Martha Rial, Post-Gazette This icon created in Russia in 1868 is among the displays at the Antiochian Heritage Museum. Click photo for larger image.

Azzie Akel's wedding dress isn't a typical white lace confection. It's much more spectacular.

Azzie's father hired four Constantinople seamstresses to create a gown of deep-purple velvet, trimmed with gold and silver embroidery and beads. The simple veil is overlaid with a web of gold with dangling copper coins surrounding the edges.

The wedding took place in the Antiochian Orthodox church in Homs, Syria, in 1859. Her gorgeous gown, good as new, is all that remains of Azzie Akel.

Her dress became an Akel family heirloom and traveled with her descendants over five generations of immigration and resettlement.

Azzie's dress now stands at the entry of a new $2 million Antiochian Heritage Museum at Antiochian Village Christian Conference and Retreat Center, a "spiritual oasis" for Arab Christians in rural Westmoreland County. It opens to the public today.

"The lady who donated the dress -- Azzie's great-great-great-granddaughter, who's now an elderly lady herself -- cried when she told me about her grandmother's wedding," said the Rev. Timothy Ferguson, curator of the museum. "It was as if she was there. It's that human element, the stories behind the items in the display, that really make this place resonate. These aren't just museum-quality items. They're precious things that real people made good use of."

There's a household oil lamp, with wick-trimmer, snuffer and other matching implements hung on chains like ornaments. It's Syrian, donated by a Johnstown family. There's a woman's embroidered caftan. It traveled here from Palestine, via Greensburg.

On the floors are handmade rugs. The walls are hung with banners and garments, and showcases include metalwork, intricate wood-and-pearl mosaics, vestments of silk and camel hair, and breathtaking jewelry.

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Madelon Sheedy, curator at the new Antiochian Heritage Museum near Ligonier, points out one of her favorite portraits by Kahlil Gibran in the exhibit "A Man From Lebanon: The Art of Kahlil Gibran" on display at the Antiochian Village Conference and Retreat Center. Click photo for larger image.

The personal items extend to religious devotions: One display shows "campaign icons," tiny, 200-year-old paintings of patron saints taken into battle in soldiers' pockets.

There's a 13th-century glass cameo pendant, marvelously preserved, with the Mother of God image pressed into its surface. The only drawback here is the lighting -- when light passes through the cameo, it glows purple. But laid on its back in a showcase, it's a dull black, just a little worn.

The walls are lined with fine icons gathered from all over the Orthodox world: Greek, Russian, Carpatho-Rus, lettered in Cyrillic or Arabic or Greek, some shiny with gold leaf and silver fittings, others battered and faded. One still wears "ex votos," nailed-on medallions shaped like hands and legs. These are metallic thank-yous, testimonies to miraculous cures or answered prayers.

Many of the Russian icons were given by Metropolitan Archbishop Philip Saliba, head of the Antiochian church in North America. Antiochian Village is his brainchild, he said, and the new museum is the crown on more than 30 years of fund raising and expansion.

The Antiochian Orthodox Church dates to the beginning of Christianity. Its claims are impeccable: The book of Acts says Antioch, a Mediterranean trading center in what is now Turkey, was the first place where Jesus' followers were called "Christians."

There are more than 200,000 Antiochian Orthodox in the United States; 13 of their 250 churches and missions are in Western Pennsylvania. Most came to the United States in the first decades of the 20th century, so the original immigrants are almost all gone now. Their children are now grandparents, and many are concerned with preserving their ethnic culture someplace outside the confines of the church walls.

"Some of our churches are like museums," the archbishop said. "No matter how many beautiful things we take out of them, we still have so much. This [museum] gives non-Orthodox people an opportunity to discover them."

Curious connoisseurs who won't darken a church door can come to the museum, he said, and not worry about where and when to bob their heads or bow.

"This is beauty, and beauty is universal for everyone," he declared, opening his arms. "Christ came to transcend all these barriers we put up. This is not a place for only Antiochian, only Orthodox, only Christians. It's a place for everyone. We want all to feel welcome here."

It's a philosophy he said extends to Antiochian Village itself.

More than 200 years ago, Scots Presbyterians gathered on this hilltop to worship beneath the trees, led by circuit-riding preachers. They later established one of Westmoreland County's first churches, as well as the inevitable cemetery. The hilltop became Camp Fairfield, a Presbyterian summer retreat.

Meantime, Presbyterian missionaries founded a university in Beirut, Lebanon. Church leaders there became friends with the Antiochian Orthodox ministers.

"The Presbyterians are considered our sister church," Metropolitan Philip said. "In the early '70s, when I was serving a church in Cleveland, I began looking for a quiet, beautiful place to bring the young people of our church. ... Ohio was so flat. I wanted Western Pennsylvania, for its hills and trees. And here were all the Presbyterians, too."

		How to get there The Antiochian Heritage Museum opens to the public today. It is part of Antiochian Village, located on state Route 711, six miles north of Ligonier in Westmoreland County. Museum hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Saturday or by appointment. For information phone 724-238-3677, e-mail AVCenter@antiochian.org or learn more on their Web site.

By then, the Presbyterians owned four camps in the area and agreed to sell the 400-acre tract in Fairfield Township for $350,000. In years since, the Antiochian Archdiocese has spent more than $20 million on a three-phase building plan that now includes 100 guest rooms and 13 meeting rooms on three floors.

The new wing adds a 143-seat auditorium, a rare-book room, a 21,000-volume Eastern theological and cultural library and a three-gallery museum space. It's become the heart of the denomination in North America, drawing members from all over the continent for summer camp and annual celebrations, councils and meetings.

"Our [guest] rooms don't have televisions. We come here to meditate, read, rediscover one another," Philip said. "This is our little piece of heaven."

The Scottish settlers' cemetery is still intact. And in the past 20 years a new Antiochian Village graveyard has become the final resting place for Orthodox divines from all over America, including Bishop Raphael Hawaweeny, a certified saint originally buried in Brooklyn in 1915 and moved to Antiochian Village in 1988.

Through September, a show of 40 drawings and prints by Lebanese poet/artist/philosopher Kahlil Gibran is on loan from Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Ga.

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Correction/Clarification: (Published June 19, 2004) An icon from the Antiochian Village Heritage Museum was incorrectly identified in a caption that originally appeared with this story on June 17, 2004. The caption incorrectly said Vladimir Theotokos was the artist who created the icon. Actually, "Vladimir" describes the icon's stylistic source; "Theotokos" describes the subject matter: "the Mother of God."