The image in the pear tree
The story begins in 1683, near Leśna in the eastern borderlands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. According to a local devotional tradition, a shepherd discovered an image of the Virgin Mary among the branches of a pear tree. People came to honour it, and reports of extraordinary help became part of the image’s reputation.
The discovery is a tradition, not a contemporary event established by a surviving eyewitness record. Even the date is told differently in Catholic and Orthodox calendars. What matters historically is that the image became the focus of a religious community and a pilgrimage tradition that endured through enormous political change.
A shrine at a religious crossroads
A Pauline monastery and church developed at Leśna in the early eighteenth century. The surrounding region was home to Latin Catholics, Eastern-rite Christians and communities whose identities cannot always be placed neatly into later denominational categories.
Some Orthodox retellings claim that the image was first kept at a nearby Eastern-rite church in Bukowice and forcibly transferred to Leśna in 1686. This particular sequence remains disputed: the church in question may have been Greek Catholic rather than Orthodox at the time. A responsible history presents the claim as a later account, not an established confiscation.
When the sanctuary changed hands
After the January Uprising, Russian imperial policy transformed the site. The Paulines were removed in 1864, and the church passed into Orthodox use in 1875. An Orthodox convent was established later in the century, and its nuns became guardians of the sacred image they revered.
These were not simply changes of architecture or administration. Religious boundaries were entangled with imperial rule, languages and communal memory. A place one community remembered as a restored sanctuary could be remembered by another as a sacred home taken from it.
The journey of 1915
In 1915, amid the retreat of Russian forces during the First World War, the Orthodox nuns evacuated with an icon. Their community travelled far beyond Podlasie before eventually settling at Provemont in France, where a Leśna devotional tradition continues.
Here the mystery sharpens. Orthodox accounts maintain that the community carried away the original image discovered in 1683. Catholic accounts associated with Leśna maintain that the nuns took a copy and that the original remained in, or subsequently returned to, Poland. Both positions are part of the documented controversy; neither should be presented as independently resolved.
Two histories, and an open question
After 1915 the church at Leśna returned to Catholic use; the Paulines returned in 1919. The French Orthodox convent and the Polish Catholic sanctuary preserve different understandings of the image and its journey. To determine which physical object is older would require comparative technical study and archival records of its movements, particularly between 1915 and 1927.
Not every historical mystery ends with a verdict. Leśna Podlaska reveals how one sacred story can survive in communities divided by politics, migration and religious authority. The question of the original image remains open — but the history of why people disagree is itself worth telling.