A world-famous religious icon that believers say has miraculous powers and seeps myrrh, a fragrant oil mentioned frequently in the Bible, will soon be moving to Kailua.

The Honolulu-based Holy Theotokos of Iveron Russian Orthodox Church, which serves as custodian to what believers call the “Wonderworking Iveron Icon of Hawaii,” is planning to move to a building on North Kainalu that formerly housed a charismatic Protestant church.

The tiny Russian Orthodox church is currently in an industrial area on busy Queen Street in downtown Honolulu. But thanks partly to enthusiasm for the icon, the space is too tight of a fit for a burgeoning congregation. Up to 100 people sometimes jam into a space that would be close quarters for a dozen worshippers.

“This is a very unusual place to have a myrrh-streaming icon,” said Father Athanasius Kone, parish priest of the Holy Theotokos of Iveron church.

The icon’s supposedly mystic powers came to light in 2007, according to church members, and its fame has since spread world-wide.

They say the mysterious icon, which depicts an image of Mary with a smaller version of Jesus on her lap, is a paper replica of a long-revered ancient icon held at Iveron, a Georgian monastery on Mount Athos in Greece. Mount Athos is the last surviving bastion of the Byzantine empire; the Orthodox faith predates Roman Catholicism.

Church leaders and members of the congregation believe Hawaii’s version of the icon has cured physical diseases and has brought peace and resolution of spiritual ailments to troubled souls.

The icon has attracted attention throughout the world and is frequently hand-transported to Russian Orthodox churches elsewhere in the world to be venerated, including visits to more than 1,000 churches in places including California, New Jersey, Canada and Maryland.

Hundreds of thousands of people traveled to churches in Georgia to see and venerate it, according to Russian Orthodox church members in the eastern United States. The Republic of Georgia is a small country that borders the Black Sea, with Russia to the north and Turkey and Armenia on the south.

The Hawaiian icon began to manifest miraculous powers about a decade ago, according to church elders and members of the congregation. They have no scientific explanation.

“It’s holy and unexplainable,” Father Athanasius said. He said there are only a handful of similar myrrh-seeping icons in the world and that the Honolulu congregation is proud and humbled to be the custodians of it.

According to church deacon Nectarios, who described the icon’s history in a widely circulated letter, the item came into his possession in 1997 as a gift from his parish priest, Father Anatole Lyovin, a linguistics professor at the University of Hawaii. It was a paper reproduction made in Toronto of an icon in Montreal that was itself a reproduction of the original on Mount Athos.

The icon he had received as a gift began seeping myrrh in the early summer of 2007, Nectarios explained in a letter circulated in the Russian Orthodox community in the United States. He said he and his wife had placed the icon in a special spot in their home chapel, he wrote.

Then they began to detect an unusual fragrance in their home, something they thought smelled like myrrh, and noticed a small bead of liquid around the side wound of the image of Christ, in the spot where Jesus Christ is believed to have been pierced in the side by a Roman soldier.

Soon it began streaming myrrh more heavily, he wrote.

He took it to their priest, Father Anatole, who revealed it to the congregation on Oct. 14, 2007. There was enough myrrh to anoint all the members of the congregation, Nectarios recalled.

“The icon has been streaming for 12 years,” Father Athanasius said. He produced a vial of the liquid, which possessed a strong, fragrant smell.

In June 2008 the Hawaiian icon was officially authenticated by the Russian Orthodox Church as worthy of veneration, church elders said.

Father Athanasius said that the icon has been carefully studied because there have been problems in the past when people fraudulently asserted that objects had special powers that they did not possess.

Nectarios’ icon was a duplicate of another famous icon from Canada. That earlier icon, which was in the possession of a devout Russian Orthodox man named Brother Jose (Joseph) Munoz-Cortes, was lost when Munoz-Cortes was tortured and murdered in a hotel room in Athens in 1997, according to a book published in 2008, “The Montreal Myrrh-Streaming Icon and Brother Joseph.”

Congregation members of the church in Honolulu think it is not a coincidence that their version of the icon began manifesting unusual powers on around the 10^th anniversary of Brother Joseph’s death.

Russian Orthodox believers see the appearance of the icon as another manifestation in a string of simultaneous miracles for their faith.

The Russian Orthodox Church, which was founded in about the eighth century, was split asunder during the Russian revolution and in the creation of the communist state. Orthodoxy had been the official church and state religion of Russia but under communism, the church was repudiated. The church elders who survived capitulated to the new political leadership.

“It was the most brutal regime the church had ever seen, with millions of families being completely stripped of their ability to have public faith,” Father Athanasius said.

Devout Russian Orthodox believers fled around the world. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia was established in the United States in the 1920s and did not recognize the authority of the Moscow Patriarchy. The Hawaii congregation, which was founded in the 1980s, belonged to this diaspora organization.

In 2007, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the diaspora church reunited with the Moscow Patriarchate.

“It was a miracle they could come together,” the priest said.

Another miracle from the Russian Orthodox perspective is that the new church came up for sale.

The church in Kailua is available because its previous congregation was dwindling, said Wendell Choy, the retired pastor of Calvary Church.

“A lot of churches are going through a hard time, they’re shrinking,” he said, adding that they would shift their activities to Texas.

Fueled partly by gifts and support the icon has brought them, the congregation at Holy Theotokos in Honolulu has stepped up to the plate and is raising money to buy the new structure.

“This church has been looking for a permanent home for 30 years,” said Father Athanasius.