Wayfarers: The Spiritual Journeys of Nicholas & Helena Roerich

Suppose we awoke one morning to discover glorious artwork surrounding us. Paintings on billboards, our highways, in airports, malls, streets, offices, buses, schools, hospitals and jails. Wayfarers: The Spiritual Journeys of Nicholas & Helena Roerich, is the true story of two Russian artists who recommended art as the approach to peace.

Afraid Nicholas would lose his artistic freedom, the couple fled the Bolshevik Revolution and come to New York in 1920. Charismatic Nicholas Roerich, who produced over 7,000 paintings and his mystical wife, Helena, author of the Agni Yoga series, also believed education was necessary and built a 27-story skyscraper, the first school to teach all of the arts under one roof. It attracted Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, Deems Taylor, and many other American artists.

From 1924-28, the couple courageously crossed the remote and dangerous regions of India and Asia searching for signs of the sacred Buddhist site, Shambhala, for Maitreya (the coming Buddha), whose presence would signal the New Era of peace, and for the support to establish a Buddhist spiritual country around Siberia. Six years after this effort failed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt funded a second try.

Wayfarers is the first book in English to tell this long-hidden story of Buddhist history and interweave the Roerich's spiritual teachings with their fascinating travels. Book contains 2 maps, 44 photos, and 11 color plates of Roerich's paintings from museums in the United States, India and Russia.