Upon entering Recklinghausen, a small town in the industrial Ruhr area, the local "hierarchy" of attractions becomes immediately clear: a bright yellow arrow points towards the center with the inscription "Icon Museum. Cathedral. Town Hall" in that exact order.

At first glance, it may seem strange that the most significant Orthodox icon museum in Western Europe is located here, as Recklinghausen has never had an Orthodox community or a large number of emigrants from Russia, as noted by art historian and museum curator Eva Hausstein-Barch.

However, there was an initiative director of the local exhibition hall, Franz Grosse-Perdekamp, who, like his successor Thomas Grochowiak, showed great interest in Orthodox religious art, which is little known in Germany. As early as 1952, he began working on an exhibition of Orthodox icons in Recklinghausen.

The exhibition, opened in 1955 by Grochowiak, a descendant of Polish migrant workers in the Ruhr area, was titled "Icons from Significant Private Collections and Monasteries." The foundation of the exhibition consisted of two of the largest private icon collections in Germany: the collections of Hanoverian doctor Heinrich Wendt and Bavarian specialist in Eastern European history Professor Martin Winkler.

The exhibition generated enormous public interest, and soon after its completion, the museum director convinced city and state authorities of the necessity to acquire private collections and make them accessible to the public. The exhibits from the exhibition became the basis for the permanent collection of the icon museum, founded in 1956.

Since then, the museum has become a center of attraction for German lovers and collectors of icons and church treasures of the Orthodox world. Many of them bequeathed, donated, or sold their collections to the museum, and over the past five and a half decades, the collection in Recklinghausen has grown to 3,000 items, including more than 1,000 icons. The collection is considered the largest and most valuable in the West.

The Icon Museum in Recklinghausen was established in 1956 based on the exhibition of icons from private collections and monasteries held at the Kunsthalle. Funding for the renovation of the building and the purchase of icons was provided by the Recklinghausen City Council and the government of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The museum's collection was initially based on 73 icons from the collections of Heinrich Wendt and Martin Winkler.

Over time, the museum's holdings expanded, and today they number over 1,000 items, making it one of the largest collections of its kind outside Orthodox countries. The museum's collection includes Russian, Greek, Coptic icons, as well as various crosses and book miniatures. Among the most valuable exhibits are the icons "Dormition of the Mother of God" from the 13th century, "Saint Demetrius of Thessalonica" from the 15th century, and "Saint Nicholas with Life" from the 15th-16th centuries.