Remembering Tekla Virvan
Tekla Virvan, born Tekla Melnick in Palmerton, PA, was the second of four children. She spent her childhood in Palmerton, a small town in the mountains on the outskirts of the Lehigh Valley.
A lifelong Orthodox Christian, Tekla was an active member of St. George’s Russian Orthodox Church in Palmerton, where she sang in the choir. She grew up attending liturgies in Slavonic, and didn’t hear the entire liturgy in English until 1978.
After graduating from Palmerton High School, Tekla attended business college in Allentown, PA. She majored in accounting, and worked as a secretary/bookkeeper in Palmerton.
While commuting to business school by train, she met her future husband, George, who also lived in Palmerton and was attending a different school in Allentown. After Tekla and George married, they moved to Washington, DC. In Washington, Tekla worked as a secretary/administrative assistant at the Department of Labor. She left that position to start a family and become a stay-at-home mother.
In the 1960s, Tekla and George moved to Bowie where they raised their three children---Greg, Daria, and Barbara. Family always came first for Tekla. She was a devoted mother and mother-in-law, and her sisters remained her closest friends throughout her life. Her granddaughters, Alexandra and Kristen, were the special lights of her life and brought her constant joy.
In her free time, Tekla enjoyed drawing, painting, crafts, music, and playing cards and board games. She loved to dance, and bowled for years in a duckpin bowling league. She was an avid reader and die-hard fan of Philadelphia’s professional football and hockey teams. A lifelong fan of the Eagles, she made sure summers included a family trip to the team’s training camps.
Tekla did volunteer work in her community as well as at church. At St. Nicholas, she worked at the annual bazaar, helped out at the candle counter, and was known for welcoming newcomers to the church.
Among the highlights of Tekla’s life was a pilgrimage to the Holy Land led by Bishop Basil Rodzianko. She received the miraculous Holy Fire at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre during the Paschal liturgy, and the group was granted an audience with the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem. During a trip to Russia, she visited monasteries, seminaries, churches, the Caves of Kiev, and the tomb of Saint Xenia of St. Petersburg.
A long-time member of St. Nicholas, she joined the Orthodox Church of St. Matthew in Columbia, MD, in 2010. Tekla fell asleep in the Lord on August 31, 2012.
