When studying religious materiel, understood as any artifacts that manifest religious value for their creators and viewers, we usually focus on their iconography, quality of workmanship and workshop connections to larger artistic centers from where inspiration for local artists may have flowed. Meanwhile, during field research, it can be seen that these works are treated in an extremely different way have a kind of Benjaminian aura, which, as art historians, we seem to consistently ignore. Hence the question about the model of research on religious materiality and its validity as such - is it really possible to render all contexts and do we really study materiality in the first place - and not precisely what it means to its recipients. Lemko Orthodox church art is perfectly suited as an example for this complicated question - due to its extremely difficult history, forced deportation, uneasy returns and its slow disappearance - relic art and any materiality associated with the Orthodox church has become more of a nostalgia - something ethereal and dreamlike but based on lost materiality. Hence the question of how to study religious materiality, which, first, is never merely materilan, and second, always carries an exploration of memories and emotions impossible for the researcher to reconstruct.