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It is a solid erection from side to side, from floor to roof, and in the centre are the royal doors, through which none may pass but the consecrating priest, or the emperor: and the last once only, at the time of his coronation. At no time is any woman permitted to enter the sanctuary. The iconostas contains sometimes as many as seven rows of images: that of the Uspenski Sobor has five.
Mark's in Venice alone can give an approximate idea of the effect of this astonishing richness. At the back, the iconostas looms up in the twilight shot through with rays like a golden and jewelled wall between the faithful and the priests of the sanctuary.
These images that you view across the carved and silver-gilt work of the iconostas, where they are ranged symmetrically upon the golden screen opening their large fixed eyes and raising their brown hand with the fingers turned in a symbolic fashion, produce, by means of their somewhat savage, superhuman and immutable traditional aspect, a religious impression not to be found in more advanced works of art.
In the dim distance, seemingly a wall of gold, is the iconostas, the solid screen which in every church divides the sanctuary from the rest of the sacred edifice. The iconostas is in all cases decorated with a large number of holy pictures or icons, arranged in formal rows one above the other.
But the greatest marvel in this Cathedral of the Assumption is the iconostas, or screen for the sacred pictures, a structure indispensable to all Russian churches, of which I have withheld the description till now, when I find myself in front of a large and more astounding erection than can be found in St. Petersburg, Moscow, or Troitza.
Finally, he conducted us into his private chapel, where, on the iconostas, the screen which, in accordance with the Greek ritual, stands before the altar, the sacred images of the Saviour and various saints were represented somewhat differently from those in the Russo-Greek Church, especially in that they extended two fingers instead of three.
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