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Updated: October 2, 2025
Priests in black robes and tall, cylindrical hats, and others with brown robes, rope girdles and tonsured heads, were coming and going around us. Pilgrims were climbing and descending the stairs, kneeling and murmuring unintelligible devotions, kissing the star and the cleft in the rock and the icons.
Ornamental sculpture seems to be superior to statuary in Russia: it is abundantly practised in the decoration of churches; the innumerable chapels standing at the street corners in honour of some saint possess icons and lamps of bronze and silver; the iconostases of the cathedrals are extremely rich, gold, silver-gilt, silver, lapis-lazuli, malachite and enamel-work are lavishly employed there.
The priests' robes were placed by the crusaders on their horses. The icons were ruthlessly torn down from the screens or were broken. The sacred buildings were ransacked for relics or their beautiful caskets. The chalices were stripped of their precious stones and converted into drinking-cups. The sacred plate was heaped with ordinary plunder.
The holy icons are pictures or mosaics of Christ, or the Virgin Mary, or of some saint or martyr of the Russian church. In every Russian house there is one or more, hung in a prominent place. Every one who enters the house at once bows and utters a prayer before the icons before he does anything else. This is an old Russian custom which is still kept up by peasants. Strong green wine.
The treasure contains also some of the most highly venerated icons, crosses, and reliquaries in Russia. As regards many of these it is difficult to assign a date or a place of production.
The investigator soon learns to withhold final judgment, realizing that the primary conditions for intellectual development are the plasticity and openness of mind that dogmatism and finality destroy. He knows that while his researches may be, and indeed must be, iconoclastic, they provide him with better icons in place of the old.
After mastering the contents of a guide-book I carefully inspected all the officially recognised objects of interest the Kremlin, with its picturesque towers and six centuries of historical associations; the Cathedrals, containing the venerated tombs of martyrs, saints, and Tsars; the old churches, with their quaint, archaic, richly decorated Icons; the "Patriarchs' Treasury," rich in jewelled ecclesiastical vestments and vessels of silver and gold; the ancient and the modern palace; the Ethnological Museum, showing the costumes and physiognomy of all the various races in the Empire; the archaeological collections, containing many objects that recall the barbaric splendour of old Muscovy; the picture-gallery, with Ivanof's gigantic picture, in which patriotic Russian critics discover occult merits which place it above anything that Western Europe has yet produced!
Another man Timokhin was lying in a corner on the benches beneath the icons, and two others the doctor and a valet lay on the floor. The valet sat up and whispered something. Timokhin, kept awake by the pain in his wounded leg, gazed with wide-open eyes at this strange apparition of a girl in a white chemise, dressing jacket, and nightcap.
Nikita lay in hospital for two months. They cut off three of his toes, but the others recovered so that he was still able to work and went on living for another twenty years, first as a farm-labourer, then in his old age as a watchman. He died at home as he had wished, only this year, under the icons with a lighted taper in his hands.
Then she shook her head and glanced up at the icons with a sigh. This might have been taken as an expression of sorrow and devotion, or of weariness and hope of resting before long. Prince Vasili understood it as an expression of weariness. "And I?" he said; "do you think it is easier for me? I am as worn out as a post horse, but still I must have a talk with you, Catiche, a very serious talk."
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