Roy Robson, professor of Russian History and Religious Studies at Penn State Abington, and author of the book Solovki: The Story of Russia Told Through Its Most Remarkable Islands, discusses this masterpiece from the Museum’s collection:

Like the islands that it depicts, this icon encapsulates the span of Russian history. Let your eyes travel across the large image and you'll see details illustrating the beauty, faith, economy, and politics of Russia. Finally, you can even find a foul joke scribbled into the wood.

It's not difficult to understand the top one-third of the icon—it shows Christ and angels in heaven. Look more closely, though, and you'll note some lovely details. Christ is shown here surrounded by a lozenge of gold called the "mandorla," the ancient iconographic sign of Christ's divinity and linkage to earth. Now focus on the angels-they may seem a little more active than others in icons you'll see at the Museum, their wings crossing each other as if in mid-flight. The angels stand on little pink and blue-green puffs.

Christ points downward toward the saints and their monastery on the earth. For now, just note that Saints Zosima and Savvati look rather different here than in other icons, where they tend to have very long bodies and pointy beards.

The White Sea surrounds the island monastery, and the fishermen at the top pull in a catch, probably herring that provided the monks food and income. The peculiar boat of this region, called a karbas, had upturned ends and a flat bottom, better to survive Arctic storms and to be pulled across the ice. Local fishermen often prayed to Zosima and Savvati, who had also traveled by karbas and were known for miraculously helping sailors in distress.

On the hills around the monastery, note the men working at various jobs. Some are in the fields, while others herd cattle and one coaxes a horse to pull a cart. They all wear matching white and red robes and red boots. They are worker-pilgrims, young men who came to atone or sins, get an education, or fulfill a promise to the saints.

Finally, we get to the most important part of the icon—the great monastery of Solovetskii, also known as Solovki. Inside the walls, which remained impregnable until the 20th century, we can see the chapels, churches, and cathedrals built with the income from Solovetksii’s vast salt-works, fisheries, and farms, both on the islands and on the mainland. The monastery became so wealthy, in fact, that an English spy for King James I wrote in the 16th century that Solovki was "richest place this day in the world.”

Between the churches, a monk rings some of the monastery's hundreds of bells. In 1893, the English priest Alexander Boddy wrote that "there was first an agitation of higher-pitched bells, then some middle-voiced bells chimed in, and then came the deep measured bass of the heaviest bell of all. ‘Tinkle-tinkle-tinkle-tinkle; Tonkle-tonkle-tonkle-tonkle; BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!’”

Contrast the round hat worn by the bell-ringer to the square-topped klobuk on the priest inside the red building below. This section of the icon shows a close-up of a priest talking to another man, perhaps hearing confession. To the right of the priest hearing confession, you can see another cleric in the white robes worn during the Divine Liturgy. The priest stands near an altar, preparing to give communion to other monks.

Finally, let your eyes float back up to the images of the saints holding a scroll. See how the text starts to get hard to read after the first three lines. There’s a reason for that: someone has scratched out the original text and added other words. The first two lines still correctly read “Master, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, hear our prayers.” Then you can see that the words have been changed around, with only the word “XPEH” easy to read. So it seems that, sometime after the Russian Revolution, an atheist communist must have defaced the icon with a slang word for male genitals (which, oddly, also means “horseradish”).

This bit of unholy graffiti reminds us that the Soviet government turned Solovetskii into the first camp in its gruesome Gulag. There, within the monastery walls, the state imprisoned, tortured, and killed thousands of civilians from 1923 to the beginning of World War II.

Since 1991, however, Solovetskii has been reopened as a monastery nature preserve, and museum. Here at the Museum of Russian Icons, we can gaze on the icon in a peaceful atmosphere, considering its long life and the stories it can tell us about Russia, Orthodoxy, and history.