The iconography of this cross is complex with each register having many layers of meaning. At the very top is a representation of Lord Saboath, the Orthodox representation of God the Father. Below, the image is flanked by two angels who grieve the death of the Lord. Certain crosses, such as ours, have the letters IНЦИ – ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’ but Old Believers such as the ones who originally created these crosses rejected this as ‘Latin heresy’. On the main crossbeam the sun and the moon representing the darkening of the skies at the crucifixion, mentioned in Luke 23:44-45 and Mark 15:33, the darkening skies demonstrate the cosmological importance of the event. St Augustine also linked the sun and the moon to representing the Old and New Testaments. Below Christ’s arms is a statement glorifying the Cross: ‘We lay prostrate before Your Cross, O Lord, and glorify Your Holy Resurrection,’. This statement is dogma: Christ died on the cross for the atonement of our sins. Christ’s body is flanked by the spear and the rod. The spear is identified by the single letter K, for Kopie — “spear.” The other is a long reed bearing a sponge at its top. This is the sponge with which Christ was given vinegar to drink. It is identified by the single letter T for Trost – meaning ‘reed’. On the next register is NIKA, the Greek word for ‘victorious’. Old Believers have their own folk etymology, making the inscription Slavic rather than Greek: NIKA – Nas Iskupi Kroviu Adamova — ‘Save Us with the Blood of Adam’.[4] Below this, two letters stand for the name Mount Golgotha, or Calvary, the location of Christ’s crucifixion. At Christ’s feet is a small cave with the skull of Adam, hence Golgotha’s epithet as the ‘place of the skull’. In Orthodoxy, Adam is buried on the site of the crucifixion. And when Christ was crucified there, there was an earthquake (Mathew 27: 51-52). The tradition is that the ground opened just below the cross, revealing Adam’s skull.

To understand the origin of objects such as this metal icon, one must turn to the reforms of Patriarch Nikon under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in the second half of the seventeenth century. These reforms led to a schism in the church. The Old Believers fled into rural Russia to continue their traditional forms of worship. There, they founded the monastery at Vyg where they began to produce metal icons on a large scale. The monastery was supressed during the reign of Emperor Nicholas I. Even with the suppression, the high-quality metalwork produced at the monastery inspired many replicas, especially in surviving centres of Old Believer crafts. The best quality enamel and bronze icons were made in Moscow in the second half of the nineteenth century during a religious revival that gripped Russia. They often used models inspired by those of Vyg.