Лампады русской работы для храмов Палестины (1693 год)

Abstract

The church lamps made in 1693 in Moscow at the request of the Jerusalem Patriarch Dositheus are by no means the only gifts from Russia to the churches of Palestine. However, they stand out because they were made according to a special pattern sent by the patriarch. In addition, Greek inscriptions were carved on them at the request of Dositheus. This practice, it seems, has never been noted in the sources before. The lamps were dedicated to the Holy places, for which the Greeks competed with the Catholics at that time, and conceived by the Jerusalem Patriarch as a symbol of the Russian tsars’ patronage over them. Basing on archival documents, the author of this article reconstructs the entire history of the creation of these late 17th-century works of Russian decorative art. The article is supplemented with the appendix “Inscriptions on Russian lamps sent to Jerusalem, original and revised versions, 1693”.