Moscow Patriarchate hopes Solovki icon stand will be returned to Russia
MOSCOW. March 4 (Interfax) - The Russian Orthodox Church hopes that the authorities and the business community will help bring the Solovki icon stand, an Orthodox relic, back to Russia.
Reports were circulated a few days ago that the only surviving three-tiered 16th century icon stand will be offered for sale at Sotheby's auction, as early as May.
"We hope that the Solovki icon stand will not be put up for sale and will be returned to Russia, to its home church in the Solovki Monastery," Metropolitan Kiril of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, head of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for Foreign Church Relations, told Interfax.
He said that monks are praying for the return of this Orthodox relic. "We are counting on the assistance of the Russian state and, most importantly, on the wealthy Russian people in this country and abroad," Metropolitan Kiril said.
The icon stand was painted by members of the Novgorod schools of icon painting in the late 16th century and was put on the property list of the Transfiguration Monastery on the Solovki Islands. In 1676, at the order of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, the streltsy, the tsar's guardsmen, destroyed the monastery and killed its monks who adhered to traditions of old beliefs.
Shortly before the monastery was destroyed, a group of Old Believers secretly left the monastery and moved to the Urals, taking the monastery's main relic, the icon stand, with them. Since then, it has been moved from one hiding place to another until it was found in the attic of the house of an old believer's family on the shores of the Baltic Sea in the late 1960s.
The owner of the house, a lay person in painting, used six of the 13 icons to make shelves in his cow shed. But before making the shelves, he polished off the coat of paint from the icons, ruining nearly half of the icon stand.
In the 1990s, the remaining seven icons were bought by a private art collector and now the icon stand is in Amsterdam. In 2001, its owner put it up for sale in Holland, but Russian businessman Konstantin Makarenko, who resides in Holland, persuaded him to return the old Russian relic to Russia. A fund to raise 1.7 million euros was set up in Holland to buy the icon stand.
But this sum has not been gathered to this day and the owner of the icon stand again put it up for sale.