Pskov’s medieval religious art is being appropriated by the Russian state to support the invasion of Ukraine

Filed 2h ago · Via Global Voices · The Buffoon Desk

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Investigations

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: DFID - UK Department for International Development · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Officials in Pskov Oblast, Russia, have unveiled icons depicting two paratroopers from the 76th Air Assault Division who were killed in Ukraine in 2023, painted in the region's centuries-old Orthodox style and installed in a 15th-century church that is part of a UNESCO World Heritage ensemble.

The soldiers appear as small figures kneeling before St. Nicholas of Mozhaysk and St. Rusticus of Paris, a traditional donor-figure format historically used for ordinary worshippers, not saints. The icons were donated by a municipal deputy and announced by the regional governor on Telegram.

Experts note the soldiers have not been officially canonized, but the imagery lends their deaths a sacred framing consistent with the Russian Orthodox Church's continued public support for the invasion. Pskov itself was an independent city-state until Moscow annexed it in 1510.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A church puts a soldier's face at the foot of a saint and calls it tradition, and maybe technically it is, but everybody in the pew knows what it's for. Borrowing six hundred years of brushwork to dress up a war is the kind of move that works right up until somebody asks who the war was actually for. Pskov didn't choose Moscow the first time either, and it isn't being asked much now.

Source: Read the original at Global Voices → Scored: Investigations · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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