1787.
So it was with a feeling of the expectation of disappointment that I entered a
small room just off the entrance to their reception hall with a little sign
that announced it to be their gift store. A museum may have a gift store, but
you don’t expect a religious institution to have one, but the monastery had a
steady stream of tourists like myself who were destined to want to purchase
some object to commemorate their experience.
1788. I was not mistaken in my anticipation of disappointment.
What did I find it that little room? Plastic statuettes of important saints
from their list of martyrs with a magnet for your dashboard, gilded plastic
Orthodox Crosses on little mahogany bases. A small model of a church with a
golden onion dome with a slit in the roof so it could be used as a piggy bank,
and numerous icons, hand painted on slabs of plywood.
1789. The
icons looked like those lacquer boxes, mostly black, with brightly painted
geometric designs that are sold everywhere that an ethnic ‘eastern’ look is
sought, along with the ‘babushkas:’ little wooden Grandmothers that nestle one
inside the other.
1790. Even
though I was so disappointed with such cheap, mechanically painted icons that
looked like they had been created on an assembly line down in Mexico,
nevertheless it did cross my mind that the icons I had at home perhaps had
looked very similar two hundred years ago.
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