“Russian Icon”
July 22 — August 11, 2007

This trip is intended as a comprehensive educational course on the development, tradition and various historical schools of Russian iconography presented in frescoes, stone and wood carvings, but most importantly in icons. Along with most of the major museum collections, containing masterpieces representing the very beginning of Russian iconography through the eighteenth century, we will visit several restoration workshops and icon/fresco studios where modern Russian iconographers are working on resurrecting the centuries-old tradition of the Russian Icon. The emphasis of our tour is definitely on the Icon, and for that we concentrate most of our trip on exploring numerous places where religious art is most brilliantly and explicitly present. Along our tour we will see a lot of sites in both world famous and very secluded locations of rural Russia. Sometimes it will be done at the expense of not having “enough” free time for “souvenir shopping” or by overlooking the major tourist attractions. Knowledgeable travelers have to understand that it is impossible to cover everything along our way, but even under such circumstances group members will, in addition to a comprehensive study of the Russian Icon, get a good idea of the Russian Church and secular history that impacted religious art. Although we’ll be dealing for the most part with realities of Eastern Christian Church Art, every iconophile is welcome aboard. The only forewarning for a prospective traveler is to be prepared for a lot of walking during incredibly interesting and educational, but long, days.