scripts since XIV century) during the siege of the town the ancient icon of Our Lady of XII century from the Church of The Savior's Transfiguration (Spasa Preobrazheniye) on Ilyin street was brought on the wall. Suzdal troops started shooting at the icon and then were blinded and easily defeated by Novgorod defenders

Our Lady Tikhvinskaya (Bogomater' Tikhvinskaya) The icon Bogomater' Tikhvinskaya according to the old belief (first encountered at the end of XV cent.) appeared as a vision to fishermen in 1383. Then after several miraculous motions within vicinity of the river Tikhvinka (Novgorod province) - chapels and churches have been built on the spot where the image stopped - the icon "chose its place" where subsequently the church in the name of Assumtion of Our Lady (Uspenie Bogomateri) has been built. After the visit paid to Tikhvin by Vasily the III in 1526 the icon was perceived as one of the holliest relic of Russia. A special glory came to the monastery⁷ in Tikhvin and its holliest property after the victory⁷ of Russians over the Swedish army. The victory was associated with help of the icon. After The World War II the ancient icon of Bogomater¹ Tikhvinskaya appeared in an orthodox church in Chicago.

Iconography of Bogomater' Tikhvinskaya - Our Lady and the Child on the left arm of Mary are slightly turned to face each other, the right foot of the Child is turned to the spectator.

Our Lady "Relieve my sorrows"(Bogomater' "Utoli moya pechali"). According to the legend the icon Bogomater' "Utoli moya pechali" was brought to Moskow by kazaks in 1640 during the reign of Mikhail Fedorovich. It gained its glory by Aleksey Mikhailovich in the 2nd part of the XVII century. It was a very⁷ revered Moskow relic. During XVIII century multiple copies have been made from the icon.

Iconography of the icon became very- popular in the XIX century. Our Lady is seen from the waist up, Christ the Child is lying on her lap being slightly held with her left hand. Our Lady's right hand is before her cheek. Christ is holding a scroll in his hands. The head of Our Lady slightly leans to the right.

An Icon as an Image

Icons cannot be referred to as works of art using the common meaning of the word. Icons are not paint­ings. Artists use lines and colour to represent people and events belonging to material life. Since the Ren­aissance, life and nature have been depicted in paintings by reproducing three-dimensional space on a plane; people, animals, landscapes and things. Even though the idea is taken from myths it is translated into the language of earthly images.

Expressionist and abstract art reflects the artist's emotions and sensations which change and contort the proportions of objects and events and the colour correlations between them, deform objects completely, or even do without the objects as images. But even in this case various experiments with colour and lines do not take the spectator out into the world of a different nature, different space and time or different val­ues.

This mission in human culture is performed by icons. Icons do not depict but represent the other world. They represent it using special artistic techniques that have been discovered over the course of many cen­turies.

Colour plays a special role in icons because it is a symbolic language which manifests the light that is inside objects and human faces rather than their colouring. The source of this light is outside the physical world. Golden strokes in icons represent this unearthly light, and the golden background symbolizes the space 'not of this world*. There are no shadows in icons. In God's Kingdom everything is permeated with this light.

Icons cannot be looked at as pictures. They represent neither space as we know it nor events conditioned by ordinary cause and effect relations. An icon is a window looking onto the world of a different nature but it is a window open to those only who have spiritual eyesight.

Those who want to come closer to understanding icons need to see them with the eyes of a believer for whom God is the undoubted reality — a reality invisibly present everywhere and in every event, an invisi­ble witness and judge from whose sight it is never possible to hide.

The principles of and methods for creating icons had already been established for many centuries before Rus took them up. Icon-painting traditions were brought to Old Rus with Christianity from Byzantium at the end of the X century.

Byzantine art was religious and obeyed strict rules. Regulation in icon-painting was the result of long dis­cussion and struggle with iconoclasm. One of the main factors that caused iconoclasm was Moslem mili­tary and ideological pressure upon Byzantium. In Islam the biblical ban on worshipping idols among which Moslems rank the cross and icons, became absolute.