Through Byzantium the Russians were connected to the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians and Romanians, all affiliated to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Through its broader links to Christendom, they also entered into closer contact with Europe, becoming conscious of themselves as Europeans belonging to a common faith. As Obolensky put it, ‘Byzantium was not a wall erected between Russia and the West: she was Russia’s gateway to Europe.’
Although Vladimir had converted Rus to Christianity, it was his son Yaroslav who built most of its first great churches as grand prince of Kiev from 1019 to 1054. Having fought his brothers for the throne, Yaroslav had come to see that building churches would advance his prestige and secure his power-base in Kiev. The most important was the Church of St Sophia, closely modelled on the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople with its simple cross-in-square formation, Greek inscriptions, monumental frescoes and colourful mosaics, dominated by the massive, solemn face of Christ Pantokrator staring down from the heaven of the central dome. Beneath him are mosaics of the apostles, the Mother of God and the Eucharist, the three avenues by which the holy spirit descended to the earth, symbolising Christ’s incarnation in nature.
Like other Russian churches, St Sophia had a row of icons on a low screen between the altar and the worshippers. Later it would be replaced by a high wall of icons, the iconostasis, whose visual beauty is a central feature of the Eastern Church. Seeing is believing for the Orthodox. Russians pray with their eyes open – their gaze fixed on an icon, which serves as a window on the divine sphere. The icon is the focal point of the believers’ spiritual emotions – a sacred object able to elicit miracles. Icons weep and produce myrrh. They are lost and reappear, intervening in events to steer them on a divine path. Not only paintings had this status in Russia: wood carvings, mosaics, even buildings could be icons too. In contrast to the Western Christian mind, where the divine existed only in the heavens, in Russia the divine was immanent in worldly existence. Here were the roots of the utopian consciousness which lay at the heart of the Russian peasant religion: the belief in the certainty of building heaven on this earth, and specifically on Russian soil, according to the early Cristian myth of Holy Russia, a new land of salvation where Christ would reappear.