Orthodox Cross

The Russian or Orthodox cross has three horizontal bars: a short upper bar for the titulus reading Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, the long central bar for the arms, and a lower slanting bar for the footrest. Counting the eight arm ends produced by these three bars, the form is also called the eight-pointed cross, a name Russian usage sets against the plain four-pointed Latin cross and the six-pointed cross that omits the footrest. The slant is the distinctive feature and carries a settled interpretation in Slavic Orthodox piety: the raised end points to the penitent thief crucified beside Christ who was promised paradise, the lowered end to the thief who mocked him, the cross read as a balance of judgement rather than a decorative flourish.

The three-bar form derives from Byzantine models transmitted to Kievan Rus with Christianity itself in the tenth century, and it became the standard cross of Russian and other Slavic Orthodox churches, cut into stone crosses, painted on icons and raised on the golden domes of parish churches from Novgorod to Vladivostok, where it is typically set diagonally so its slant is legible from the street below. It is worn as a body cross by most baptised Orthodox believers from infancy, blessed and immersed in the water at the feast of Theophany each January, and carried at the head of processions on major feasts, uses that keep the form in daily devotional contact with worshippers rather than confining it to church architecture alone.

The three-bar cross is characteristic but not the sole Eastern Christian form; the Greek cross of four equal arms is older and dominates Byzantine architecture and iconography, and the Oriental Orthodox churches, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian and Syriac, use crosses of their own design unrelated to the Slavic pattern. The slanted footrest has been given other explanations, a literal footrest shown in perspective, or the crooked made straight, but the two-thieves reading is the one carried in the liturgical hymns sung during Holy Week.

In Russia the cross's exact form became a matter of open conflict during the seventeenth-century schism, when Patriarch Nikon's reforms to bring Russian practice into line with contemporary Greek usage, including changes to the sign of the cross made with the hand and to liturgical texts, were rejected by the communities who became known as Old Believers, who held that the older Russian forms, not the imported Greek ones, were the more faithful. Millions were persecuted or fled after the 1666-1667 councils condemned them, and their descendants remain a living, self-governing tradition today, in Siberia, in the Danube delta as the Lipovans, and in North American settlements from Erie, Pennsylvania to Oregon and the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska, where the older cross forms and the two-finger sign of the cross are still kept exactly as the seventeenth century left them.