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The Power of God: The Bells of Russian Orthodoxy
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13625 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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8 / 1988 |
1,536 Words |
| Author
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William Knulles
William Knulles is a writer on the arts and lives in New York. |
While the choral tradition of the Orthodox liturgy represents one major manifestation of religious art in Russia, another, less understood form of national music is the pealing of bells. The great bells that announce the beginning of the Divine Liturgy and summon believers are a necessary part of every Orthodox church. Russian chroniclers mention church bells from the very beginnings of Christianity in the country, in 988. Within fifty years there were impressive sets of bells in Kiev's Desyatinnaya Church, in Novgorod's Cathedral of St. Sophia, and in the major churches in Vladimir.
The first bells made in Russia itself were cast in Kiev in the mid-thirteenth century, and within a hundred years there were large bell-casting firms in Moscow. It was also in Moscow that the world's largest bell, the "Tsar Kolokol," or "Tsar of Bells" (weighing nearly two hundred tons), was cast in 1735. By the sixteenth century, the four hundred churches of Moscow alone had an estimated total of more than 5,000 bells, which could be heard over an area of a hundred square miles. This overlapping, hypnotic tintinnabulation produced a stunning aural image of the trumpets of the Last Day, and of the coming Deification of the world.
Protection from Evil
Just as icons were paraded to offer protection in times of war and to ward off the evils of plague, fire, and drought, so bells were pealed to summon the power of God against these forces. A bell's reverberant voice spread a shield of sanctification as far as the sound was heard. The overlapping sonorities, passing from town to city to countryside, wove an invisible mantle of prayer and protection over
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