MENAION OR "SPAN" TIER

The Menaion tier is placed above the Veneration one. It got its name because of the length of its icons, which were called 'pyadnitsa', after the ancient Russian length bar 'pyad' (span). A span is a distance measured by a human hand, from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the forefinger (7 inches). The 'Span' tier is not often encountered in Russian iconostases, this is a specifically Moscow phenomenon and typical of the iconostasis in domestic churches, for example, the Annunciation Cathedral of the Kremlin. Concerning the Church of the Deposition of the Virgin's Robe, the Menaion tier was arranged in the 1960s due to organizing a museum exposition. It consists of icons of the 17th – early 18th centuries, which originated from both the Kremlin collection and Solovetsky Monastery.