DID YOU KNOW...

• Women of the 17th Century czarist court were not allowed to see strangers and were secluded in the terem, a palace for noblewomen within the Kremlin. There they attended religious services, embroidered and ate. The full, rounded figure was much admired.
  
• Royal children learned from "fun" books, colorful encyclopedias illustrated by the most talented Kremlin artists.
  
• Under Alexei Mikhailovich, the second Romanov czar, the accidental omission of even a single word of the czar's lengthy titles could reap severe punishment.
  
• Peter the Great was almost 7 feet tall at a time when most people were considerably shorter than they are today.
  
• Piotr Alexeivich (Peter the Great) not only visited the West, he worked in it. Traveling incognito, he spent several months laboring in Dutch and English dockyards.
  
• The Russian Orthodox Church is 1,006 years old. The Russian word for peasant, krestyanin, means "a Christian."
  
• The word "icon" comes from the Greek eikon, meaning "an image." Orthodox icons were created for prayer and the artist was expected to be a Christian of high moral principle who prepared for his work by fasting and praying.
  
• Salt was rare in ancient time, and its importance was reflected in the bread and salt ceremony, when visiting emperors were presented a loaf of bread and a container of salt. The folk custom is still practiced today.
  
• After he peacefully freed 20-million serfs in 1861, Alexander II became known as the "Czar Emancipator." Jan. 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln freed 200,000 slaves with his signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.