"One thing I can guarantee," said an excursion guide to a group of selected visitors before letting them past the red ironwork door, "this is the only time in your lives that you get to see this room. There will not be a second chance."
She was probably right: The excursion had veered off its routine track because the Granovitaya, or Faceted, Chamber was filled with banquet tables for the next days presidential reception. The Royal Golden Chamber was offered as compensation.
The chamber is an 80-square-meter room situated in the first level of the Great Kremlin Palace. Since its first mention in the writings of Arseny Blazonsky in the 16th century, the chamber has always served as a reception ceremonial hall for the monarch's wife.
Blazonsky described it as a room with gold "spilled all over it." Before entering the room, he wrote, the entire party, including the monarch and dukes, would stop in the adjacent Zhiletskaya, or Living, Chamber and remain silent for a while. They would be surrounded by "maidens" dressed in white with no jewelry.
Then, the gold-plated doors would fly open to reveal the tsarina, clad in gold, silver and precious stones, seated on a throne in a golden room -- a scene carefully designed to take one's breath away.
The chamber was first mentioned in 1526, at the time of Great Prince Vasily III's marriage to Yelena Glinskaya. According to historians, it was most probably built by an Italian architect.
The wall and ceiling ornaments portray three canonized royal wives who played a great role in the development of Christianity in Russia.
Across from the door, on the eastern wall and above the place where the throne once stood, are the images of the sainted Grand Princess of Kiev Olga, known as the baptizer of Russia. Other walls are decorated with icon-style paintings of the Georgian queen Dinara, and Theodora of Constantinople, who by prayers saved her sinful husband from hell.
Most of the painting was done in the 17th century but the ancient tempera-paint images were later coated with a layer of oil, according to the guide, a doctor of history who has pieced together the origins of the chamber from the Kremlin's accounting books.
A team of Soyuzrestovratsiya's restoration specialists spent about 10 years in the 1970s looking for the original ornaments and managed to expose most of the 16th-century originals.
Today the Gold Royal Chamber is sealed most of the time and no ceremonies are held there. It was briefly opened up recently to allow the Russian Patriarch Alexei II receive the patriarch of Constantinople.
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