Russian athletes were conspicuous in their neutral colours during this year’s Winter Olympics and Paralympics due to a ban based on doping allegations.
In Vancouver in 2010 and in Sochi in 2014, however, Russia’s Olympic hockey jerseys prominently featured a two-headed eagle exactly where Canada’s jerseys highlighted the maple leaf.
This two-headed eagle is not a modern invention. It is “Byzantine.”
The eagle was, if we travel 1,800 years back in time, the imperial symbol of the Byzantine Empire. It is still at the core of Orthodox Christianity — Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian — throughout the world.
The importance of …read more
Source: The Conversation