ON PALM SUNDAY, 1558, a prosperous English merchant by the name of Anthony Jenkinson was in Moscow, representing both his queen, Elizabeth I, and an international trading enterprise known as the Muscovy Company. While there, he saw Moscow's annual “donkey walk,” like many other Palm Sunday processions an elaborate outdoor liturgical rite recalling Christ's entry into Jerusalem on a donkey five days before his crucifixion. Despite the name of the event, no donkey took part. The metropolitan archbishop of Moscow and all Russia was led in procession seated on “a horse, covered with white linen down to the ground, his ears being made long with the same cloth, like to an ass's ears.” The archbishop, in full pontifical regalia, played the part of Christ, while a white horse, wearing white linen ass's ears, played the part of the donkey. Holding the end of the horse's rein was no less a dignitary than Tsar Ivan IV (1547– 1584), also known to history as Ivan the Terrible.

Three centuries later, in 1865, a Russian realist painter, Vyacheslav Schwartz, completed a large oil painting called Palm Sunday in Moscow under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich: The Procession of the Patriarch on a Donkey. The painting, which now hangs in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, depicts in meticulous detail a later instance of the same processional tradition (Fig. 1). A grey-bearded boyar guides the reins of the patriarch's horse, while Tsar Alexis I (1645– 1676), holding the tasseled end of the rein in his right hand and a palm in his left hand, walks ahead. The metropolitan archbishop of Moscow and all Russia, whose predecessor had been elevated to the status of patriarch in 1589, sits atop the white horse. Crowned and richly vested, he holds a golden, three-beamed orthodox cross in his right hand and a gilded gospel book in his left. The animal's costume remains the same: a full-length white linen cloth, topped with long, white, pointed donkey's ears.

Moscow's horse with donkey's ears is one of the more colourful cases of historical dissonance between an enacted representation of Christ's entry and the biblical story it was believed to represent.