Old Iron Marriage Crowns: 1 - Iron from the Seventeenth Century, 2 - Strip of Bast from the Sixteenth Century, 3 - Carved from Wood and Gilded, from the Seventeenth Century. In the Rostov Museum. Rostov Velikii

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863–1944) used a special color photography process to create a visual record of the Russian Empire. Some of Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographs date from about 1905, but the bulk of his work is from between 1909 and 1915, when, with the support of Tsar Nicholas II and the Ministry of Transportation, he undertook extended trips through many different parts of the empire.