Знамя Бунчуки казачьих войск - Public domain dedication image

The Cossacks were a group of predominantly East Slavic-speaking people who lived in the lands of the Dnieper, Don, Terek, and Ural rivers in Eastern Europe. The Cossacks were known for their military skills and their semi-nomadic lifestyle. They were organized into autonomous communities and were known for their martial traditions and their resistance to foreign domination. The Cossacks played an important role in the history of Eastern Europe, and they were involved in many conflicts and wars throughout their history. Today, the Cossacks are still recognized as a distinct cultural group in some parts of Eastern Europe. Cossacks had a tradition of independence and finally received privileges from the Russian government in return for military service. Originally (in the 15th century) the term referred to semi-independent Tatar groups, which formed in the Dnieper region. The term was also applied (by the end of the 15th century) to peasants who had fled from serfdom in Poland, Lithuania, and Muscovy to the Dnieper and Don regions, where they established free self-governing military communities. In the 16th century, there were six major Cossack hosts: the Don, the Greben (in Caucasia), the Yaik (on the middle Ural River), the Volga, the Dnieper, and the Zaporozhian (mainly west of the Dnieper).

Byzantine architectural and visual style was a style that existed with remarkable homogeneity within the Eastern Roman empire between the 6th century and until the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. The Byzantine style's presence extended to Greece. Through Venetians, who became Constantinople's archrivals, it spread to Italy, and Sicily, where it persisted almost intact through the 12th century and became a foundation for the Italian Renaissance. Preserved by the Eastern Orthodox church, the Byzantine style spread to eastern Europe, the Balkans, and particularly to Russia, where it remained, with little or no local modification, through the 17th century. Byzantine architecture and painting remained uniform in tradition rather than changed with time and personal expression. The result is a sophistication of style and spiritual expression not paralleled in Western art. As with all large Picryl collections, this one is made with the assistance of AI image recognition. It allows collections of sizes never seen before. We do our best to clean after AI as it is based solely on visual resemblance and we apologize if we missed a few images in the collection that do not belong to the Byzantine style.