Old Believer’s Christian Orthodox crucifixion copper cross, 1500-1700 AD. Height: 250 mm = 25 cm; Width: 120 mm = 12 cm; Weight: 14.6 oz. = 0.414 kg = 414 g; Provenance: private collection in Florida, from Estate of early Russian emigrants (after 1917) Old Believers, also called Old Ritualists,[a] are Eastern Orthodox Christians who maintain the liturgical and ritual practices of the Russian Orthodox Church as they were before the reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow between 1652 and 1666. Resisting the accommodation of Russian piety to the contemporary forms of Greek Orthodox worship, these Christians were anathematized, together with their ritual, in a Synod of 1666–67, producing a division in Eastern Europe between the Old Believers and those who followed the state church in its condemnation of the Old Rite. Russian speakers refer to the schism itself as raskol (раскол), etymologically indicating a "cleaving-apart".