Dear Friend,
Certainly martyrs are depicted wearing Crowns, such as St Catherine and others.
The icon of the 40 Martyrs of Sebaste in Armenia usually always have forty simple crowns depicted above them.
Royal Saints, such as Constantine and Helen are also, of course, wearing crowns.
They are invoked as patrons of marriage during the actual Crowning service as "the Holy Crowned Ones."
Crowns also appear on the heads of the Mother of God and Her Son, Jesus Christ.
The "coronation" service began in the West as a way to formally "canonize" miraculous images of the Mother of God and other Saints.
The Byzantine East doesn't have such a ceremony, but does depict miraculous icons of the Mother of God with crowns - although not all.
The Orthodox Pochaiv Icon of the Mother of God, when it was in Catholic hands, was crowned with a papal crown during a ceremony in the 18th century that lasted for eight days (an "octave").
The Greek Catholic convert, Count Mykola Pototsky, petitioned Rome to crown this miraculous icon after experiencing a miracle in his own life by it . . .
A papal representative actually came with two crowns from the Pope for the coronation ceremony and copious fireworks were used throughout the eight days.
Thirty side altars were used for continuous Masses and Divine Liturgies during the Octave of the coronation by Roman and Greek CAtholic priests and bishops.
More than 10,000 copies of the icon were distributed to the people and more than 5,000 medallions were likewise distributed for the occasion.
The medallions actually bore an image of the Orthodox Saint Job of Pochaiv on the back.
Count Pototsky also petitioned Rome to consider canonizing St Job as a Catholic saint - something that was well under way until the Lavra returned to Orthodox hands in the early 19th century and the cause was shelved.
Above the royal doors of the iconostasis where the icon is enshrined today are two statues of Angels holding a large crown above the icon.
When the Orthodox returned to the monastery, the monks petitioned the Russian Synod for permission to remove the Angels and Crown as being "incongruous with Orthodox tradition."
The Synod, interestingly enough, DENIED permission to remove the statues.
Mykola Pototsky gave more than two million Polish Zloty of his own funds to the Pochaiv Lavra for building and other purposes throughout his life and died a tonsured Basilian monk.
His heart is enshrined in a special chalice that is still in the Lavra to this day.
As a Greek Catholic, he was very well disposed to the Orthodox and even gave lands to the Skete Manjavsky that was most opposed to the union with Rome.
Although the Orthodox Akathist to the Pochaiv Mother of God does refer to Catholics and Uniates as "heretics" - it does make strong mention of how the Mother of God "brought people of other faiths to honour herself" - and this was a direct reference to people like the Greek Catholic Count Mykola Pototsky (as the great Orthodox scholar of the Pochaiv Lavra, Fr. Khoynatsky, wrote).
Pototsky was actually a Polish Count(nomatter who his ancestors were) who never learned either Ukrainian or Church Slavonic.
Alex
