HOLY SOURCES AND FOLK RELIGIOSITY OF THE ORTHODOX POPULATION OF THE URALS IN 1954 – 1964

Abstract

The tradition of attributing mythological and religious meanings to natural phenomena, the formation of a ritual culture associated with trees, stones, water sources, atmospheric phenomena, etc., refers to the most ancient sacred practices of human communities. This stimulated philosophical, cultural, and anthropological studies of this phenomenon in the context of Orthodox culture, aimed at identifying the relations between pagan and Christian symbols and rituals and analyzing the problem of dual faith among the Orthodox population of Russia. Historical studies of the manifestations of folk religiosity are still at the stage of generalizing empirical material. The subject of the article is a study of folk religious practices in the historical context of Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign. The focus of the study is on the Orthodox traditions of venerating water sources. The specificity of the approach is the analysis of the elements of folk religiosity (using the example of the veneration of “holy sources”) as a manifestation of everyday practices of adaptation and survival of believers in the USSR. Despite the banishment of religion from public space in the era of Nikita Khrushchev, belief in miracles and miraculous healings and visits to holy places were common not only among Orthodox Soviet people, but also among those who were considered “atheists”. Regional features of folk religion in the Urals were the redefinition of holy places in the multi-ethnic space of the region and the use of water sources for folk medicine in an underdeveloped health care system. For certain categories of Soviet citizens (former priests, monks and nuns, marginalized elements, etc.), the sphere of folk religiosity was a space for the realization of subjectivity, different from the “normative” one. As a result of a comparative-historical approach, it is shown that the practices of venerating holy sources in the Urals fit into the all-union framework of the phenomenon.