Urbis et Orbis: Mikroistoriâ i Semiotika Goroda (Dec 2022)
A-sacred space of the city: Imagology of the “holy heretic”
Abstract
The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the formation of the sacred topography of Pskov in the 15th century. The sacralization of the living environment of medieval society is inevitable. The sacred environment forms a special space in it. This space will be peculiar only to this society. And the cultural memory of the city is able to form both its positive sacramental topography and serve as a source for the creation of a-sacred space. At the same time, it should be clarified that the understanding of “a-sacred” is not in the plane of the unholy or profane, base, but rather as the opposite of the sacred, revered. The most important task in the study of sacred space is to restore the connection between the urban environment and the ideological programs of the past, with the intentional and unintentional influence of the ideas of ordinary citizens and city rulers on the process of its change. Moreover, such a study primarily relates to the field of the history of consciousness, the history of intentions to modify the environment, and partly to the history of knowledge about it and its reflection in the minds of contemporaries. Let's turn to the Pskov land. In its unique sacral topography, there is, perhaps, the only one in the entire Christian world, a monastery named after the secular name of its founder – the Eliazar Monastery. The amazing fact of the anomaly of the Pskov city sacred space was able to be preserved unchanged for five hundred years only by the cultural memory of the city. And in order to understand how such an anomaly of the Pskov sacred space was formed, and besides, it was able to survive, it is necessary to turn to the history of the development of the local church structure in its relations with the social institutions of Pskov, as well as biographies of the ascetic St. Euphrosynus himself.
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