Lake Svetloyar in modern sacred discourse

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to identify the features of the sacred discourse of Lake Svetloyar. The material of the analysis is the texts of interviews taken from residents of the village of Vladimirsky and guests who visited this place, video content posted on the YouTube social network, publications in the media dedicated to the lake. The conducted discourse analysis reveals the peculiarity of the sacred discourse of Lake Svetloyar today as a complex and conflicting combination of Orthodox discourse, the discourse of neo-pagans, representatives of new age, individual religiosity, as well as the excursion activities of employees of the Museum and Tourist Complex “Grad Kitezh” in the village of Vladimirskoye. The article concludes that for all of them Lake Svetloyar is a natural sacred space, one of those in Russia in which either the Russian national and cultural identity, or the spiritual uniqueness of all mankind, or the source of individual “cultivation of the spirit” is most strongly manifested. The results of the study confirm that Lake Svetloyar, as one of the most important sacred spaces in Russia with a corpus of various narratives revealing its special nature and status, with a complex of ritual practices formed around it, remains significant and actively functioning in the modern socio-cultural space.

Keywords

• city of Kitezh
• lake Svetloyar
• natural sacred space
• sacred discourse
• veneration of the holy place
• град Китеж