Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2018 number

The article is based on the review of archival materials and other sources. It aims to study the specific character of public local shrine veneration and the relevant reaction of the religious governance in Tobolsk eparchy in the XVIII-XIX centuries. While studying popular shrines the least attention is paid to the historical aspect, particularly to the reaction of the official religious community in the XVIII and XIX centuries (or a synodic period) to new or “uncontrolled” venerated shrines. Combatting pilgrimage to shrines that were not included in “the rules” of church, up to removing them, in the XVIII and XIX centuries, became the result of Peter I’s legislaive initiatives. It has been supposed that the spring, which was formerly situated in Tyumen and spurted out in one of the gullies in its “historical” part, was the first venerated water spring in Siberia, where Cross Processions were held every year on the Ninth Friday from the beginning of the XVII century. The article reveals eventual reasons of emergence of this venerated place in the first Siberian Russian city. During Peter I’s clerical reforms, the monarch’s ally Phylophey Leshchinsky forbade Cross Proces-sions, and the spring was filled up with soil. The archival depository of Tobolsk clerical consistory remains the main source of restoring the historical canvas. Twice a year all clerical ruling councils were to report to the authority, executing supervisory function as well, about the absence, as stated in the headline of a case dated from 1774, of “any superstitions, veneration of non-recognized dead bodies as holy relics, icon false miracles, springs, wells, monks dissolutely hanging around and other mischiefs”. In order to prevent different “unorthodoxies” in ecclesiastic canon, religious authorities had to nip in the bud probable rumors by applying prohibition of eventual shrines. For example, a number of Cross Processions with popularly venerated icons were called off and eventual practices of “weeping” icons veneration were suppressed.