THE RETURN OF THE SHRINE AND ITS LEGITIMATION THROUGH LEGENDS. THE CASE OF ST. NICHOLAS THE WONDERWORKER, THE ICON OF KYLASOVO

Abstract

The article focuses on the case of revered icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker from Kylasovo village of Perm Region. The author introduces the importance of legends in creating the existence of an icon as a sacral object and the ways the “breaks” of tradition are symbolically overcome. The paper outlines etiological plots related to the icon and the forms of its veneration as well as the history of the loss and re-acquisition of the shrine in the 20th century and reconstruction of the local tradition at the present stage. The earliest legends about the Kylasovo icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker (a phenomenon on the periphery of the cultural space, blinding of blasphemers) show that the plots have already become widely known and are updated in the south of the Perm region with the processes and events of the 17th–18th centuries. The realities of the Soviet era (the closure of a rural church, disappearance and discovery of a miraculous image hidden in a village house) contribute to a new round of the development of the oral tradition. The history of the salvation of the shrine was published on the official website of the church of Kylosovo village. It can be considered as the beginning of the inclusion of modern oral legends about this icon into the fields of official church culture. In the 2000s another problematic situation was the restoration (in fact, rewriting) of the revered icon. It should be noted about a link of a significant part of folk legends with “crisis points” in the life of the parish, caused by the “instability of being” of the local shrine (loss, transfer to another church, radical restoration). In such situations the legitimation of the current changes and confirmation of the miraculous nature of a religious relic as functions of religious become the important functions of religious narratives. Such functions are generally inherent in legends about shrines when modern material highlights their pragmatics more obvious