Sacred Sites of the Demiansk Land in the Context of Hero`s Mythology

Abstract

The study comes up with results of the analysis of historical material collected in the north of the Demyansk district of the Novgorod region during expeditions on the topic “Historical and cultural map of the Demyansk district” in 2021. In the course of processing the material, we drew attention to the fact that in this map, in addition to the historical and ethnocultural, the contours of the sacred landscape are clearly visible. For the Demyansk land, the sacred landscape is a geographical space where topochron meets the hero's mythologeme. While we studied the topos of the sacred landscape of the Demyansk land on the district`s north, its chronos covers the epochs of the formation of the Old Russian state, the time of the spread of Orthodoxy and its rooting in tradition, the Soviet period and its important part — the Second World War. For each of the determined toposes of the sacred landscape of the Demyansk land we identified corresponding hero mythologeme: a prince (a hero of the feudal era of the formation of the ancient Russian state), a priest (a religious figure, framer of the Christian sacred landscape of territories) and a Soviet warrior (hero of the Second World War).