The Great Patriotic War, like any major war before it, significantly changed the cultural landscape and was reflected in folklore – in particular, in narratives about miracles as harbingers of good or bad events. Despite the information that icon renewals took place in almost every diocese that suffered from the Nazi invasion, sufficient statistics on these events have not been accumulated yet and they are still not dated. In this regard, the work on fixing such stories and analyzing them is extremely relevant. For the study, we used the following methods: comparative, structural and typological ones, areal analysis and mapping. During the areal analysis and subsequent mapping, we also used the chronotope method, which allowed us to trace not only the territorial, but also the temporal and cyclical distribution of recorded narratives. The article provides stories and documentary evidence of pre-war cases of spontaneous renewal of icons and renewals of icons at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The paper also makes a review of sources of the renewal and myrrh-streaming of icons on the eve of the war and in the first post-war years. The author gives a brief description of the so-called wave of icon renewal in the first half of the 1940s. The article focuses on the stories of informants about pre-war cases of spontaneous renewal of icons recorded on the territory of Belarus as part of the author's ethnographic expeditions in 2016–2020. The paper presents some records about the renewal/myrrh-streaming of icons and similar miracles in texture, which were interpreted by informants as signs of war.
Keywords: miracle, stories about miracles, renewal of icons, myrrh-streaming icons, omens of war, harbingers of bad events
DOI: 10.22250/2072-8662.2021.1.97-106
About the author
 |
Ilya S. Butov – PhD (Agricultural sciences), science editor of the journal “Potato and vegetables”; |