Reports of miracles in the CIS countries are extremely diverse. The narrators of such stories often name a specific scene, but it can vary in different regions and even localities. In this case, almost always behind the rumor of a miracle is a real event (sometimes several), which became its prototype. There is a separate group of stories about miracles related to the phenomena on the window of religious or near-religious images. Unfortunately, in the scientific literature, they are practically not considered and described, the mechanism of their formation in the popular environment is still unknown, and the regions where they were most widely distributed are not identified. The purpose of the work: to consider and analyze stories about the appearance of religious or near-religious images on window in Belarus. Such stories begin to appear in the late 1920s, reappear in the 1980s and 1990s. The сentral place is given to the case in the Central regional hospital of Smorgon, which occurred in 1995. It is concluded that it served as the Central core of a wave of rumors and narratives about the phenomenon in a number of Belarusian hospitals in the Smorgon, Myadel and Korelichi districts of miraculous images on glass. All these localities belong to the Western part of Belarus, and there are no records on similar topics in other parts of the country. It is emphasized that stories of miracles, like any other, can grow all sorts of rumors and take on an exaggerated form in the eyes of the population, leading to their undulating distribution in certain periods (the end of the 1920s – “crosses on window panes”; the second half of the 1980s – “moving images on glass”; the second half of the 1990s – “faces on glass in hospital wards”, etc.).
Keywords: miracle, stories about miracles, images on religious themes, the appearance of the Virgin, the appearance of Jesus Christ, rumors
DOI: 10.22250/2072-8662.2020.3.36-44
About the author
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Ilya S. Butov – PhD (Agricultural sciences), science editor of the journal “Potato and vegetables”; |