UDC

Authors

Abstract

The sacred landscape of the Solovetsky Islands includes the space that had sacred meaning for primitive people, as well as the cultural landscape of the Solovetsky Monastery, the symbolic embodiment of Jerusalem on these islands and sacred place names. The paper describes the sacred toponymy of the Solovetsky Islands consisting of place names defined by the author as mythological, orthodox and biblical names of geographical objects. The process of place naming in the pre-religious period ran parallel to the development of the world and at its early stages was of a mythological nature. Mythological place names describe that part of the Solovetsky Islands where primitive people worshipped their pagan gods. These toponyms include geographical names derived from the names of sacred plants and animals. A significant group – sacred place names of the Solovetsky Monastery – is based on the orthodox and biblical vocabulary: the names of the bays, inlets, lakes, mountains, hermitages, churches, chapels, etc. reflecting the process of space symbolization of this archipelago. The toponyms derived from the names of monks preserved the memory of the local ascetics who used to live there in hermitages. The research shows that the number of sacred toponyms exceeds the number of worldly place names on the Solovetsky Islands.

Keywords

References

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