The article attempts to comprehensively describe the ritual and everyday practices associated with the existence of cult casting among the Komi Old Believers. The work is based on the author's field materials (interviews with informants, personal observations, photo and video materials) collected during ethnographic expeditions in 1999-2007 in the Udorsky, Ust-Kulomsky, Troitsko-Pechorsky districts of the Komi Republic, as well as archival data. Being an integral attribute of everyday life and rituals that determine religious affiliation (the sacraments of baptism and funeral requirements), cast images have become one of the symbols of Old Believers in Komi.
Keywords: Komi-Old Believers, Old Believers ' copper casting, ethno-confessional symbols, family and festive rituals.
Introduction
Since the break with the official church, it was important for the Old Believers, based on ideological considerations, to get their own samples of objects accepted for worship. After the prohibitions of the beginning of the XVIII century. Instead of using cast icons in churches and private homes, it was they who continued their production, focused on the ancient pictorial canon [Printseva, 1986; Gnutova and Zotova, 2000].
The works devoted to Old Believer casting are mainly of an art criticism nature. They address issues of attribution, classification, and dating (Printseva, 1986; Vinokurova, 1989; Gnutova, 1993; Berestetskaya, 2003), and characterize individual production centers (Druzhinin, 1993; Vinokurova et al., 1994; Yukhimenko, 2002; Zotova, 2003). Since the mid-1990s, objects of Orthodox worship, including Old Believers 'castings, have been considered as significant and" insufficiently popular " ethnographic material reflecting the religious worldview [Gnutova and Zotova, 2000; Golomyanov and Fursova].
K. V. Tsekhanskaya, who studied the tradition of icon worship in Russian culture, came to the conclusion that the icon is "a distinctive sign of the Orthodox faith", which, in ...
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