FOREFEAST AND AFTERFEAST IN THE CALENDAR PRACTICE OF PRE-MONGOL RUS’

Abstract

The church calendar came to Russia together with Christianity and quickly came to be something more than a guide for organizing worship services. In the first centuries after the baptism of the Old Rus’, its elite began to systematically link the most important events of political and ecclesiastical life with the festive dates of the Menologion, Menaion and weekly liturgical cycles. The reasons for this can be both spiritual and symbolic as well as practical. The topic of such linking as a part of extra-devotional calendar practice in Russia has been actively studied in recent years, including the author of this article. For the first time in historiography, this paper raises the question whether Old Rus’ princes and bishops, when planning their public ceremonies, attached importance to the fact that many of the main celebrations of the church year, in addition to the main day of celebration, had the so-called fore- and aft erfeasts. The boundaries of these liturgical periods (like multi-day fasts) were regulated by church statutes, including the pre-Mongol Rus’ Alexios’s Stoudios Typikon. And although pre-Mongol sources do not provide explicit answers to the question posed above, they contain much evidence of the coincidence of these multi-day festive periods with princely and episcopal ceremonies, i.e. laying the foundation and consecration of churches, transfer of relics, entrances of bishops to their cathedral cities after their chirotony, intronizations of princes, their congresses, starting military campaigns and marriage rituals. Among these events, special attention should be paid to those which were not scheduled on the days often chosen when planning signifi cant public events, i.e. Sundays and the eve of holidays. The author came to the conclusion that pre- and aft erfeasts were indeed in the field of vision of the organizers of ceremonies and were apparently perceived by them as sacral and semantic “fields” of holidays. And this applies to the representatives of both church and secular elites.