Sacred Image as a Local Patron? The Icon of St Nicholas of Mozhaisk in the Petseri Monastery in Setu Folklore

Abstract

The present article is an attempt to find reasons why a certain has been of extraordinary importance in the religious life of local peasants. Is it due to the iconographic type with its connotations; were these known and possibly modified and accommodated according to the needs of worshippers? Is it due to the person of the saint depicted, his contamination with historical and mytho- logical characters? Answers to these questions are sought from the folklore, beliefs and customs of the Setus, a Fenno-Ugric Orthodox group inhabiting the Southeast corner of Estonia, as well as from the travellers' and clergy's descriptions of the image of St Nicholas of Mozhaisk, located in the Petseri monastery. This study centers on a 17th century piece of sacred sculpture (called a carved icon in the Orthodox tradition) which has been the focal point of a local cult of St Nicholas throughout centuries. The image was venerated by the Setus, a Finno-Ugric Orthodox group in Southeast Estonia. In the middle of the 13th century, during the formation of Old Livonia, the district of Setumaa was incorporated into the feudal Pskov Republic, which later became a part of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy and the Tsardom of Russia. In 1920, the area was reunited with independent Estonia and in 1945 it was divided between Esto- nian and Russian Soviet Republics. Setumaa was a peripheral agrarian area. It remained extremely conservative in the cultural sense, stuck in the Middle Ages until the 1920s. The population of the Setus was about 15,000 at the time, a large majority being illiterate peasants without family names and under the control of the Petseri monastery. The Setus were subject to various religious influences. Next to the Russian Orthodoxy, to which belonged the overwhelming