Old Believers’ Burial Complex from the Collection of the Irkutsk Museum of Regional Studies: Structure and Symbolism

10.33876/2311-0546/2022-3/180-194

Abstract

The article reveals the information potential of such a unique part of the Old Believers’ collection of the Irkutsk Museum of Regional Studies as a burial complex. It includes burial clothes, a coffin and other attributes of a burial complex. The Museum employee A. Popova brought these objects from her expeditions to the Semeiskie Old Believers’ settlements in Transbaikal region in 1924–1927. In addition to the complex itself, the fabric, color, technique of creation and the structure of components, the symbolism of numbers is of particular interest, as it appeals to the most important Christian categories. The key to this symbolic system is a “lestovka” — an Old Believers prayer rope — containing the main numbers (3, 4, 7, 9, 12, 17, 33, 40), which accompany a Christian during his or her lifetime and which are reproduced during his or her transition to the Other World. The structural analysis of objects and the analogy method revealed that almost all objects related to the burial, in one way or another, have an imprint of symbolism, including the numbers symbolism. The latter manifested itself to a greater extent in the structure of the kichka (head wear), shirt, sundress, kalishki (burial shoes) and in the usage of stockings and shrouds. It is concluded that in the 1920s some of the Semeiskie Old
Believers maintained such a numerical understanding of Christian doctrine and religious life. Modern observations made in expeditions indicate that the evolution of the tradition formalized this approach and preserved only some of these elements.