Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe

Transporting Jerusalem: The Epiphany Ritual in Early St. Petersburg

 Transporting Jerusalem:The Epiphany Ritual in Early St. Petersburg Michael S. Flier In 1776, Gavrila Derzhavin, the court poet laureate during the reign of Catherine II, wrote an ode,“To Peter the Great,” that encapsulated a broad perception of the emperor’s relationship to Russia’s medieval past: Russia, clothed in glory, Wherever it turns its gaze, Everywhere, with exultant joy, Everywhere beholds Peter’s works. Carry the voices to heaven, O wind: You are immortal, Great Peter! He, conquering our ancient gloom, Established the sciences in the midnight land; Lighting a lamp in the darkness, He also instilled in us good manners and morals.1 One has only to consider words such as darkness and gloom in Derzhavin’s characterization of medieval Rus’ to ask what precisely Peter might have wished to use from the past in rites of commemoration. After all, the Petrine era in Russia is commonly considered to represent a sharp break with the obscurantist, medieval past, a “new” culture that looked not to the indigenous East, but to the European West, for artifacts to emulate. Yet, as  michael s. flier Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspenskii made clear more than three decades ago, the Petrine myth of a total rupture with the past, while understandable, is simply inaccurate. Peter’s reformed culture was structured not so much on a European model as on an inverted model of the old culture, the superficial results of which were labeled as European, namely, Other.2 For example, in his effort to illuminate the way out of religious ignorance into secular enlightenment, Peter surely has predecessors in Vladimir I (d. 1015), who illuminated the way out of tenth-century paganism into enlightened Christianity , and in Iosif Volotskii (d. 1515), who exposed the dark heresies of the Judaizers, illuminating the path toward true Orthodox belief in his late fifteenth-century work “The Enlightener.” An interesting example of commemoration as cultural inversion can be found in the realm of religious ritual, a cultural artifact not commonly associated with the secular-minded Peter I. As background, we note that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the tsar participated directly or indirectly in five major rituals performed annually in Moscow in accordance with the church calendar: the New Year ritual on September 1,the Fiery Furnace ritual on the first or second Sunday before Christmas, the Epiphany ritual on January 6, the Last Judgment ritual on the Sunday before Shrovetide (Maslenitsa), and the Palm Sunday ritual on the Sunday before Easter.3 All were conducted within or near the Moscow Kremlin and through the medium of that architectural complex were associated metaphorically or metonymically with other places,including Jerusalem and Babylon.When Peter I moved his capital to St. Petersburg in 1712, he did not transfer these rites of place to the northern site, with one exception—the Epiphany ritual.The Palm Sunday ritual,in which the tsar on foot led the procession for the metropolitan mounted sidesaddle on an ass in celebration of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, resurfaced only as the basis for parody at the hands of the Most Comical All-Drunken Council. The New Year, Fiery Furnace, and Last Judgment rituals apparently disappeared from public view at court. By contrast , the Epiphany ritual, including the Blessing of the Waters, remained a significant and vital rite in the evolution of Petersburg from its founding to the revolution. In the present study, I will explore the semiotic implications of this selection in light of the compositional metaphors relevant to Moscow and Petersburg that gave shape to Peter’s ideas about kingship and reform. Before discussing the move to Petersburg, however, we need to have a clear sense of the relationship between site and ritual in Moscow. We do so by examining more closely the two most important rituals involving the heads of church and state witnessed there in the sixteenth century: the rites for Epiphany and Palm Sunday. We have more information about these specific ceremonies because they were the most lavishly produced and sol- transporting jerusalem  emnly presented,making a deep impression on the spectators in attendance, especially on foreigners, who later described the proceedings in varying detail ,depending on access and interpretation.The most thorough description of the Epiphany ritual is from Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations, in which the British explorer and trader Anthony Jenkinson describes the ceremony of January 6, 1558: The...