Sacred places of Belokrinitskie old believers in West Siberia

Purpose. In this paper we discuss a model of constructing sacred spaces in West Siberia in traditions of modern Old Believers of the Belokrinitskiye religious group. The purpose of this research is to highlight ethnic, cultural and religious peculiarities of the sacred space in the tradition of the religious group in question. Results. This work is based on field research held among representatives of several Old Believers' communities in West Siberia. We supposed that different spiritual practices of Old Believers, especially pilgrimage and visiting sacred places, and «alternative church» discourse is essential for this group in order to save identity through different historical periods. The results of our field research show that a modern network of sacred places of Old Believers belonging to the Belokrinitskiye religious group has its own characteristics. Such a network is created by people and it is mainly represented by artificial constructions - churches, crosses, etc. Such objects become actual places of religious worship, while honoring natural shrines gradually turns into folklore. Thus, when choosing a site for establishing a new sanctuary, Old Believers prefer places historically associated with their Church, so-called «pure» or «holy» places. It fits well into the scope of the Old Believers' culture based on protection from «secularism», that is, from certain kinds of contact with «outside people» or «heretics». In modern conditions, which require constant interaction with outsiders at school, at work, in public transport, stores, etc., they need to find such forms of organizing a sacred space which would allow them to distance from the rest of the world. In urban or rural settlements the problem is solved by constructing a church. There is a special attitude among Old Believers concerning locations of previously destroyed Belokrinitskiye temples and burial places of co-religionists, preferably remote from civilization, which represent a kind of memory of the religious group. Such objects are actively used as a means of creating religious identity of Old Believers, serve the purposes of consolidating their communities. Visiting sacred places (usually, burials of martyrs or the ruins of churches demolished in the 1930s by the Soviet power, which are marked by eight-pointed crosses), Siberian Old Believers place special emphasis on the stories connected with the history of those places that usually contaminate with the history of the Old Believers' Church. Conclusion. The modern Belokrinitskiye religious group in West Siberia is represented by a small number of communities actively implementing various practices of conserving and reproducing their traditions. The latter can be illustrated by the process of forming sacred places. The Old Believers' network of sacred places consists of churches and crosses erected that mark not only some commemorative points, but demonstrate bounds between the «territory of veritable faith» and the «heretical world». Siberian communities of Old Believer follow the traditional view of sacred places, but in the present situation it becomes an additional mechanism for constructing the group identity.