Social and cultural potential of the national holiday: the Sharvili festival in Dagestan

This study discusses the history of the emergence and consolidation of the Sharvili annual festival devoted to the hero of the Lezgin epic poems. The epic poetry “Sharvili” combines the elements of archaic and classic epos. Its character embodies the image of the perfect conquering hero who resists the mythological and real characters. The Sharvili festival promotes the epic poetry, creates the environment for preserving non-material cultural heritage of Lezgins. In a long-standing territorial division of Lezgin ethnic group now inhabiting Southern Dagestan and Northern Azerbaijan, this festival becomes the instrument of ethnic consolidation in Dagestan-Azerbaijan border zone. Over the last decade, the national holiday designed as a social and cultural project has become a component of cultural heritage that integrated into an art and semantic matrix of the people living in Dagestan-Azerbaijan border zone. In the context of modern radical religious declarations on the priority of religious identity over ethnic and civil one, the national culture develops and reinforces the regional and civil identity among the young Dagestan people.