The Pomors’ wedding bread baynik: cultural and linguistic aspect

Ethnographic records of the second half of the XIX century and the XX century that include a description of the Pomor wedding ceremony (P. S. Efimenko, P. V Shein, N. P. Kolpakova, T. A. Bernshtam, A. P. Razumova, T. V. Zelenina, etc.) indicate that the tradition of baking special ritual bread baynik (bayennik, bannik) was widely spread in the territory of the White Sea area. The relevance and novelty of this study lie in the fact that it uses data from dialect dictionaries for the analysis of this ritual practice for the first time, which make it possible to clarify not only its verbal, but also its subject-actional and ritual-semantic local content. In addition to expressions noted in ethnographic sources, such as collect baynik, give money for bayink, put on baynik, stitch up bayink, etc., dictionaries record the possibility of transferring this nomination to other adjacent objects: a tablecloth into which this bread was sewn, a tray or table on which it was placed, gifts that the bride’s relatives placed on them, the ceremony of bringing gifts. The paper presents an ethnolinguistic analysis of such ceremonial terms as stitching up and unstitching baynik, which convey the ideas of fastening - closure and opening - destruction associated with the bride and her loss of girlhood and in various forms represented in the wedding ritual as a whole. Special attention is paid to the study of the symbolic correlation between the bride’s bathhouse (banya) ceremony held on the day before the wedding and the ceremony of collecting the baynik, which is considered in the study as an additional justification for the linguistic kinship of these names