Muscovite liturgical practices changed constantly. In Pskov in the early fifteenth century the priest Iov, citing Photios, the Greek metropolitan of Rus', contended that the triple-hallelujah was prevalent throughout Orthodoxy while the monk Evfrosin insisted one should chant the hallelujah twice. But by 1510 Evfrosin was recognised locally as a saint and in 1551 the Stoglav ruled as canonical the double-hallelujah and the related custom of crossing oneself with two fingers instead of three. Complaints entered at the Stoglav Council reveal other examples of how folkways permeated liturgical practices: the 'desecration' of the altar with offerings of food used for banqueting, cauls thought to be favourable omens for the newborn, soap for washing the sanctuary and salt placed on the altar before sunrise on Holy Thursday, then used to cure ailments in persons and cattle. In dispensing holy water to parishioners for protections and cures, the line between priest and sorcerer blurred. To shorten services, clergy chanted different parts of the liturgy simultaneously (mnogo- glasie) making it incomprehensible. Believers acquiesced, revering the 'magic' of the service. Priests also transformed the spoken liturgy into a 'continuous song' and began to walk in deasil, or with the sun, in rites and processions in a manner informed by tradition. When Metropolitan Gerontii, citing Greek practice, questioned the canonicity of proceeding in deasil in consecrating the Dormition cathedral in 1479, Grand Prince Ivan III rebuked him.11 By 1600 the liturgical cycle had become 'national'. Wedding rituals, like those described in the manual written in the 1550s 'On the Management of the Household' (Domostroi), were unions of clans carried out according to ancient custom. Their rites, such as the bride donning a matron's headwear (kika) symbolising her transformation from maiden into married woman, were anything but Christian. A priest sanctioned the ceremony, but a best man (druzhka) and a
10 V G. Vlasov, 'The Christianization of the Russian Peasants', in Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer (ed.), Russian Traditional Culture (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), p. 17; N. M. Nikol'skii, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi, 4th edn. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1988), pp. 43-4,47,50-1; Eve Levin, 'Supplicatory Prayers as a Source for Popular Religious Culture in Muscovite Russia', in S. H. Baron and N. S. Kollmann (eds.),Religionand Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), p. 101.
11 Emchenko, Stoglav, pp. 290-3,304,309-10,313-15,319; Vlasov, 'Christianization', pp. 24-6; Nikol'skii, Istoriia, p. 43; Slovar', vol. ii, pt. 1, pp. 262-4.
matchmaker (svakha) presided. Church weddings became common only in the fourteenth century, and were followed by folk rituals for bedding, announcing a coupling and the purification of the couple. Still, by the sixteenth the binding of unions with a sacrament performed by an authority above and outside the clans had become customary. Rituals for commoners in the Domostroi and accounts of imperial weddings were similar.[144]
In the building boom of the sixteenth century a 'national' style of church architecture emerged. One of its elements was the construction of masonry churches with sharply vertical 'tent' roofs and rows of arched gables inspired by wooden tower churches built by village craftsmen. The first (1529-32) was the church of Ascension in Kolomenskoe built by Grand Prince Vasilii III. Another element of the new style was the appearance of icon screens separating the nave from the chancel with rows of intercessory figures turned towards a central icon Christ in His Powers over the holy doors to the sanctuary. Some trace its inspiration to late Byzantine spirituality; others to the Russian manner of decorating wooden churches. The oldest extant high iconostasis, painted in the 1420s, is in the Trinity church of the Trinity-Sergius monastery. New technologies of masonry construction and design also appeared. When Metropolitan Filipp's new cathedral church of the Dormition in the Kremlin collapsed before it was completed in 1474, Ivan III brought in Pskov builders and an engineer from Bologna, Aristotle Fioravanti. Fioravanti's five-domed church, completed in 1479, resembled Russian cross-in-square churches, while using Italian engineering techniques and exhibiting tastes and skills of Pskov builders in working limestone, brick and decorative tile (see Plate 15). Pskov builders also introduced the belfry to Muscovite church complexes, the first being that in the single tall drum on the church of the Holy Spirit (1476) at the Trinity-Sergius monastery. In 1505 Ivan commissioned the Venetian Alevisio the Younger to build the cathedral of the Archangel Michael as a family burial church. In its pilasters, cornices and scalloped gables, it resembled Venetian churches. New cathedrals such as that in the Novodevichii convent in Moscow (1524-5) or the Dormition cathedral in Rostov (c.1600), replicated these innovations. In churches of St John the Baptist in Diakovo (c.1547), Saints Boris and Gleb in Staritsa (1558-61) and the Intercession (St Basil's, 1555-61) on Red Square, builders produced a complex variant to this style. The Intercession church consisted of eight chapels surrounding a central altar with a tent roof. Exaggerated helmet cupolas, replacing traditional shallow domes, capped the heightened drums over each altar. Ideological schemes and Western models inspired its layout, and a Pskov builder oversaw its construction. By 1600 churches with multiple altars, tent roofs and helmet cupolas went up everywhere.[145]They blended forms, materials and techniques developed in many places, elements of popular religiosity and Renaissance innovations in engineering and design.
The huge quantity, variety and opulence of reliquaries, icons and other religious objects that laity donated to monasteries belie the view that its religiosity was a formality. Chronicle entries, such as that recording the appearance of an image of the Mother of God in 1383 over the River Tikhvinka in the Obonezhskaia territory of Novgorod, tell the same story. Its purported miracles attracted pilgrims. A century later bookmen entered new miracle tales into the Novgorod chronicle and Archbishop Serapion (1504-9) built a brick church to house the icon. In Moscow the cult entered the liturgical calendar and in 1524 Metropolitan Daniil wrote it into his 'history of Russia' known as the Nikon Chronicle. Complaints about the ubiquity of uncanonical or blasphemous icons reflected the Church's ambivalence about such 'appearances'. Even the court was complicit. Ivan Viskovatyi, Ivan IV's Keeper of the Seal, complained about icons with unprecedented imagery with which painters from Pskov and Novgorod redecorated Ivan IV's family church of the Annunciation after the fire of 1547.[146]
Reports of fires provide evidence that towns were filled with churches in which ordinary people shared liturgical experiences. The frequency ofreligious processions was another form of popular religiosity. They might be provincial celebrations like that in Ustiug in 1557 when its inhabitants proceeded with a cross to honour the raising of the church of St. Nicholas Velikoretskii. Or they could be great affairs like Metropolitan Filipp's processions on 30 April and 23 May, 1472, to inaugurate construction of the Dormition cathedral and to translate there the relics of metropolitans Photios, Kipriian and Iona.[147] No later than 1548 Metropolitan Makarii fashioned a court procession to celebrate Palm Sunday. Based upon a ritual he had observed in Novgorod, it re-enacted Jesus's entry into Jerusalem by having the tsar, afoot, lead the metropolitan, mounted on a horse and followed by nobles and clerics, to the Intercession church on Red Square. For the Epiphany Feast of 1558, Ivan IV led the hierarchy and the court onto the Moscow River to a hole in the ice where Makarii blessed the water with a cross. After that he splashed Ivan's son and the nobility, commoners filed by to fill pots, children and the ill were immersed, some Tatars baptised and Ivan's horse brought to drink. The baptism on the symbolic River Jordan, the animals and the healings were elements of popular feasts.[148] Although many rural settlements lacked churches, peasants also primarily and most deeply expressed their religiosity in communal celebrations. When they could not, they resented it. In a petition to the archbishop of Novgorod in 1582 peasants and deti boiarskie in a remote parish requested they be allowed to attend a neighbouring church. The petitioners said their priest could not communicate with them because his church was far away and required a boat to get there; as a result their ill died without confessing, there were no prayers when mothers gave birth and the young were not baptised.[149]
144
Daniel H. Kaiser, 'Symbol and Ritual in the Marriages of Ivan IV',
Carolyn J. Pouncy (ed.),
pp. 204-39.
145
William Craft Brumfield,
146
147
K. N. Serbina (ed.),
148
Bushkovitch, 'Epiphany', pp. 1-14; Michael S. Flier, 'Breaking the Code: The Image of the Tsar in the Muscovite Palm Sunday Ritual', in Michael S. Flier and Daniel Rowland (eds.),
149
P. S. Stefanovich,