Conflict Potential of the Sacred Space in the Orthodox Churches (on the Example of City Churches of St. Petersburg)

A seriality of traumatic experience of the Orthodox temples attenders inspires an analysis the problem with a focus on surplus informal negative sanctions on the part of church staff towards church-attenders. Informal negative sanctions repertoire includes both verbal (comments, rebukes) and kinetic (interruption of private space or physical displacement away the trajectory of locomotion) pretenses. The main question of the paper investigates the structure of sacral space: how does its geometry provokes constant conflicts. A configuration of the Orthodox churches’ sacral space (in particularly, in the main cathedrals of S-Petersburg Metropolis of the Russian Orthodox Church) due to a high altar bar, predestinating trajectories of locomotion and direction of attenders’ sight, provides a shortage of acoustic and visual attenders’ involvement into a worship-service. A redistribution of these loci between churchgoers creates a main drama of their mutual attendance during a liturgy. Outside of liturgy a trajectory of visitors as a rule synchronizes with a running along a church perimeter, i.e. the belt of tangible objects (icons flanked by candlesticks, reliquaries) – mediators of sacral communication. Though even thinly populated, a church place forces attenders find themselves in condition of a space shortage, so far as a trajectory of their locomotion is near to be interrupted by church staff, controlling both an appearance of visitors, their potential invasion into loci with unobvious lines and a correspondence their actions to a set of rules with a high degree of implicitness.

A collision in this case is provokes by a functional ambiguity, when a church, represented as a religious facility aimed public worships, in a break between services acts both a space for private requires or individual prayer, and as a commercial institute for religiously marked items selling, and sometimes as a museum-concert complex targeted leisure pastime. An extra well of a sacred space collisions is an insider parish status asymmetry, when an activity of catechism is occupied not by clerics or catechists, but by elder ladies with a superstitious behavior as their peculiarity.

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