Kalacheevskaya cave in the Middle Don: interpretation of sacred topos in the context of the Via Dolorosa

The aim of this work is to identify the semantic meaning of Kalacheevskaya cave’s sacred space. The sources of research are the underground complex itself, located on the south of Voronezh region, maps and descriptions of places by pilgrims to the Holy Land. There are no written sources left about building of Kalacheevskaya cult cave. However, the object under study is one of the longest caves in European part of Russia, which attaches particular relevance to field studies of the caves. The total length of the cave passes makes today 892 m. So far, the intended purpose of most of them has been unknown. The study suggests and justifies a hypothesis for reflection in the structure of Kalacheevskaya cave of Jerusalem sacred space, where passes of the cave are town streets and its separate premises are buildings, that makes the scientific novelty of the study. The possibility of such problem setting and solving was inspired by the existing precedent in the caves of Divnogorskiy and Ust-Medveditskiy monasteries in the Don region, where the symbols of the labyrinths can be interpreted as Via Dolorosa. Via Dolorosa is a street in Jerusalem where symbolic stops on the last day of Christ’s sufferings are reflected. Its sanctity began to shape in Jerusalem in the 14th century. The embodiment of Jerusalem sacred topos in Russian architecture gets its development in 16-17th centuries. The Kalach city, with a high chalk outlier and the cave in the middle of the town, was founded in the early 18th century by Cossacks of Ostrogozhskiy regiment. Its inhabitants could see the sacred space of Jerusalem during pilgrimage to the Holy Land, trying to repeat it at home within the folk tradition of cave digging. If to compare the plan of Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem with the central and northern parts of cave labyrinths in Kalach, it is possible to see eight stops of the Way of the Cross. Hence, the second stop, “the place of the flagellation and the place where the Savior took his Cross to bear it to Golgotha”, is marked by a cu t in chalk column decorated with graffiti. The third stop is marked with a big cross cut on chalk. It is impossible to identify on the plan the location of stops from the tenth to fourteenth owing to their location in Jerusalem prototype inside the Church of the Resurrection and its absence in Kalacheevskaya cave. We can only make an assumption about the location of some of them on the basis of distinct architectural elements. For example, Golgotha can be symbolically identified in the circle up-going and down-going pass in the area of the eighth stop of Via Dolorosa in Kalacheevskaya cave. The method of structural-semantic analysis developed in the article based on comparison of individual elements of the cave with a particularly revered Christian sacred loci, allows to take a fresh look at the numerous religious caves of the Great Russian Plain. Thus, in the case of similar semantics, we can speak about increasing of recreational potential of these objects.

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