Cross in the traditional culture and landscape of the Russian North

For about two centuries «the Russian North» is not only the set expression that has incorporated the peculiarities of the Russian mentality, but a concept reflecting meanings important for the national culture. Rural cultural landscape is a system that embraces a settlement, landscape, planning and toponymal structure, folk architecture, as well as ethnos, economic activity, language and spiritual culture. The research determines the place of the cross in traditional culture, settlement, and the landscape of the northern and Arctic territories. The paper is based on archival, museum sources and field materials. The wooden crosses are typologically classified according to the following groups with regard of their meanings and the role they played: crosses of worship, promise, memorial, lighthouse, commemoration, protective crosses, cemetery, thanksgiving. The location of the wooden crosses could be as follows: in the place of the burnt church, by the roads, near or inside religious buildings, at the spring, outside a village, on a cattle pasture, in a forest, on a river bank, on a hill or a cape, among arable fields, in the peasant estates, at the entrance to the village, at the crossroads, on the seashore. The research gives examples of the most ancient, famous and revered crosses: Ignach cross (1238), Lyudogoshchinsky cross (1359) -Veliky Novgorod, the cross set up by Peter the Great in the Unska Bay on the White Sea coast (1694), the crosses of the Lower Volga region in Staraya Ladoga (XVII - beginning of the XVIII century), and new sacred objects: votive cross in the Zabor, the village of Kimza (1887), cemetery and promise crosses in the village of Kimzha, Mezen (end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century), a cross in the village of Kushkopala, the Pinezhsky district (mid - second half of the 19th century), the cross of the village of Kozmogorodskaya, the Mezen district (1899), etc. The cross as one of the main symbols of Orthodoxy occupied a central place in the cultural landscape of the North. In the Arctic, where the Orthodox maritime culture took shape, it reflected the special conditions of life and was the center of the surrounding space, fulfilling a protective and sacred mission in it. Pomorye crosses set on the coast and islands of the White and Barents Sea make a separate group in the Russian North. The crosses are researched as monuments of architecture, Orthodoxy, objects of ritual practices, seafaring, navigational signs of Pomors, which were put on pilotage maps. It has been determined that votive offerings are gender-based. Female objects on crosses indicate the use of a sacred object by a female group. They were located in the settlement or in the immediate vicinity of it. Crosses controlled by the male group were devoid of cloth and other offerings and located far from villages, on islands or the seacoast.

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