Hellanicus of Lesbos was one of major Greek historians of the 5^th century B.C. His main contribution to the development of historical writing is connected with his scrupulous elaboration of chronology issues in works of the last period of his life which was not a subject of sufficient attention for the preceding authors. As to Hellanicus’ outlook, in religious sphere he was by no means an atheist or skeptic, but his beliefs were already accompanied by a certain degree of rationalist criticism. For a judgment on his political views, there are only very scanty and, moreover, mostly indirect data. If we proceed from them, the historian may be characterized as an opponent rather than supporter of radical democracy of the type, which existed in Athens during the Peloponnesian War, when Hellanicus was writing his Atthis, a treatise on Athenian history. It could even be that he voluntarily or under compulsion left his home town of Mytilene, when an oligarchic regime there was replaced by a democratic one. The article analyzes the system of views of Hellanicus of Lesbos on the basis of the preserved corpus of texts.

The article deals with an issue of describing and interpreting the concept of «madness» in medieval law. Based on the material of legal sources (canon law, author’s treatises of jurists and theologians, court verdicts and letters of pardon), the author of the article traces the formation of the concept during the 12^th – 15^th centuries, its relation to the norms of Roman law (primarily with the «Digests» of Justinian), the specifics of its practice in ecclesiastical, civil and criminal cases. Special attention is paid to the issue of the daily life of mentally ill people, their almost complete dependence on relatives and friends, who were mainly responsible for the stay of the insane in society, as well as of the role of medical expertise in determining their status. The article considers in detail the terminology used by ecclesiastical and secular lawyers and judges who described the cases of loss of sanity by criminals and/or their victims. The author of the article concludes that the variety of terms present in medieval legal texts indicates, firstly, the lack of elaboration of the concept of «madness» at that time, and secondly, the presence of explicit borrowings of special terms and detailed descriptions of such a disease from medieval fiction (in particular, from earlier romances).

The article deals with the organization of work on the study of Soviet icons – religious artifacts that were massively created by homeworkers in Orthodox regions during the Soviet era. The phenomenon of the Soviet icon was described and conceptualized in a series of works and two books by D.I. Antonov and D.Yu. Doronin in 2022–2023. The first center for the study of these artifacts has become the Center for Visual Studies of the Medieval and Modern Culture of the Russian State University for the Humanities. The presented article analyzes the material uniqueness of Soviet icons and describes the sequence of works aimed at identifying and studying and characterizing those objects. The study plan includes identifying groups of respondents, searching for masters and the memory keepers of the masters; artifact discovery and detection of local traditions; analyzing relevant moderating practices, recording narratives and the video fixation of the master’s work process; restoration, photographic fixation, and the artifact cataloging. The practical recommendations can be applied in organizing various types of regional research: from professional expeditions to the school, student, and volunteer projects. The article is recommended as a practical guide for local historians, museum workers and employees of educational institutions in different regions of Russia, as well as in other countries of the post-Soviet circle, where Orthodox traditions were maintained during the Soviet era.

Since 2021 The Educational and Scientific Center for Visual Studies of the Middle Ages and Modern Times of the Russian State University for the Humanities carries out research on a still little-studied phenomenon – Soviet folezhnyi (foil) icons. These are prayer images of various types (most often photographic or chromolithographic), placed under glass in a homemade kiot (icon case) and variously decorated with foil and paper decor. In the Soviet decades, during the era of the illegal existence of icon craft, different areas and «handicraftsmen» of villages developed their own artistic manners and traditions of creating icons in kiots with different technologies, ornaments and types of decor. One of the main tasks for researchers of the Soviet icon is to identify and describe these local traditions, their characteristic stylistic and material features. The article is intended as methodological guidelines for the organization of field research in local traditions of the Soviet icon. It article complements the previously developed thematic guide questionnaire and D.I. Antonov’s methodological article on the principles and general program of work on the study of Soviet icons in different regions. The order of presenting methodological recommendations in the article is consistent with the course and tasks of organizing expeditionary work. The following stages and directions of field research of Soviet icons are consistently considered: a) planning a research expedition; b) the specifics of fieldwork with local communities; c) the specifics of fieldwork with local traditions; d) the research ethics of fieldwork with Soviet icons.

The author examines the vernacular «cult» that arose at the poet Maximilian Voloshin’s grave (Crimea, Koktebel village). Visitors to the grave, ascending the Kuchuk-Yenishar mountain, bring stones on which they write messages to the poet. In these messages, Voloshin acts as a giver of benefits, he is approached with requests for health, creation and well-being of a family, material prosperity, career success, etc. The article provides a quantitative analysis of written appeals to Voloshin. For comparison, the author presents materials of a similar «cult» that exists near one of the Novodevichy Convent towers in Moscow. Those two cases have similar structures of appeals to the mythologized sacred addressee. They differ only in particulars; that are determined by the characteristics of the addressee, place and time of address. The requests generally reflect the values of Russian citizens, revealed by sociological surveys; thus, the categories of health, family values, well-being and safety of loved ones come first. Voloshin’s grave and the tower of the Novodevichy Convent are tourist attractions. The vast majority of visitors come to them not to seek help (for example, miraculous healing), but simply as part of leisure. When «honouring» Voloshin, the first place is not the solution of current human issues, but gaming activity, largely motivated by the aesthetics of what is happening.

Nowadays in Russia, there are clearly visible signs of desecularization of the social imagination, also in the genres and practices of popular culture and yet that desecularization is accompanied by the simultaneous actualization of «nationality» – as a characteristic of creative work and as an instrument of national (self)identification. Often such a new appeal to religion and «nationality», in all the diversity of forms, for cultural entrepreneurs is determined, as far as can be judged by the examples of their creative work, not at all by their own «insight», but by the desire to present to the public some examples of their compliance with the obvious public demand for acquiring «spirituality». Using a specific example from the field of popular music, an attempt is made to understand what is hidden behind the façade of a «return to tradition» and postmodern games with religiosity in modern mass culture, how legitimate it is to talk about the «retrotoping» (Z. Bauman) of public attitudes and the reification through the scene of a reflective nostalgia (S. Boym) for the conventional «golden age» of Russian history as a guideline for everyday life, or is it more correct to talk here about the scenic incarnations of such a phenomenon as counter-urbanization (the same as «new rurality»), when the pre-industrial – «traditional» – way of life is imagined as form of leisure for a modern city dweller.

Monuments to saints became a characteristic feature of the cultural and religious landscape in Russia and some regions of Belarus in the 21^st century became monuments of saints. Their involvement in various social interactions is studied in the latest studies of folklore and urban anthropology. The initiators of monument installation projects and sculptors are trying to find new subjects as well as forms and images that would meet the needs of modern society, in whose worldview religious and secular elements are intricately intertwined. The article considers an issue of using children’s images in monumental sculptural compositions associated with the glorification of saints. Its main goal is to show the features of such iconographic solutions and their repetition and variability. Monuments to saints with images of children are quite diverse thematically, although they are similar in compositional solutions. Group compositions can incorporate different ideas that do not always take into account the iconographic models developed over the centuries, although they use symbolic elements and techniques for representing characters borrowed from icon painting, as well as motifs of ancient and medieval European sculpture. Content analysis of media publications and Internet resources allows to identify the most striking or typical emotional reactions toward monuments to saints with figures of children and draw conclusions about the connection of those reactions with the specifics in the modern man worldview.

Type of a through iconostasis, which opens the inner space of the altar to view, has repeatedly appeared in Russian church architecture. Its origins lie as far back as Byzantine architecture. In the 20th century the appeal to that type of iconostases turned out to be consonant with the ideas of liturgical revival, most popular among the Russian emigration. In the 1930s – 1960s in Europe, iconostases of Orthodox churches with very wide portals were created. In some churches, the iconostases disappeared, revealing the altar. In the Soviet Union, on the contrary, preference was given to high-blind type iconostases. The first attempts to construction churches with open altars in post-Soviet Russia date back to the 1990s. They met with fierce opposition from the conservative part of the church community. It is surprising that such experiments found support from the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. During the 2000s–2010s, a number of temple complexes with open altars were created in Russia. The design is varied: from imitations of Byzantine altarpieces open- work wrought-iron iconostases-lattices. At the same time, the official Church press justified the admissibility of such type of altar screens from the point of view of Orthodox theology.

The great film series project about the life of different ethnic people groups of the USSR called «Cinema-Atlas of the USSR» was initiated by the Soviet government in 1920s. To realize the project a number of film expeditions to different regions of the Soviet Union were organized and the first one by the All-Russian photocinema joint-stock film company «Soviet Cinema» (SOVKINO) took place in Buryat-Mongolia. From the film materials obtained during the expedition, educational «film aids» were made, one of them was «Baikal» (1928). The focus of the article is that unique archival film document, which expands the boundaries of research in the field of ethnography, visual anthropology, as well as anthropology of religion, in particular, Buryat Buddhism. Today, the newsreel footage becomes a valuable visual source for studying the material and non-material culture, religious rites and cults of the Buryats. The film «Baikal» documents one of the central Buddhist religious ritual the Maidari Hural – the festival dedicated the Bodhisattva Maitreya (Maidari) known as the Buddha of the Future. The ritual takes place at Khoymorskij (Khandagaitai) datsan A religious architectural monument, the only monastery that has not been preserved to our days and the only monastery that fully functioned according to the principles of the Renewal movement in Buryat Buddhism in the early twentieth century.