The Presidential Library released a movie about graffiti of the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Veliky Novgorod

The Presidential Library released a movie entitled “Graffiti of the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Veliky Novgorod” - the first of a four-series documentary is about graffiti on the walls of in the city churches. The film director is Tatyana Dyakonova. The film can be seen on the Presidential Library website under Audiovisual materials.

The main character of the movie is Savva Mikheyev, senior researcher of the Department of Typology and Comparative Linguistics of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, PhD in historical sciences, who tells about the significance of graffiti drawings and inscriptions of the XI-XV centuries. He denotes the role of Veliky Novgorod as the most important book center of Ancient Russia, the center of literacy and written culture. Drawings and graffiti survived on the walls in many of the most ancient churches of Novgorod and its outskirts. The greatest number of them was found in the Cathedral of St. Sophia.

- It is said in the first Novgorod chronicle, - Savva Mikheyev is leading his story on camera, - that the stone made Cathedral of St. Sophia of the Wisdom of God in Novgorod was laid down in 1045 in replacement of the burned away on that spot wooden church and erected in five years. Fortunately, the walls of the cathedral have almost completely survived down to our days. Look at this fragment: on the original masonry consisting of stones and plaster, which is exceptionally strong, like a stone, - there are ancient inscriptions, crosses and drawings. The inscriptions appeared after the construction of the cathedral in the middle of the XI century and before the middle of the XII century. Onomatology, the name and naming study, lets to learn a lot about an individual: who wrote this, what did the author do, where did he come from. There is, for instance, the Scandinavian name of Farman among the names. Many inscriptions suggest the social status of a person.

The camera carefully examines the walls, covered with inscriptions. And, of course, the question arises among visitors and spectators: how come, whether it permissible to write on a church walls or not? But, as if anticipating the question, the lecturer answers it:

- Although, these are not frescoes. These are the bare walls, where the parishioner did not feel in sin, leaving a prayer to the Lord. Many inscriptions are left by the clerics themselves – the priests, the deacons, about which the inscriptions themselves report.

Scientists often meet names of complex origin that were newer recorded or known only by some modern place names, that is, the place, cities or villages names. Kulotka, for example. This is an ancient, pre-Christian Slavonic name. Probably, the root in it is the same as in the word “kulak” (a fist). There is one place in the Novgorod Oblast called Kulotino, and it is clear that it originates from the same name of Kulotka, which in order originated from Kulot.

Among the inscriptions shown in the film, there are some Greek writings as well. Literacy in ancient Novgorod flourished, and here, perhaps, even Glagolitic manuscripts were copying into Cyrillic.

From the movie of the Presidential Library it follows that Novgorod's ancient churches have become a kind of archive of written and oral history, allowing researchers to reconstruct the events of the medieval city and original verbal speech of the authors of graffiti inscriptions.