Book chapter
Эпиграфика. Надписи с Анакопийской горы
In book

In addition to an exhaustive anthology with over fifty historical documents written between 1913 and 1964 translated directly from Russian - several of them previously unpublished - this publication includes essays and texts by Boris Groys, Manuel Fontán del Junco, Christina Kiaer, Ekaterina Degot, Fredric Jameson, Irina Leytes, Alessandro De Magistris, John Bowlt, Hubertus Gassner, Eckhart Gillen, Aage Hansen-Löve, Michael Hagemeister and Evgeny Steiner. (From the editorial review).
The author considers the essence of religious crimes, their classification system and principles as well as the general character of religious delicts in the criminal law of Russia of the end of the XIXth - the beginning of the XXth century.
In the present article two eleventh-century phrases inscribed many times on the walls of the St Sophia Cathedral in Novgorod (коуни рони and парехъ мари) are shown to be of Semitic provenance. The authors provide the linguistic arguments which support the claim of a Hebrew source for коуни рони and a Syriac one for парехъ мари. In addition, we offer a reconstruction of the historical pragmatic context in which the phrases can be situated. It is proposed that the коуни рони inscriptions can be connected with the seizure of Novgorod and the plundering of St Sophia by Vseslav of Polotsk in the year 1066. They should be regarded as the oldest tangible proof of contacts with Jews and Hebrew in Rus’. In the case of the парехъ мари inscriptions, the hypothesis is put forward that the author was a certain Efrem, a local citizen, possibly a clergyman, who was a Syrian by descent.
The second publication of the international art center Kunsthaus Bregenz Arena (Austria).