Collective Responses to the Black Plague in Northern Russia: The ritual of the one-day church

This paper explores the performance of collective religious rituals in response to the Black Plague in medieval Russia. The ritual of constructing one-day churches (obydennye khramy), votive chapels built and consecrated within a single day to shield the community against epidemic disease, is recorded in Russian chronicles for the period from the 14th century to the 16th century. Annalistic narratives from the First Novgorod Chronicle and the Third Pskov Chronicle are the primary sources for this research. I argue that the one-day church ritual emerged in the towns of Novgorod and Pskov as the result of three contextual factors specific to pre-modern northern European Russia. Analysis of these factors is intended to elucidate ways in which performative rituals enable societies to collectively process disaster and duress. First, the ritual was a response to environmental and economic factors that made the region susceptible to famine and epidemic disease. Medieval Novgorod and Pskov were prosperous mercantile towns that existed in a condition of trade connectivity and climate vulnerability. A short, wet growing season made them susceptible to crop failure which left populations undernourished and weakened immunologically. Rapid population growth, increasing urban density, and communication with Baltic trade routes made these towns the geographical epicentre of the Black Plague in Russia. This combination of economic wealth and climatological vulnerability produced a plague response of monumental proportions; religious structures of all kinds, often built by conscripts, were characteristic of the local plague response. Second, the ritual represented a combination of ideological-symbolic elements unique to the medieval Russian worldview. The Black Plague caused a popular return to religiosity, manifested through extreme forms of religious practice. The one-day church is the product of a syncretism between aesthetic forms received from the Byzantine church, and ritualistic forms derived from pagan rites indigenous to the East Slavs. The accelerated, simplified process of construction was thought to endow the one-day church with supernatural powers, transforming the object into an apotropaic barrier that protected the town from disease. Third, the ritual was an instrument for information diffusion and power signalling by secular and religious elites. In the immediacy of its performance, the ritual provided collective psychological release for the population. The ritual was subsequently mythologised in the written record as the initiative of a prince or archbishop, a figure of political authority and moral virtue. The structure stood in the urban fabric as a material testament to the divine intercession, mediated by earthly authorities that had allowed humans to triumph over plague. Larger stone churches were later constructed on the site of the ephemeral wooden votive chapels. It is the social-psychological dimension that points to the present-day relevance of the one-day church. Amidst economic sanctions against Russia, the tradition was revived at the level of the urban microdistrict (mikrorayon), as a collective response to a new form of duress.