False Kyiv relics of "St. Barbara"
Nicholas Zharkikh
or St. Michael's legends in the history of Kyiv
Sketches of the Kyiv obscurantism in 16 – 21 centuries.
In the history of Kyiv long known expressive fantastic group of messages that still nobody bothered to call "Golden-domed incredibilities" or "St. Michael legends". They were arised / updated every time while St. Michael's monastery became the seat of the high church hierarch (the first this was happened in 1620 – in 1631, when Metropolitan Isaiah Kopinsky settled in monastery).
When this hierarch was unable to take the oldest and most prestigious churches of Kiev – St. Sophia Cathedral, he decided to compensate for this situation by "justification" that St. Michael's monastery (not Saint Sophia Cathedral) was the oldest seat of Christianity in Kiev.
There were following legend invented for this:
1, about the "Metropolitan of Kyiv Michael";
2, about the "relics of St. Barbara of Heliopol";
3, about the "Byzantine princess Barbara".
All these legends have to raise religious authority of Golden-domed monastery and along with it – the authority of Those-who-in-the-monastery-sits.
Researchers have repeatedly addressed these topics (e. g., St. Barbara cult: Mytsko I.Z. The problem becoming popular Christian worship in Ukraine // Mediaevalia Ucrainica. – 1998. – T. 5. – S. 41-42), turned to them I too [Zharkikh M.I. New books on architectural monuments. – Archeometry and protection of historical and cultural heritage, 1999, vol. 3, p. 131 – 136]. Since I am not going to defend my doctoral thesis on "Michaelelogic and Barbarologic studies", the small historiographical overview will be presented at the end of the article, after considering the source material. Why is it done so? Let it be a small affair, which will determine the reward one who suffers reading.
At this point, I note only the general lack of previous studies: they were intended to extract some positive historical information from these legends (e. g. M.Yu. Brajchevsky – from the legend of Metropolitan Michael), while the purpose of scientific historical research should be destruction of these legends, demonstration their late origin and ignorance of their authors (falsifiers of history) to the subject, which they undertook to write.
Such a task I put as a goal of this article.
Kyiv, April – November 2012.
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