Dominika Gapska (Adam Mickiewicz Unieversity, Poznań): A Saint ‘Scandalist’ – Xenia of St Petersburg
Dominika Gapska, Ph.D. – is a Serbian philologist and medievalist. She is a graduate of the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań. Her research interests include the history of Serbian medieval literature, Slavic writing traditions, spiritual culture, and Orthodox Church rituals. Her work focuses in particular on the sanctity and spirituality of women, as well as on hymnographic, hagiographic, and euchographic texts devoted to them. She is the author of Woman-Church-State: Cults of the Female Saints in the Writings of Serbian Orthodox Church (2021), written within a project funded by Poland’s National Science Centre. She has published several articles devoted to the sanctity of women in Serbian Orthodoxy and has participated in multiple conferences in Poland and abroad.
Hovedinnhold
Yurodstvo (holy folishness) has its roots in the culture of the Byzantine Orthodox Church, from which it was transplanted into East Slavic and later Russian Orthodoxy and “russified.” Provocative gestures, unacceptable behavior – the yurodivy’s way of “being” constituted a moral scandal, which often caused disapproval from the church and other official institutions. In the case of women’s holy foolishness, scandal behavior involved a violation of social norms and was revealed, for example, in transvestitism or scandalous acts in public and holy places. An important example of a female fool-for-Christ in Russian culture is St Xenia of St Petersburg (born betw. 1719 and 1730– died c. 1802). Despite her outrageous “way of being”, the yurodivaya was held in local veneration and was respected by the “people.” The cult of Xenia was however difficult to accept for the church. This resulted in a long process of canonization and what we may call a “multidimensionality” of worship; for example, outside Russia, Xenia is not venerated as a yurodivaya, but rather as a patron of immigrants, “exiles.” The lecture attempts to answer the question of whether the official acceptance of Xenia’s cult might be a way of accustoming scandal in religious life.
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