The Embodiment of Orthodox Christianity in Central Asia: Sacred Objects and Orthodox Nationalism in Revolutionary Turkestan

The Embodiment of Orthodox Christianity in Central AsiaSacred Objects and Orthodox Nationalism in Revolutionary Turkestan Daniel Scarborough (bio) The Church of the Icon of the Mother of God, "The Life-Giving Spring," is located on the edge of the village of Kosmos, about 40 kilometers northeast of Almaty.1 The church sits atop a spring considered sacred by Orthodox Christians. Groups of pilgrims regularly travel down the rough dirt road by bus to visit the church and plunge into the spring, in the hope of receiving health benefits from the holy water.2 Construction of this church and baptistery was completed in 2008. The project was initiated by the Orthodox Metropolitanate of Almaty on the basis of archival evidence of the sacred spring, the precise location of which was unknown. It was located and restored with the help of local residents, one of whom later became Hieromonk Gleb (Zhartovskii), the pastor of the church. When the church authorities expressed interest in reviving the site, Gleb personally cleared away decades of debris from the spring. In the process, he found the wooden planks of the old baptistery, as well as the bronze consecration plate of the original church, dated 1909. The waterlogged planks of the baptistery were dried and used to build the new church's altar.3 The spring near Kosmos is one of hundreds of objects throughout Central Asia considered sacred by Orthodox Christians. In contrast to End Page 243 its rich landscape of medieval Muslim, Buddhist, and Assyrian Christian sites, Central Asia's Orthodox sacred objects are relatively recent, dating back to the 19th-century conquest by the Russian Empire. During this period, Orthodox sacred objects were not unearthed or restored, as in the contemporary case of the sacred spring, but created in the process of Russia's colonial settlement of Central Asia. The hierarchy of the Orthodox Church promoted the creation of sacred objects as a means of sacralizing, and thereby assimilating, the spaces around them into the Russian Empire. Yet ecclesiastical leaders relied upon popular initiative in this creative process. The Orthodox settler population venerated objects that they recognized as sacred, with or without official sanction. The native population of Central Asia also contributed to the creation and maintenance of Orthodox sacred objects through trade, labor, and hospitality, even as they resisted colonial rule. The region's Muslim and pre-Muslim sacred landscape defined the context and parameters of Orthodox sacred objects. Orthodox objects and spaces emerged in Central Asia through the interaction and conflict of these social, political, and geographical factors. My approach to Orthodox sacred objects in Central Asia is inspired by Manuel Vasquez's "non-reductive, materialist theory of religion." By this designation, Vasquez means the study of religion as it is practiced and experienced in the physical world, beyond the parameters set by ecclesiastical authorities. "We need not appeal to some transcendental, ontological category of the sacred in order to build a non-reductive theory of religious emplacement. Transcendence is immanent, part of our own untotalizable but still binding materiality."4 This approach facilitates the study of religion in its lived complexity, without reducing it to constituent factors, such as high doctrine or political ideology. Vasquez argues that religion is embedded in biology, environment, culture, and politics, and is embodied through the interaction of these various factors in "networks of relations."5 These networks can be organized through control as well as through cooperation. "We should, thus, not assume that intimacy, trust, and emotional attachment are automatic ingredients of all networks. Sometimes constraints, proximity, or lack of resources compel people to enter into networks on the basis of competition or antipathy."6 End Page 244 Indeed, within the steep, vertical authority structure of the Synodal Church,7 as well as the colonial regime of the Russian Empire in Central Asia, Orthodox sacred objects were created through compulsion as well as consensus. Certain church leaders used Orthodox sacred objects as sources of power over their own parishioners, the native population, and the territory they occupied. As Vasquez points out, the sacred is often emplaced in accordance with "the interests of a particular, situated group of people, namely, political and religious elites that...