Identity Markers in the Paraliturgical Hymnography of Novgorod and Pskov Saints

This article examines the Orthodox akathist dedicated to Russian saints — primarily those of Novgorod and Pskov — as a genre of paraliturgical hymnography. The focus is on the laudatory hymns (laudationes) contained in the chairetisms of these akathists, which construct an axiological hierarchy of religious merits preserved in ecclesiastical memory and transmitted to the faithful during worship as models of spiritual emulation. Given the vast corpus of hagiographical literature in the Russian Orthodox tradition — both prose hagiobiographical and poetic — amounting to several thousand texts when variant redactions are included, it is methodologically appropriate to concentrate on one regional corpus, where a sufficiently representative sample allows for reliable verification of results. The choice of Novgorod and Pskov is not accidental: their akathistographic legacy has not yet been subjected to comprehensive historical-religiological (akathistological) analysis, despite its richness and its close connection with key figures in Russian history, such as Prince Aleksandr Nevsky or the founders of the first frontier monasteries. This makes the findings of the study relevant also to the broader field of frontier studies.