On November 1, social anthropologist Jeanne Kormina will give a lecture on an Orthodox icon which appeared in the result of the terrorist attack in the city of Budennovsk (former Karabagly) in Stavropol’sky Krai in 1995. When discussing the historical, political and theological context of this project, Jeanne Kormina argues that religion provides people with a conceptual framework helping them to convert a unique historical event into a typical theologically proven example of heavenly intervention. 

In her lecture Kormina will show how religious language and aesthetic forms become instruments in turbulent times for the transformation of a story about a weak state and innocent victims into a narrative of political integrity of this quasi-imperial state formation. The reported apparition of the Mother of God to the hostages served to create a coherent historical narrative which legalized Russian presence in the region. As a result, the icon of the Mother of God Sviatokrestoskaya (The Holy Cross) created in commemoration of victims has become a link in a national and religious chain of memory which helps to reduce a very complicated ethno-religious and political history of the region to the narrative representing this frontier territory as Orthodox and Russian.

Jeanne Kormina — social anthropologist, researcher-professor, Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités, Ecole Pratique des Hautes études – PSL, Paris․