SMOKED ICON. THE SOOT AND THE HOLINESS

The article describes the formation and functioning of one of the little-known local centers for the craft of popular icons in the Lukoyanovsky district of the Nizhny Novgorod province. Here, in the early 1870s, the peasants of the villages of Nikolay-Dar and Tolsky Maidan began to produce and sell foil icons. The impetus for the foundation of the new craft was a pilgrimage trip of peasants to Voronezh, from where new technologies for the icons production using smoked seals were transferred to the Nizhny Novgorod province. Such seals were used to make serial imprints with soot on foil. The case of the Lukoyanov foil icons is of undoubted interest, since it can show how Christianized colonies, large monopolistic centers of production and trade of icons and local crafts were interconnected. The main sources on the history of the “Lukoyanov folezhki” (foil icons) are two short articles from two issues of the “Nizhny Novgorod Collection of Papers”, edited by Gatsisky in the last quarter of the 19th century. Two authors, independently but in the same local journal, with an interval of 13 years published descriptions of the local icon craft. The authors of the article compare those two descriptions and find out the specifics in constructing the foil icon research narratives. Thus, the article, analyzes not only the icon trade, but also its descriptions made in the 19th century.