SUMMARY:

The ancient emblem of Sviiazhsk represents a wooden town floating on a river with fish splashing around. The emblem reproduces the actual history of establishment in 1551 on Round Mountain of a fortress, a rather formidable fortification for that time, from which a year later the troops of Ivan the Terrible set off to capture Kazan’. The fortress walls were lumbered in the woods surrounding Uglich and sent by ship down the river after the ice broke up in spring, to the spot where at the crossing of the Volga and the Sviiaga rivers rose Round Mountain. But simultaneously the emblem of Sviiazhsk evokes sacred history, for all too obvious here is the analogy with the ark looking for salvation on top of Mount Ararat. Medieval society created its world following the laws of Biblical myth and that is why the rational aspirations of a young Russian tsar, who found a strategically suitable site for a sudden attack on Kazan’, resonate in Christian myths with a mountain, island, and ark as their major components. A new city emerged on the site of pagan worship, thirty kilometers away from the capital of the Kazan’ Khanate. From its inception the city claimed the role of Christian missionary in the alien country. This religious mission laid bare the semiotic and mythological aspects of the city life. The confined territory allotted to the city was hurriedly covered with buildings. After five years of existence it acquired two monasteries and ten churches. Amazing is the fact that Sviazhsk remains the “eternal city” in its nature despite all the historical upheavals and the period of time that had elapsed since the foundation of the settlement on the mountain. In the status of the “eternal city” Sviazhsk works as a liaison between the heaven and the earth. The city’s mythological setting is reassured by the return of its original master – the Russian Orthodox Church.