Introduction

1Every year in July, Ekaterinburg, a big industrial city in the Urals and one of fifteen cities in Russia with a population over one million, becomes the centre of Orthodox life in the country. By no means a popular tourist destination, the city in these days hosts thousands of visitors from all over Russia who come to participate in cultural and religious events devoted to the commemoration of the last Russian tsar Nicholas II and his family, killed by the Bolsheviks in this city on the night of July 17, 1918. Believers arrive by car, rented bus, train, and plane in small groups of friends and relatives or in larger groups from a parish or diocese.

• 1 On the controversy of the royal remains see Slater, 2007; Rozanova, 2008; Avdonin, 2013.
• 2 Along with Nicholas and his wife, there were their five children and four attendants (a doctor and (...)

Throughout July 16, a large open space in front of the Church on Blood in Honor of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land, erected in 2000–2003 on the place of the Ipatiev House where the Romanovs stayed until their shooting in the house’s cellar, is occupied by Orthodox pilgrims. Women in their floor-length skirts and headscarves, along with men and children of all ages, sit or sleep on the grass waiting for evensong; some read prayers with their faces and bodies directed at the church, while many confess to one of the twenty-to-thirty priests standing in the area with their analoy, special folding tables used for religious services. Late at night, the liturgy starts on a stage built in front of the church, with several bishops, many priests and deacons, and a large professional choir participating. People can see every detail of the service on two big screens and hear every word due to a powerful audiosystem installed for this event. After several hours of church service, when the city plunges into late summer twilight, believers take part in the eucharist distributed by priests from tens of chalices. At 3 a.m., the cross procession starts. It takes approximately five hours for this huge group of people to cover the 21 km between the place of shooting, where they just had eucharist, and the site of the Romanovs’ clandestine grave outside the city, an old mine called Ganina Yama (literally: Gania’s pit): this is now a monastery with a well-tended recreational area—flower beds, convenient benches, café, and shops.1 Starting in the city center, the procession weaves along well paved streets, which have kept their Soviet names, before flowing into the wooden suburbs and then down a narrow forest road, arguably following the path along which, in July 1918, the Ural Bolsheviks carried the bodies of eleven murdered people in two trucks.2

3Orthodox cross processions, just like the religious processions of Catholics (Orsi, 1985; Seales, 2008; Brucher, 2016; Siekierski, 2018), the marches for Jesus of evangelicals (Fer and Malogne-Fer, 2017), and the prayer walks of Pentecostals (Kirby, 2017), give ordinary believers presence in public space: they are their way to struggle peacefully for their right to the city (Orsi, 1999; Bielo, 2013). The difference with Orthodox processions, however, is that the latter do not only take place in cities; often, krestokhodtsy go through abandoned villages and down forest roads, which can hardly be considered public spaces and where there is no one to struggle with for the right to be present. Cross processions rather follow the cultural logic of internal colonization discussed by Alexander Etkind, though the new religious “colonizers” do their work symbolically rather than materially (Etkind, 2011) by creating an ephemeral spiritual map of Holy Russia.

4In this essay, I analyze Orthodox religious processions as a collective pious work, a conjunction of bodily effort and prayer aimed at connecting “earth and heaven” and at creating a sense of belonging to the holy collective of the Russian Orthodox nation. All these practices create a utopian space, which is the opposite of “a socio-economic space… [where] the strong always win and the words always deceive” (Certeau, 2011: 16). The utopian space has its own topography and uses a specific language of miracles (Eade and Sallnow, 2000; Peña, 2011; Bielo, 2020). I wouldn’t dare say that in this way believers “subvert the fatality of the established order” (Certeau, 2011: 18), as did the Brazilian interlocutors of Certeau, but they surely enjoy their utopian space as a space of alternative power relations based on spiritual reputation. A short overview of cross processions in contemporary Russia is followed by ethnographic analysis of the tsar cross procession in Ekaterinburg, with sections focusing on how the atmosphere of holy collectivity is created and how space is claimed in these processions.

Pious Work for the Common Good

6Contemporary devotional literature and Orthodox media often mention the words “Russia is to be saved by cross processions,” attributed typically to St Ioann of Kronshtadt, when they praise the spread of cross processions throughout Russia from the 2000s. They see the growing popularity of the processions as the next stage in the religious revival that followed the building of Orthodox Christianity’s material infrastructure in the 1990s, often the result of the grass-root initiatives of parishioners and priests (Tocheva, 2017; Köllner, 2011). The lack of money and other resources made these efforts truly heroic, and cross processions maintain this ethos of heroism and collectivism, though in their own way.

9Few people can afford to walk with the entire procession for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers. Bardizh explains in this and other interviews that an individual contribution to a collective pious work should be affordable; one can join and leave the procession at any time—“as much as God wills.” Thus, the procession is united not by the constancy of participants, starting and finishing the path together and thus creating a temporary religious community, “a monastery on foot” as Andrei himself phrased it; instead, the procession is a project made by a particular person who sets up and manages its infrastructure (food, places for sleep, medical care) and cares about building the spiritual infrastructure of its participants. This allows grace to flow with the procession.

Ekaterinburg’s Via Dolorosa

10Among many other cross processions in contemporary Russia, the tsar procession in Ekaterinburg stands out. Like those pilgrims who come to Jerusalem to be in the place “where Jesus walked” (Kaell, 2014), especially on Via Dolorosa, the street where he went to Calvary, participants in the procession take communion near the very place where the tsar was killed and presumably go by the very road used to take the royal martyrs’ bodies to their burial place. Attesting to the authenticity of the road they follow and to the place where the bodies of the royal martyrs were buried is an important part of the whole event. As Veronika, an organizer of the minor tsar cross processions where I met Maxim, explained to me:

The thing is that we follow the road which was marked (pobita) by his [Emperor Nicholas II] blood.… And what does it mean that we follow (idem vosled) the royal family? A connection with Christ happens (soedinenie so Khristom). The very connection which was lost 100 years ago.

11In other words, krestokhodtsy are not just “spatializing [the] time” of the Romanov dynasty (Lefebvre, 2004: 89) by connecting Romanov-related memorial places on the map as they go from Nyrob to Ekaterinburg; they connect heaven and earth with their own bodies.

12For Veronika, “a connection with Christ” was lost by the Russian people when the tsar was killed. As she explained to me in a long interview, confirming what I already knew from other informants and the literature they read, the last Russian tsar was not just a person of royal descent and a legally crowned monarch, nor was he simply a saint canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church as a passion-bearer (a Christian who faced his death in a Christ-like manner). He is more than that: he is a Redeemer who by his death in the “Urals Golgotha” expiated sins of the Russian people, as Jesus did for humanity in Jerusalem (Shnirelman, 2020; Shtyrkov, 2020). Although the theology of the tsar as redeemer (tsar’-iskupitel’) is considered heretical by the official Church, it is nevertheless widespread among Orthodox believers, especially those who come to the tsar cross processions in Ekaterinburg. These ideas are present in their icons and in the leaflets and brochures they spread. They insist that the tsar was killed in a ritual committed by the enemies of Russia and that, at the same time, his death was a Christ-like self-sacrifice for the sake of the Russian people, who had forgotten authentic ways of life in the throes of modernization on the eve of the revolution.

13The aim of the devotional labor of the krestokhodtsy is to bind the gaps, spatial as well as temporal, in their utopian space. Spatially, they connect the place of the killing of the “royal martyrs” with their burial place or, in the language of conspiracy theories, the site where the ritual murder started and the place where it was completed by immolating the bodies in fire and acid (Slater, 2007). Temporally, they build a connection between the past and the future. The tsar cross procession and the week-long festival of Orthodox culture that precedes it are held under the slogan “From repentance to the resurrection of Russia.” Repentance for the сollective misdeeds of the past, such as the sin of regicide, should lead to the nation’s future prosperity: the cross procession is a mechanism which helps the future to come and the past to be overcome. The responsibility of the krestokhodtsy as representatives of “our people” for the past tragedies and future successes of the nation (russkogo naroda) is constantly stressed in the speeches, lectures, and media narratives of the tsar days. Here is what Father Evgeniy, one of most famous and respected priests in the city, preached to a group of his parishioners at about midnight on July 17, 2018 to prepare them for the procession:

We have to be as focused as possible [during the procession], we have to pray to God for our personal salvation and for our families, for our country. Because this is a turning point in a sense, maybe the future history of Russia depends on it, on how we will pray, on what happened within the past hundred years. Have we learned any lessons from that event? Has our people learned to humble itself? Has it repented or does it remain oriented toward sin, toward selfishness, toward egoism?

14Dressed in red t-shirts with the logo of the Orthodox service Miloserdie (Mercy) headed by Fr. Evgeniy, the thirty or so men and women he addressed did not really need any explanation of history or the meanings of the regicide. Many of them come to the cross procession every year, and not as ordinary participants with icons and church banners; instead, they come to create order in the flow of people. They compose small mobile first aid groups, with a supply of band-aids, small bottles of water, handfuls of candy and chocolates, and a table with an ambulance phone number: they spread out along the procession to assist the kreskokhodtsy if the need arises. Yet, even if some of them do not really believe in the idea of the collective sin of the Russian people, they do not protest and silently share this popular theology in its moderate version.

15In the cross processions in Ekaterinburg, I also met groups of believers who split from the Russian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate, moved from cities to remote places, and waited desperately for the end of the world to come. Yet, to be extreme in terms of theological claims does not necessarily mean to be marginal socially. Veronika is a happily married mother of four children who lives the comfortable life of a middle-class urbanite. Her devotion to the tsar brought her into a network of people from different places in Russia who share her views and whom she meets in numerous cross processions. Every year she participates in the main tsar cross procession in Ekaterinburg, the next day going to another procession in Alapaevsk, a town 150 km northwest where other Romanovs were martyred, including Elizabeth, the sister of the tsar’s wife (also canonized as a saint). In addition, every Sunday she organizes her own minor tsar cross procession, which covers the last third of the tsar’s road and tries to follow the historically authentic path as close as possible (Kormina, 2022).

16Religious people, including this mystically oriented woman and more moderate religious practitioners (like Orthodox volunteers), live simultaneously in two “partially connected worlds” (Girard, 2019: 14), spiritual and mundane, both of which are real to them. They see the cityscape in a different way to secular people, using their specially trained spiritual gaze (dukhovnoe videnie) to see invisible aspects of the world—obscure causality and the meanings of historical events (Shtyrkov, 2020) or a sacred landscape lost in layers of mundane infrastructure or in the forests and swamps. The spiritual gaze is a prerequisite for successful communication within and about utopian space. Naletova wrote how in Kazan’ she “was struck by a group of pilgrims praying … in a back yard disfigured by the garbage of a factory” (Naletova, 2010: 245). This was a site where the icon of the Kazanskaia Mother of God once appeared: then, it was in a deep forest, but a century later was a part of tobacco factory. The tsar’s road, too, does not exist in the mundane world: it is invisible to the eye of an ignorant observer outside of special periods of time when the tsar processions make it visible. The road exists in devotional literature, on special maps for pilgrims (including a mobile app prepared for the tsar days by organizers), and in the flow of krestokhodtsy who mark and make this road with their own bodies. The cross processions, managed by city services, church professionals, or religious enthusiasts like Bardizh or Veronika, refer not to mundane reality but to the invisible world, the “utopian space” of God, saints, and Holy Russia.

Performing Holy Collectivity

17In this section, we will see how the atmosphere of collectivity is felt and maintained in the processions through the pious work of chanting, walking, and sharing the weight of holy icons. Every cross procession is essentially a collective prayer. Usually, krestokhodtsy sing the Jesus prayer (“Lord, Jesus Christ Son of God, have mercy on us”) aloud along the way. In one of his interviews, Bardizh called this prayer “the battle hymn of the host of Christ” (Bardizh, 2008). Here is a self-description from a participant in one of his long cross processions:

I dare to walk the first 10 km with God’s help. With the first step the Jesus prayer begins. The leader of the procession makes sure that no one is distracted by talking: if the Jesus prayer is interrupted, it is no longer a cross procession. (Larionova, 2013: 23)

19Although the choice of the Jesus prayer as the main prayer for cross processions everywhere can be explained by purely pragmatic reasons, it is rooted in the deeper context of post-secular religiosity in Russia, namely the way “authentic” pre-Soviet religious practices and ideas are interpreted. In popular religious literature for Orthodox believers, the Jesus prayer is widely discussed as an individual mystical practice not recommended to an unprepared person (Paert, 2010; Dubovka, 2018: 200-201). It should be done secretly and privately, under the supervision of a spiritual advisor (Pop, 2018). In post-Soviet Orthodoxy, however, the Jesus prayer has turned from an elite individualistic religious practice accessible to the most spiritually advanced believers into a sort of a minimal prayer for everybody. As a result, it has become a marching chant and a “battle hymn” that helps the procession keep pace and simultaneously create an atmosphere of full immersion in devotional work, similar to the hesychastic spiritual techniques of uninterrupted prayer. This is how an Orthodox priest from eastern Finland put it before setting out on a skiing procession in his parish: “when skiing, the rhythms of one’s arms and legs is particularly suitable for silently repeating the Jesus prayer” (Vuola, 2020: 12). For him, the prayer helps to organize everybody’s individual movement; yet for Russian krestokhodtsy, the collectivity of their singing is crucial. The collective singing of the Jesus prayer and collective movement help create an experience of being a part of a group, of a people (narod) with an unavoidably shared destiny.

20None of the participants can take advantage of any social privileges they might enjoy in their usual life as members of a category usually recognized as vulnerable and weaker, such as an older person, a woman, a child, or a person in a particular position in the social hierarchy. Priests, bishops, and even the patriarch (when he joined the procession in 2018) make the whole way on foot; only in extreme cases are wheelchairs used for invalids and strollers for toddlers. Unescapably, one feels, through the efforts of one’s own body over several hours, a belonging to a collective organized on egalitarian principles, where only one’s effort and faith matter. Several buses organized by Fr. Evgenii’s Miloserdie group follow the procession, but the volunteers are instructed to allow people into the buses only in the most desperate cases and to remind people that they join the procession chtoby potrudit’sia (to do hard work), that is to make the whole way on foot and not by bus. The volunteers are to help those in need but even more so to discipline the flow of people and make the procession a “pious march.”

21Many seek to experience hardship in order to become more deeply immersed in their religious performance. This experience is generated largely by dealing with material objects that participate in processions, such as large church icons. Quite often, small groups joining the procession carry their own icons, which are sometimes so large and heavy that they are put on a stretcher on people’s shoulders. This makes walking in the procession extremely difficult but, as I could see, the carriers only reluctantly agreed to have a rest and allow someone else in the procession to take up their burden for a while. Everyone can help these people to carry their icon for some time and, in this way, become immersed deeper in the collective pious work. Indeed, many people (men) want to join the carriers, as one of my students walking with me in the procession in 2018 did. Not a devout Orthodox believer, he wanted to share the weight of the icon with others, therefore accessing a more authentic experience of being part of this collective labor and making his participant observation more immersive.

22The collective of the procession includes not only krestokhodtsy chanting the Jesus prayer, but also invisible agents. Orthodox observers and krestokhodtsy themselves compare cross processions to an army with more participants than are visible to the naked eye. As Fr. Evgenii preached to his parishioners before the procession in 2018, “we will go this way (my proidem etim putem) side-by-side (riadom) with the royal passion bearers. They will also go this way and our prayers will reach them very quickly.” The presence of invisible agents is marked with holy images: some people hold poles with velvet church banners of a deep red “Byzantine” color (sometimes deep blue or green) with images of saints, Jesus Christ, or the Birthgiver embroidered or pictured on them. Some have icons of various sizes and weights, whereas others have just small laminated paper icons hanging around their necks. In any case, an icon on the chest is a distinctive sign of krestokhodtsy that helps them to think of the saints as “being synchronous, alive and active in the present” (Forbess, 2015: 118), marking their real presence in this pious parade alongside the krestokhodtsy.

24This militaristic discourse, especially prominent in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (wholeheartedly supported by many of my informants, including ethnic Ukrainians such as Fr. Evgenii), is another way of experiencing one’s belonging to the collective of the Russian and Orthodox nation. According to the evangelical theology of warfare, “‘supernatural entities’—God, angels, the Devil, and demons… acted within national and international politics” alongside humans (Girard, 2019: 8; see also O’Neill, 2010; Kirby, 2017), and believers can have an impact on politics by praying for or against these agents. In Orthodox theology, God is not one of the political agents acting in the world: rather, he is the only political actor, as everything on earth happens only due to his divine permission (popushchenie). Hence, collective actions and fighting for the public good in a political sense make no sense to Orthodox people and is not useful for their religious selves. Although in the contemporary Orthodox theology of war, there is an image of the world as a battlefield between the Russian Orthodox people and the dark forces represented by the apostate West and its local representatives (“liberals,” secularists, and other sorts of people who question the holy collectivity of the Russian Orthodox nation [Rousselet, 2022]), every (Orthodox) Christian is a warrior of Christ because she has to fight her own passions and sins as the work of the Devil. Thus, the discourse of “militant Orthodoxy” is to a large extent directed at personal salvation through self-cultivation rather than on achieving a public good (Knorre and Zygmont, 2020).

Claiming Space, Challenging Authority

25Whatever the differences in the nuances of their understandings how cross processions should function, both Bardizh and Fr. Vsevolod Chaplin would agree that in post-secular Russia cross processions have become “pious demonstrations” that symbolically claim space and demonstrate the presence of Orthodox people to themselves and secular observers (Vuola, 2020). Indeed, according to Stella Rock:

• 11 In the region of north Karelia, divided by the Finnish-Russian border after the Winter War of 1940 (...)

In travelling through what is now predominantly secular space, halting traffic in city centers, passing through villages without functioning churches, often visiting springs or places that were desecrated or otherwise erased in the Soviet period, they are gradually contributing to the physical re-Christianization of the landscape. (Rock, 2014: 280)11

26It is no wonder that krestokhodtsy willingly include abandoned churches and ruined monasteries in their routes. Here in the ruins they perform minimalistic religious rituals: lighting candles and singing prayers. This contribution makes the abandoned church seem less empty and the religious landscape more expansive, more in line with their angelic map of the utopian world.

27Cross processions in the Russian legal system are categorized as public events and are thus regulated by the federal law “on gatherings, meetings, demonstrations, processions and pickets,” which is usually applied to political protests. Organizers of a cross procession that goes through a city have to apply to the municipal authorities to get permission for their event: the city administration, in turn, gives orders to the traffic police and emergency services to make the event safe. The law’s technical definition of processions reflects the fact that they are public events involving others as observers and involuntary co-participants (those stuck in traffic, those stopping for a moment in order to take pictures of the exotic crowd, or those who maybe join it). By walking in city streets, the Orthodox krestokhodtsy make a statement about their existence and their right to the city (Lefebvre, 1968). In a similar way, the evangelicals of Paris organize annual marches for Jesus to reconquer public space in the city center (Fer and Malogne-Fer, 2017), while Latino Catholic migrants through their impressive Good Friday processions make their presence in their new home, the towns of the American South, visible (Seales, 2008). In each case, a religious procession has an observer and an opponent, be it another religious or ethno-religious group or a secular urban dweller. To give an example from the post-Soviet world, Georgian Baptists organize an ecumenical procession in Tbilisi on Palm Sunday to claim their presence in a Georgian public space completely occupied by the Orthodox Church when it comes to religion (Eastwood, 2009; see also Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri, 2014).

28In all the cases mentioned above, processions have become “rituals of establishment or protests,” capable of maintaining or challenging institutional authority in many ways (Smithey and Young, 2010: 395). Typically, they are organized by religious minorities holding a marginal position in their society. In the Russian case, the Russian Orthodox Church portrays itself as a “socially influential ‘public religion,’” but in fact it occupies quite a tenuous position in a highly secularized society (Kormina and Luehrmann, 2018: 394) that tends to see processions and other public manifestations of religiosity as violent representations of religious and cultural anti-modernism. Hence, the main others for Orthodox believers in Russia are their secularized co-patriots who remind them about the actual cultural marginality of their counterpublic (Kormina, 2023). At the same time, Orthodox Christianity is taken by many in the country in an essentialist way as an inherited religion, similar to the popular understanding of ethnicity. Everybody born Russian is by default Orthodox, even if she has never practiced this religion. Krestokhodtsy and other Orthodox zealots see themselves as an avant-garde for an Orthodox people whose religiosity is sleeping for the time being. By their public actions, they represent “the people” and wake it up.

29Cross processions can indeed become rituals of protest, though in their own way. In 2021, due to coronavirus restrictions, all public gatherings were prohibited in Russia, including religious meetings (Mitrofanova, 2021). These restrictions concerned such a sensitive topic as the purity of the Eucharist and caused heated debates within the Church on the topic of hygiene and holiness: is it safe to give wine and bread from one chalice and with one spoon (lzhitsa) to every believer (Hovorun, 2021)? Or, in other words, can the secular authorities redefine the central ritual of Orthodox believers by mixing scientific logic with religious truth? Some priests and religious communities rejected the rules, which resulted in their split from the Church, and in one case even in the detention of a rebellious priest, Fr. Sergii (who happened to be the first abbot and builder of the monastery in Ganina Yama).

30In this difficult case (Kormina, 2020), the Church had no choice but to follow the state-sponsored restrictions, although it resisted secular control in other ways. When in Ekaterinburg that year the governor did not allow the tsar cross procession due to coronavirus restrictions, the head of the diocese Metropolitan Evgenii refused to obey. He wrote a post in his social media that was broadly disseminated by journalists:

The tradition of the people’s procession (narodnoie shestvie) from the Church on the Blood to Ganina Yama has moved beyond a so-called “event” (meropriiatie) and has become holy for tens of thousands of people. And now people will follow the holy way, this is obvious. (Truskova, 2021)

31By saying this, the metropolitan openly criticized the regulation of religious processions and, more broadly, the intrusion of secular power into spiritual matters. In his message, the procession appears as a grassroots initiative (narodnoie shestvie) rather than a well-organized event (meropriiatie), and so it cannot be stopped or banished.

32In reality, this ban on the procession meant that the state would not provide its usual infrastructural support. In particular, on the night of July 17, 2021 the roads were not blocked by the traffic police; as traffic continued in the streets, the procession had to move onto the pavement and stop while waiting for traffic lights to turn green. These unfavorable conditions obviously broke the dynamic of the “pious march,” as the religious procession crumbled into hundreds of pedestrians. However, quite quickly the krestokhodtsy started ignoring the traffic lights and occupied the whole road, as they would do under normal circumstances. The traffic police did not try to stop the flow of thousands of people headed by the bishop and started helping the krestokhodtsy to cross the streets (quite empty at night anyway). In other words, the Church asserted its right to hold a holy walk as usual. Nobody was punished.

33The notion of collectivity evoked in the metropolitan’s words about a “people’s procession” is very central to Orthodox thinking and living in the world (Agadjanian and Rousselet, 2010). But what is the collective represented and prayed for by the participants in tsar cross procession and others? In pre-revolutionary Russia, processions were part of village or town festival culture: each parish had several processions a year organized either on a saint’s day, on days commemorating heavenly interventions in the life of the community (such as the miraculous appearance of an icon or the end of an epidemic), or to commemorate other events of local or sometimes national significance, such as the coronation of new emperors (Shevzov, 2004: 152). In contemporary Russia, krestokhodtsy often join processions that are not in their places of residence, and many national processions attract believers from all parts of the country. During their ritual marching, participants refer to national history rather than locally important events. The procession in Ekaterinburg is a case in point: participants come to this city because, for them, it is “the Russian Golgotha” due to the regicide. Thus, when walking in the streets of the sleeping city, they do not “claim the city”: they rather claim the country, which they re-Christianize with cross processions. Or, to be more precise, they do not really claim it in Lefebvre’s terms, as they use “a language necessarily foreign to the analysis of socioeconomic relationship” (Certeau, 2011: 17) in their rituals of spiritual resistance and other practices directed at creating and maintaining a Russian utopian space.

Conclusion: Orthodox Christian Citizenship?

34In July 2022, Svetlana and her nine-year-old son from the town of Vikulovo in Tiumen’ region walked in the tsar cross procession for the third time. This time they and fifty other pilgrims from their diocese came to the procession “for only one purpose: to pray for peace in the whole world” (za mir vo vsem mire) (Ananina, 2022). When Svetlana and her son came up to the white and shiny Church on the Blood, they could not escape seeing the photo exhibition “Children of Donbass.” Two dozen huge black-and-white close-up portraits installed between a sculpture of the royal family in front of the church and its entrance basically told them that the war had started long ago and that Russia’s full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine, populated by many people of the same faith and speaking a very close language (Wanner, 2014), makes sense. To pray for peace in the world does not mean to protest the war. This pacifist formula, which has distinct Soviet roots (peace to the world, miru – mir), states the existence of an ideal world where there should be no wars. It signifies that Svetlana and the other krestokhodtsy want to be citizens of such a utopian world, and perhaps even feel like citizens of such a world during the collective prayer in the procession.

35Cross processions, including the tsar procession, are “pious demonstrations” that make the sacred landscape of contemporary Russia visible and densely populated. Through their “ritual walking,” krestokhodtsy do not simply mark the space religiously, as immovable religious objects like churches, chapels, and memorial crosses do; they fill the space with the sound of their prayers, the rhythm of their moving bodies united in a specific choreography, and the representations of their invisible saintly co-workers in icons and church banners. They connect permanent religious markers into a sacred landscape and create a spiritual infrastructure that makes the spread of grace throughout their vast land possible. Like a magic needle, they sew together the space of the country, pulling its fragments towards each other and keeping them in place, in their utopian space at least.

36The notion of utopian space was introduced by Certeau cursorily in the first part of his famous book The Practice of Everyday Life (2011 [1984]). For Certeau, space is created by practices as well as the texts that legitimize them; space also implies the realization of a certain social logic, including the notion of justice, and becomes the source of certain social emotions. Developing these ideas on the basis of Orthodox material, the article shows how utopian space is created and maintained in certain religious performances—cross processions—through bodily practices such as walking and collective singing, as well as through the language of spiritual warfare and the notion of spiritual seeing.

37While I fully agree with James Bielo that “there are distinctly Christian modes of urban experience” (Bielo, 2013: 301), there is a significant difference in how Christian cultures conceptualize the city and work with a city space. Evangelicals, themselves the product of modernity, see the city as the natural place for their existence and religious action, and even their buildings are constructed in such a way that they blend in with the urban fabric. In marches inspired by the theology of spiritual warfare, they aim at reconquering the city from secular forces. For Russian Orthodox Christians, the city is basically a place unfit for a proper spiritual life. They fence off the buildings of their churches from the city and localize their centers of spirituality in monasteries and holy places outside city walls, opposing “tradition,” which they defend and represent, to “modernity”; and they refer through their ecclesiastical architecture and church interiors to the specific reality of their “utopian space.” But more importantly, unlike religion in cities, which are fragmented, split, and divided and where religious groups through their processions and other public performances of piety assert their existence within an urban palette of diversity, Orthodox Christianity in Russia ignores diversity in its efforts at internal colonization. The krestokhodtsy see themselves as spiritual delegates of the whole country, of the narod, and their religious processions are powerful performances of this imagined unity.

38Similarly, the historical drama of the regicide (or ritual murder, depending on the point of view) commemorated on July 17, took place in Ekaterinburg, but it does not really belong to this city, just like the remains of the royal family, which were buried in the royal burial place in Saint Petersburg (or, according to a more conspiratorial version, burned to ashes). For those who hold the latter version, officially recognized by the Church, their sovereign, like Christ, has passed into heaven without leaving earthly remains. And it is to this heavenly kingdom, governed by the Holy Tsar, their “utopian point of reference” (Certeau, 2011: 18), that they want to be loyal above all else.