Abstract
The history of the religious development of the Nağaybäks took place against the background of complex interactions and contacts between Islam, Christianity and the remnants of the original ideas of the peoples of the Turkic and Finno-Ugric groups of the Volga Region, the Kama Region and the Urals, rooted, among other things, in ancient Turkic Tengrianism. It was formed in the fi rst half of the 16th – early 20th century in the conditions of rivalry between two world religions, Christianity and Islam, the spiritual culture of the Nağaybäks, being nominally Orthodox, retained a complex set of archaic features. This is manifested, for example, in the structures of ritual and ceremonial practices (equestrian competitions, preparation of sacrifi cial meat in cauldrons, rules of the festive and ritual table, etc.), the calendar of holidays of the annual cycle, including Turkic and Slavic traditions (Nardugan, Maslenitsa, Easter, Ash Biru and others), as well as the vocabulary used in the liturgical literature (Turkic, Slavic, Arabic and Iranian). All this testifi es to the pronounced syncretism of the religious culture of the Nağaybäks. Being a Turkic people by language and Orthodox-Christian by religion, the Nağaybäks have always been close to the Turkic-speaking Muslims, Tatars, Bashkirs and Kazakhs, as well as Russian Orthodox Christians. Such a neighborhood served, on the one hand, to strengthen them in Orthodoxy, on the other – to preserve the Turkic-Muslim remnants. As a result of such infl uences, the religious culture of the Nağaybäks was formed into an original composition, felt by the people as a single complex refl ecting their ethnic identity. The religious phenomenon of the Nağaybäks can be considered one of the foundations of their modern ethnic identity.
Keywords
ethnohistory, Christianity, Islam, Tengrianism, syncretism, Nağaybäks, Tatars, Russians, ethnic culture, identity.
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