THE CULT OF ST. PARASKIEVA IN RUS (Kult swietej Paraskiewy na Rusi)

St. Paraskieva belonged to the most popular saints of the Orthodox church, and can be considered one of the most important figures venerated in the Eastern Slavic regions. In the 14th-16th century her cult reached its apogee, gaining a pan-Slavic influence. In the Polish-Lithuanian state it developed mainly due to Grzegorz Cambłak, the archbishop of Kiev, who in the 1420's inspired the proclamation of St. Paraskieva of Tyrnov as the patron saint of the local Orthodox church. In the following centuries, however, her cult began to gradually diminish. This article is an attempt to explain this process. The relatively low status of holy women venerated in the Eastern church may have been among the reasons why by the 17th century the hitherto vigorous cult of St. Paraskieva was no longer supported by the ecclesiastical authorities. The cult of the Theotokos was gaining importance in the same period, and rather quickly overshadowed that of Paraskieva's. In the Muscovite Rus', an additional element was the ongoing 'Byzantinisation' of the Ruthenian Orthodox church. Initiated by Patriarch Nikon. The disappearance of the cult of St. Paraskieva in Western Rus' (i.e. the territories of today's Poland, Ukraine and Belorussia) was concurrent with the steady growth of the dominance of Russia in the Slavonic lands.It was also the period in which the local Orthodox church found itself in deep crisis resulting from the 1596 Union of Brest. It can be assumed, therefore, that the key role in the disappearance of some saints and the emergence of new ones was played by the Muscovite religious tradition, in which - starting from the second half of the 17th and the early 18th century - the Marian cult, often in an imperial interpretation, was steadily gaining in importance. Under the influence of Moscow the Orthodox church in the Polish-Lithuanian state underwent deep transformations, and as a result its earlier ties with the Balkan and Moldavian traditions were seriously weakened. Paraskieva was one of the saints who in effect of those changes were sentenced to oblivion.