Cultural heritage of one vanished Zaonezhye village

The article introduces materials on the natives of Zaonezhye village of Lelikovo -famous performers of the epic and fairy-tale tradition. The paper also contains folklore and ethnographic information concerning the everyday life of the village of Zaonezhye, as well as data on the intangible cultural heritage site - the wooden church of John the Baptist preserved on the island. The island village, which does not exist as an administrative unit for about 60 years, was rich both for masters of the word and for skillful architects. Lelikovo was a typical village of Zaonezhye, a treasury of Russian North culture. Back in 1871 it was the well-known Russian Slavonic scholar, folklorist, corresponding member of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences A. F. Hilferding who recorded epic poems in Lelikovo. In Soviet times, in the late 1920s, members of a folklore expedition led by folklore scholars the Sokolov brothers visited Lelikovo. Collectors recorded epic poems from narrator P. S. Semenova, included in the famous collection of "Onega epic ballads". The rich folklore, ethnographic and linguistic material was collected in Lelikovo by the students of the Ethnographic Department of the Leningrad Historical and Linguistic Institute in 1931. The expedition s unique materials are stored in the Scientific Archive of the KarRC of RAS, among them - records of epic ballades, small folklore genres, fairy-tale prose, etc. The participants of the expedition also documented the distinctive features of speech in Zaonezhye. The village was liquidated in the 1960s with disruption of the cultural landscape s development ensuing.