Christian cult has been around for two thousand years. During this time, his ritual practice evolved into a system of extremely complex ceremonies. Of course, for the full implementation of the latter, a material base is needed: the vestments of the clergy, the temple premises, church utensils and other elements, without which no service and no sacrament can take place. This article will address the issue of utensils that are used in the Russian Orthodox Church.
Temple church utensils
There are not so many sacred objects that are used in the temple space. First of all, it is a chandelier - a church chandelier. In large churches, several chandeliers are hung.
Unlike simple lighting items, chandeliers play a ritual role - they are included at certain moments of worship to mark especially significant and solemn places of the ceremony. Previously they usedoil lamps or candles. Today, almost all temples use electric lighting.
The second object of general church use is candlesticks or, as they are also called, shandals. They are something like a dish dotted with small stands for thin church candles. An oil lamp is placed in the middle of the shandal, in which the fire is constantly maintained. Its meaning is directly related to the purpose of the shandals - they are placed around the perimeter of the temple near the icons, as well as near the altar, so that people who come to pray can put a sacrificial candle in front of the images. To be able to light it, you need a constantly burning lamp.
Altar items
Church utensils of the altar are more diverse, since the deacon, priestly and bishop's ceremonial includes a huge variety of all sorts of "gadgets". The most famous of them is, of course, the censer. This is such a metal bowl, suspended on chains. This device is used for incense, that is, fumigating the temple with incense, a traditional resinous Middle Eastern incense.
But the following church utensils are of the greatest importance in Orthodoxy: chalice, diskos, spear, liar, star and covers. All together they are called the Eucharistic set, as they serve to perform the most important sacrament of the Christian church - the Eucharist. The chalice is a metal bowl that looks like a large goblet. Eucharistic wine is poured into it. Diskos is a dish on a stand, intended forof bread. A spear is a kind of knife with which this bread is ritually cut. The liar, that is, the spoon, serves as the Eucharistic gifts of the faithful for communion. The diskos is covered with a star on top, in order to then put a cover on it - a small fabric cover. The chalice is also covered with the same cover.
There are many other, less important items of church worship: vessels for wine, oil, bread, altar crosses, tabernacles, etc. But we will not dwell on these attributes here.
Production of utensils
The presence of a huge number of Orthodox churches in Russia requires mass production of church utensils. There are quite a few factories and workshops that offer their goods to choose from, but the official and main enterprise among them is Sofrino, whose church utensils are products directly from the Moscow Patriarchate. This is a large plant serving the whole of Russia and some CIS countries. It is located in the suburbs in the settlement of the same name.
There are internal orders for the clergy to forbid or restrict the purchase of essential cult items anywhere other than Sofrino. At the same time, church utensils have a huge cost and often do not differ in quality, which the clergy often complain about.
Alternative factories produce products of an order of magnitude better quality, both in terms of internal characteristics and visual characteristics. They are located in various cities and regions. But the main place of concentration of enterprises, inwhich produce church utensils - Moscow.
Conclusion
The complete list of church utensils includes several dozen items. Among them there are rather peculiar ones, for example, ripids - round metal images of seraphim on a long handle. Once they were made of feathers to drive away flies, but today they are used without much sense for the pomp and solemnity of bishops' services.
