A poor fund of the surviving data on princely assemblies which had played an important role in political life in Russia since 11th century is well known and was scrupulously studied. The analysis of exact dates of their holding opens new possibilities in studying the Old Russian princely congresses. This approach is possible in the light of the practice widespread among the secular and clerical elite of Rus’ to combine the most important public ceremonies, including princely ones, with church celebrations of the weekly and annual cycle of services, and also to avoid them during certain periods and days of the church year. The sources of the pre­Mongolian time refer to 14 exact dates of princely gatherings in the second half of the 11th through the first third of the 13th century which allow us to reveal a connection of these events to the days of week, to the significant landmarks of the church calendar, and also to the name and funeral feasts of representatives of the ruling dynasty. The examination of the data, carried out in this article for the first time in historiography, allows us to speak of a stable tendency to appoint princely congresses on the eve and/or on the very day of one of the great feasts, an honoured church celebration on a smaller scale, a Sunday or one of the “princely” days listed above. In some cases, there is an overlap of these “calendar strategies”. This state of affairs suggests that an essential element of the ceremonial of the princely “snem” was the joint prayer of its participants during the solemn service, which not only spiritually consolidated the unity, but demonstrated it to the contemporaries. Perhaps it was during such a service that the mutual oath (the kissing of the cross) was taken if the princes reached any decisions, binding them to further joint action. The results of the study are interesting in terms of characterizing the ideological component of the princely culture of pre­Mongolian times and the temporal culture of Russia in the first centuries after its baptism.

The church calendar came to Russia together with Christianity and quickly came to be something more than a guide for organizing worship services. In the first centuries after the baptism of the Old Rus’, its elite began to systematically link the most important events of political and ecclesiastical life with the festive dates of the Menologion, Menaion and weekly liturgical cycles. The reasons for this can be both spiritual and symbolic as well as practical. The topic of such linking as a part of extra-devotional calendar practice in Russia has been actively studied in recent years, including the author of this article. For the first time in historiography, this paper raises the question whether Old Rus’ princes and bishops, when planning their public ceremonies, attached importance to the fact that many of the main celebrations of the church year, in addition to the main day of celebration, had the so-called fore- and aft erfeasts. The boundaries of these liturgical periods (like multi-day fasts) were regulated by church statutes, including the pre-Mongol Rus’ Alexios’s Stoudios Typikon. And although pre-Mongol sources do not provide explicit answers to the question posed above, they contain much evidence of the coincidence of these multi-day festive periods with princely and episcopal ceremonies, i.e. laying the foundation and consecration of churches, transfer of relics, entrances of bishops to their cathedral cities after their chirotony, intronizations of princes, their congresses, starting military campaigns and marriage rituals. Among these events, special attention should be paid to those which were not scheduled on the days often chosen when planning signifi cant public events, i.e. Sundays and the eve of holidays. The author came to the conclusion that pre- and aft erfeasts were indeed in the field of vision of the organizers of ceremonies and were apparently perceived by them as sacral and semantic “fields” of holidays. And this applies to the representatives of both church and secular elites.