Paraskeva

[Henning Andersen]

St. Paraskeva is mentioned briefly in Andersen 1998: 23-24:

"... one of the twelve annual Friday celebrations of St. Paraskeva, 
whom the Slavs worshipped as the Christian proxy of the goddess Zhiva 
'Freya', the goddess of female health and fertility and of matrimony 
and domestic life, and the protectress of the fields and of trade. In 
her honor, women neither spun nor sewed on Fridays.

Footnote. The saint's name Gk. paraskeue 'preparation' also 
translates a Jewish (Aramaic?) word for Friday, literally 'day of 
preparation'. St. Paraskeva's Day is 28 October, but the Slavic 
rendering of the name as Pjatnica 'Friday, i.e. Freya's Day' made the 
saint a suitable front for the continued worship of the goddess 
Zhiva, the Slavic counterpart of Freya. She was until recent times 
the most widely worshipped and most frequently invoked saint in 
orthodox Russia. (Kalinskij 1877/1990, passim; Rybakov 1981: 387-392).

Andersen, Henning. 1998. "A glimpse of the homeland of the Slavs". 
Proceedings of the Seventh Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference. Los 
Angeles 1995, ed. by Angela della Volpe and Edgar C Polome. 
Washington: Institute for the Study of Man.
Kalinskij, Ivan P. 1977/1990. Cerkovno-narodnyj mesjaceslov na Rusi. 
St. Petersburg. Reprinted, Moscow: Xudozhestvennaja literatura.
Rybakov, Boris A. 1981. Jazychestvo drevnix slavjan. Moscow: Nauka


>

|||||   Henning Andersen

|||||   Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
|||||   University of California, Los Angeles
|||||   P.O.Box 951502
|||||   Los Angeles, CA 90095-1502

|||||   Phone: +1-310-837-6743.  Fax by appointment
|||||   http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/slavic/faculty/andersen_h.html

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