"В СТАРООБРЯДСТВЕ ЖЕ ОНИ ВСЕ СОСТОЯТ ИЗ ДАВНИХ ЛЕТ, В КАКОВОМ ЗВАНИИ НАХОДИЛИСЬ ОТЦЫ ИХ И ПРАДЕДЫ..." (ИЗ ИСТОРИИ СТАРОВЕРИЯ В БЫНЬГОВСКОМ СЕЛЕНИИ)

The article concerns history of the Old Believers’ communities in the settlement of Byngi factory and factory-owned villages of Verkhniye Tavolgi and Nizhniye Tavolgi at Ekaterinburg district of the Perm province in the 18th - early 20th centuries. Research of the Old Believers’ “small centers” in the mining Urals allows a much more detailed study of the internal processes taking place in local Old Believers’ organizations, without which neither the general history of Old Belief nor the history of Russian religious ideas as a whole can be adequately represented. The lack of specific information regarding regional peculiarities of the Old Belief movement allows some researchers to consider Old Believers the most zealous keepers of the old Russian traditions observed by them almost in their original form. At the same time, the Old Belief itself is sometimes classified as an integral whole, without taking into account such “details” as the context of specific historic eras, social and confessional heterogeneity of the Old Believers, the uneven influence of the social, political and economic factors of the society development on various Old Believers’ groups, etc. The factory in Byngi, one of the oldest Ural factories, in the 18th - first half of 20th centuries was also a very important center of Old Believers. However, one cannot speak of any uniqueness or particularity of it. On the contrary, the author takes Byngi community of Beglopopovtsy (the so-called Chasovennye, or the Chapeliers) as an example to show some common processes and tendencies typical for the whole Old Believers’ movement of the mining Urals. Special attention has been given to the "consolidated marriages" (with no priest-blessings) which the Old Believers began to organize in the late 1830’s. It was the tradition of "consolidated marriages" that became an important step to transit former Beglopopovtsy to the priest-less practice of Bezpopovtsy when the Consent of the Chapeliers (Chasovennoe Soglasie) emerged.