Folk oral art is an integral part of the historical and cultural heritage of any state. Legends or ballads represent a certain historical event that was processed by an unknown author and after that it began to be passed on from generation to generation. The task of any historian is to maximize the clarification of the core of such a work, which in turn will make it possible to more clearly understand the historical period in the development of a particular people.
The history of Ancient Russia has many open questions that do not have an unambiguous scientific answer. Therefore, it is so important to clear and structure various sources, including works of oral folk art. The key type of creativity of our ancestors is the epic, which praises the exploits of a particular character. As a rule, the main hero of the epic is a warrior or hero who performs special deeds, saving the people and the state from foreign intervention. One of the most famous heroes of the epics is Ilya Muromets. In modern science, there is no unequivocal opinion regarding the reality of the existence of this warrior as a historical person. To understand this issue, it is necessary to begin to consider the existing historical evidence from the very end.
What do we know about Ilya Muromets? That at birth he received the name Nikita, he was named Ilya at the time of baptism. It is known that from birth he was immobile due to some serious and unknown illness and was cured of it at the age of 33, when wandering beggars visited his house. After that, there were various feats of arms, the service with the prince at the end of his life, Ilya turned to stone. This is all known from the epics about this hero. An interesting fact is that heroes who were in Russia, such as Nikita Dobrynya and Alyosha Popovich, are mentioned in addition to epics in some chronicles, as for Ilya from the city of Murov, there are no such references. This fact leads some researchers to the conclusion that there was no such person in the history of Russia, and that his image is collective and is an analogue of Robin Hood.
On the other hand, in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra there are the relics of a man who bore the name Ilya and was from the city of Murom. This man's grave is at least 400 years old. The first written mention dates back to 1592, in which the Austrian envoy Eric Lesotho reports that during his diplomatic mission he visited the city of Kiev and was in the Lavra, where he saw the grave of the hero Ilya, a local landmark. At the end of his life, he accepted monasticism and died in the Lavra, so his remains were buried in Antonyev's Caves.
Of course, the remains of this man prove that a certain monk named Ilya came from Murom and stayed in the Kiev monastery, but where is the evidence that he and the legendary warrior are one and the same person? But there is evidence that the person buried in Kiev was not a simple monk.
The first circumstance is the fact that the monk Ilya had impressive physical characteristics during his lifetime. He really had a slanting fathom in his shoulders, a wide bone, huge arms, in all likelihood he was a very strong man during his lifetime. The relics of the monk Ilya are so great that in the 12th century he could easily be considered a giant, because he was one or two heads taller than all his people around him. His height during his lifetime was 177 centimeters.
Further information about Monk Ilya can be obtained by closely examining his remains. In the 1960s, a group of Soviet researchers carried out a scrupulous study of the remains that are in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. It was revealed that Ilya suffered from a certain disease that deforms his spine. If we turn to the epics, we can recall the illness of the legendary hero, who for more than 30 years could not move independently.
The cause of the death of the monk Ilya was a stab wound in the region of the heart, inflicted with such force that it simply pierced this man through and through. In addition, the right collarbone is simply shattered, as if it had been hit by a heavy, blunt object. On the remains, scientists counted more than 10 healed fractures, which, according to characteristic features, a person began to receive in the 30th year of his life.
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It would seem that everything testifies in favor of the fact that it is this man who is the legendary hero who served Prince Vladimir Krasnoe Solnyshko. However, the conducted radiocarbon analysis showed that the remains belonged to a person who lived in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. Thus, it turns out that Ilya could not serve Prince Vladimir in any way.
Such a discovery made scientists look differently at the subject of their scientific research. After lengthy disputes, it was found that at the moment science is not able to give an unambiguous answer, whose remains are in the caves of the Lavra.
In 1982, Professor of Moscow State University S. N. collected almost all the epics where the hero Ilya is mentioned. After the analysis, he concluded that, depending on the regions, there are several different interpretations, both of the biography of the hero and his exploits.
In Siberia and the Arkhangelsk region, an epic hero with this name is extremely rare in local folklore. In central and southern Russia, the name of Ilya is often found in various stories, but this historical character is not often associated with Prince Vladimir. In this area, he often acts as a wandering warrior who fights various manifestations of injustice, and sometimes raises popular uprisings against an overly cruel prince. In the Tver region there is a legend about the fact that Ilya rejected the love of the daughter of the Kiev prince, for which he was expelled from the city. For a long time, he wandered around various principalities. In the end, he found refuge with Gleb Tverskoy, the brother of Prince Boris, and even married the prince's younger sister.
Ukrainian legends practically do not coincide with Russian counterparts. On the territory of modern Ukraine, there are legends that tell stories about Ilya and his son, as well as the fact that a warrior was able to build a flying ship. In some places in Ukraine, the hero of epics is identified with the prophet Ilya. In addition to all this, in the folklore of the Germanic tribes of the 13th century, there is a mention of a cruel and terrible Russian warrior named Ilya. He headed the squads of some Russian prince who repeatedly attacked and ravaged the German lands.
Based on the collected materials, Professor S. N. Azbelen came to the conclusion that a historical paradox occurred when stories and exploits of other people were layered on one person. Therefore, there is such a huge number of different versions of stories about the exploits of this person.
Unfortunately, at the present stage of historical science it is impossible to determine who exactly was the prototype for the emergence of a huge number of heroic epics, which then absorbed the exploits of other heroes with a similar name. Hopefully in the near future there will be artifacts that will shed light on this mystery.