Outwardly, the sanctuary looked like a real fortress on the high bank of the Desna: a deep ditch, a high horseshoe-shaped rampart and wooden walls (fence?) Along the upper edge of the site. The diameter of the rounded (now triangular) area was about 60 m, that is, it was equal to the diameter of medium-sized marsh settlements.
The internal structure of the courtyard of the sanctuary-fortress was as follows: along the entire rampart, close to it in the western part of the site was built a long, curved rampart structure 6 m wide. Its length (including the collapsed part) should have been about 60 m.
At a distance of 5 - 6 meters from the long house, vertical pillars were dug into the mainland to a depth of more than a meter, located, like the house, in a semicircle. These are idols.
At the east end of the site opposite the house and the idols, there was a certain structure, from which (or from which, if one was replaced by another), there were vertical pillars, coals, ash, and burnt earth. At the southern wall of the site are ash, coals, animal bones and an abundance of so-called "horned bricks" - stands for skewers. The middle of the courtyard, free from structures, was approximately 20-25 meters in diameter. The entrance to the settlement was from the side of the plateau.
The fortification had an impressive appearance, but it was purely symbolic, since the ditch was blocked by earthen "rowing", and the rampart was cut in the middle. The only real defense here could only be the gate, from which only one massive pillar survived, giving us the mentioned line of symmetry. The structure on the eastern edge of the settlement, located at the end opposite from the entrance, could have been an altar platform, on which a fire was often and in large quantities burned and sacrificial carcasses were butchered. Abundant traces of fires at the southern wall testify to the roasting of meat on numerous spits. All this took place in the face of a semicircle of idols bordering the empty middle of the courtyard of the sanctuary.
The idols were probably tall, as their foundations were dug very deeply into holes carefully dug in dense material. In the surviving part of the settlement, there are only 5 idols' pits-nests; there could be 10 - 12 in total.
Near the idols, at the very foot, small clay vessels were found, and at the idols located in the center, at the entrance, bronze torcs were found, cast, but not cleaned, with casting burrs.
A living woman could not physically wear such a hryvnia. Apparently, they were either adorned with wooden idols or offered to them. Near these female idols, near the entrance, the most remarkable find of the Annunciation Mountain was made - the neck of a huge thick-walled vessel in the form of a bear's head with a wide open mouth.
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The middle position of the vessel on the hill fort on the line of entrance - the altar, at one of the central idols of the goddess with a bronze mane around her neck, reveals the contents of the entire sanctuary. The goddess with a bear is well known to us from ancient mythology - this is Artemis, or Diana, the sister of the solar blessing giver Apollo, the daughter of the goddess Leto, known since Crete-Mycenaean times. In honor of Artemis Bravronia, the priestesses of the goddess performed sacred dances, dressed in bear skins. And the creation of the constellation Ursa Major is associated with Artemis. The month of artemision was dedicated to Artemis - March, the time when the bears woke up from hibernation. In terms of solar phases, this coincided with the vernal equinox around March 25. The Greeks called the bear holidays comoedia, which served as the basis for the later comedy.
Bear holidays with exactly the same name, which retained the ancient Indo-European form of "comedy", are known among the Slavs. In Belarus, the comedy was held on March 24, on the eve of the Orthodox Annunciation. The hostesses baked special "comas" from pea flour; dances were arranged in clothes turned upside down in honor of the bear's spring awakening.
The ancient Shrovetide turned out to be shifted from its calendar date by Christian Lent, incompatible with Shrovetide revelry. And since fasting was subject to a moving Easter calendar, the pagan Shrovetide, although it survived after the baptism of Russia and survived to this day (at least in the form of pancakes), but its timing is variable. The initial period of the undisturbed carnival is the spring equinox. An indispensable mask at the Maslenitsa carnival was a "bear", a man dressed in a bear coat or a twisted sheepskin coat.
Inside, a longitudinal, flat-bottomed depression was dug along the entire length of each half of the "house", and on both sides of it, solid couch benches were made in the mainland, also in full length. On the flat floor, in three places (in the remaining half), fires were laid without special hearths. In total, 200 - 250 people could sit on four earthen benches in both halves of the building.
This built room was apparently intended for those feasts and brothers who were an integral part of the pagan ritual. Having made a sacrifice, stabbing a victim on a distant platform, gifting and praising a semicircle of idols, having cooked sacrificial meat on horned bricks, the participants in the ritual ended it with a “conversation”, “dining, an honorable feast” indoors, sitting on benches near small) bonfires.
All clothing material of the Blagoveshchenskaya mountain differs sharply from the material of ordinary Yukhnov settlements. There are no ordinary dwellings, no hearths, no fishing weights, no spindle wheels. Everything found here is intended specifically for feasts: large vessels (for beer?), Small cups, knives, animal bones, skewer stands.
The entrance to the sanctuary was arranged in such a way that at first the one who entered passed to the bridge over the moat ("rowing"), then fell into the narrow space of the gate, which was in the middle of the rampart and in the middle of the long house. It is possible that some kind of ceremony of "ripping" the contents of the bear vessel took place here. From this middle room, two gentle slopes led to the left, to the northern half of the building, and to the right, to the southern half. Directly from the entrance was the entire courtyard of the sanctuary. It is possible that the clear division of the room into two halves is associated with the phratrial division of the tribe.
The presence of an enclosed space, which favorably differed from the open-air tabernacles, confirms the assumption about Lada as the main mistress of this unique temple: songs in honor of Lada were sung on New Year's Eve and then in the spring, starting from March 9 to June 29, - half of the holidays associated with in the name of Lada (including the Annunciation) falls on the cold winter and early spring season, when it is preferable to celebrate not in the cold. However, it cannot be ruled out that the most massive actions could take place on the entire plateau of the high bank of the Desna River and outside the sanctuary itself.
Sacred trees
Sacred trees and sacred groves, “trees” and “groves” in the terminology of medieval scribes, which are not sufficiently mentioned in historical sources, were a peculiar category of places of worship.
One of the revered trees was birch, with which a number of spring rituals and round dance songs are associated. It is not excluded that the birch was dedicated to the shores, the spirits of goodness and fertility. Ethnographers have collected a lot of information about the "curling" of young birch trees, about spring ritual processions under tied birch branches. A cut birch tree in se-mik (ancient date - June 4) served as the personification of some female deity and was the center of the entire Semyk ritual. The trees involved in the pagan ritual were lavishly decorated with ribbons and embroidered towels.
The embroidery on the trims contained the image of those goddesses who during these periods performed prayers and made sacrifices: the figures of Makosha and two women in labor (mother and daughter) Lada and Lelia, prayers in the “groves”, in the “trees” can be functionally likened to the later church deity, where the temple corresponded to a grove or a clearing in the forest, fresco images of deities - separate readable trees (or idol trees), and icons - images of Mokos and Lada on the ubruses.
Trees located near springs, springs, krinitsa enjoyed special reverence, since here at the same time it was possible to appeal to both the vegetative power of "grove" and to the living water of a spring gushing from the ground. The meaning of the appeal to spring water and the emergence of the fabulous concept of "living water" is explained by the thought often held in anti-linguistic literature:
"Recosta: let us dissolve the evil, let the good come to us - we will devour the jelly and the rivers and behold, let us improve our petitions." "Ov demand it on students, even if there are claims from him."
The cult of the oak differs significantly from the cult of birch and trees growing among students. Oak, the tree of Zeus and Perun, the strongest and most durable tree of our latitudes, has firmly entered the system of Slavic pagan rituals. The Slavic ancestral home was in the oak growing zone, and the beliefs associated with it must go back to ancient times.
Until the 17th - 19th centuries. oak and oak groves retained the leading place in ritual. After the wedding, the village wedding train circled a lonely oak tree three times; Feofan Prokopovich in his "Spiritual Regulations" forbids "to sing prayers in front of an oak tree." Live roosters were sacrificed to the oak, arrows were stuck all around, while others brought pieces of bread, meat and what each had, as their custom demanded.