러시아인과 투르크계 민족들의 전통장례 비교 연구

Comparative Study on the Traditional Funeral Rites of the Russian People and Turkic Peoples

This paper aims to compare the traditional funeral rites of the Russian people and such Turkic peoples as the Chuvash, Bashkir, Uzbek, Turkish. The purpose of the comparison is to identify the similarities in the traditional funeral rites between these peoples and to find out how similar the so-called inverted elements of the traditional funeral rites of the Russian people to the elements of the traditional pre-Islamic elements of the funeral rites of the Turkic peoples. To do this, we divided the funeral rites process into 5 main stages and examined the similarities and differences for each stage. Despite the historical, cultural, religious, and geographical distributions of the nations, there are many common elements in the traditional funerals of the Russian people and four Turkic peoples. These common elements are based on great sorrow and loss of close relatives and a dual attitude toward death or the dead. In other words, the fear that the dead body or the soul of the dead can harm the living people and the expectation that the soul will safely reach the next world, continue a happy life with the ancestors who have died before and take good care of the descendants living in this world are the base of those common elements. The results of this work can provide one cliché for further research on the historical and cultural connections between the Turkic peoples and the Russian people. In addition, the systems of professional mourner and undertaker and the attitudes toward fire and soil demonstrate the need for research on the relationship between ancient Russian culture and Zoroastrianism or ancient Persian culture.