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Despite the historians' growing interest in material culture, collections of sacred objects have largely been overlooked by scholars of religious history and art history alike. While the former tend to reduce church artifacts to their religious function, the latter focus mostly on individual items of singular artistic import. This essay examines a collection of displaced relics from the perspective of their shifting meanings and multiple uses as ritual objects, offerings, gifts, and commodities. Charting the parallel displacements of objects and people during the Polish-Ottoman wars of 1672–1699, I argue that the mutability of the relics shaped the refugees' attempts to deal with the conflicting social obligations and economic pressures of exile. Drawing on the church inventories and trial records of the Armenian communities in Poland-Lithuania, this essay offers a wider analytical framework with which to approach the problems of migration, displacement, and collective possessions in the early modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnological analysis, the author of this article presents a new hypothesis concerning the currently obscure origin of the tradition of decorating roadside crosses with aprons and ribbons in the area of the Southern Highlands in Lithuania. Due to an identical and prevalent tradition among the Belarusians, the phenomenon is ascribed to cultural innovations of non- Baltic origin. This enables the identification of the genesis of the custom, for up to the present time the most archaic reminiscenses of proto-Semitic religious-mythological models were interpreted as authentic factographic relics of the Baltic proto-culture: the transformation of mythological images, reflection of necroculture, fertility rites, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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