The subject of the paper is the perception of geographical space and natural objects of the Azov Sea coast area by inhabitants of ancient rural settlements. Nowadays, there are more than ten sacral objects in the territory of the Crimean Azov region that have been excavated. The localization of public sacral complexes and their correlation with remarkable natural objects was determined by rural population’s ideas about the model of the world and the necessity to represent it in the given space-time continuum. Natural objects, marked with ritual actions and sacral constructions, were meant as boundary markers and symbolic Centers of the local microcosm, connecting links within space in its horizontal and vertical dimension. Sacral objects that marked the elevated plateaus of capes and hills, as well as grottoes, clefts, gorges, were endowed with functions of mediators connecting the world of the sky, earth and the chthonic sphere. They also acted as boundary markers in the system of space division in the horizontal plane that divided it into developed (ours) and undeveloped (alien) spaces, extending beyond the limits of human habitation.
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