The resources of the Orthodox Church were spread thin among the Russian settlers, who migrated to the Kazakhstan by the hundreds of thousands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A frequent complain among the Orthodox population was that children were dying without being baptized due to that lack of ordained clergy near their settlements. Folk religion, thus, played an important role in guiding religious practice and establishing sacred space. The official Church put forth considerable effort to regulate folk religion, often by prohibiting its various manifestations. For example, in 1910, the Metropolitan of Turkestan and Tashkent rejected a profession of loyalty to the Church from followers of John of Kronstadt. Local Church authorities sealed up sacred springs that were revered by peasants.
This paper examines the intersection between Church authority and folk Orthodoxy, focusing a sacred spring near the current village of Kosmos in Almaty Oblast. A Church was founded on the spring in 1909, and was destroyed soon after the Bolshevik revolution. Locals threw coins in the spring as early as the 1880s, and throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet period, until a new church was built over the spring in 2007. This paper examines the history of this spring as a sacred space for both folk Orthodoxy and the official Church. It examines the various religious needs that this sacred space served in prerevolutionary Kazakhstan, and compares it with the Soviet period and present day.