The Mistress of the Copper Mountain

This article is about a fairy tale character. For the fairy tale, see The Mistress of the Copper Mountain (fairy tale).
The Mistress of the Copper Mountain and Tanyushka
The coat of arms of Polevskoy (from left to right): the Venus symbol (♀), which represents the chemical element copper and was the brand of the Polevskoy Copper Smelting Plant, the Mistress of the Copper Mountain depicted as the golden lizard, and the eight-pointed star, the brand of the Seversky Pipe Plant.

The Mistress of the Copper Mountain (Russian: Хозяйка медной горы, romanized: Hozjajka mednoj gory), also known as The Malachite Maid, is a legendary being from Slavic mythology and a Russian fairy tale character,[1] the mountain spirit from the legends of the Ural miners and the Mistress of the Ural Mountains of Russia.[2][3] In the national folktales and legends, she is depicted as an extremely beautiful green-eyed young woman in a malachite gown or as a lizard with a crown. She has been viewed as the patroness of miners,[4] the protector and owner of hidden underground riches, the one who can either permit or prevent the mining of stones and metals in certain places.

"The Copper Mountain" is the Gumyoshevsky mine, the oldest mine of the Ural Mountains, which was called "The Copper Mountain" or simply "The Mountain" by the populace. It is now located in the town of Polevskoy, Sverdlovsk Oblast. In some regions of the Ural Mountains, the image of the Mistress is connected with another female creature from the local folktales, the Azov Girl (Russian: Азовка, romanized: Azovka), the enchanted girl or princess who lives inside Mount Azov.[5]

The Mistress of the Copper Mountain became a well known character from her appearance in Pavel Bazhov's collection of the Ural Mountains folktales (also known as skaz) called The Malachite Box. The Mistress appears in the third skaz, "The Mistress of the Copper Mountain", and in 9 other stories from the collection, including "The Stone Flower", "The Manager's Boot-Soles", and "Sochen and His Stones".

  1. ^ V. Lopatin, ed. (2004). Russkij orfograficheskij slovar: okolo 180 000 slov Русский орфографический словарь: около 180 000 слов [Russian orthographic dictionary: about 180 000 words] (in Russian). O. Ivanova, I. Nechayeva, L, Cheltsova (2 ed.). Moscow: Российская академия наук. Институт русского языка им. В. В. Виноградова.
  2. ^ Levkiyevskaya, Yelena (1995). N. I. Tolstoy (ed.). Slavyanskie drevnosti. Etnolingvisticheskiy slovar Славянские древности: Этнолингвистический словарь [Slavic antiquity. Ethnolinguistic dictionary] (in Russian). Vol. 1. The Russian Academy of Sciences. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya. pp. 520–521. ISBN 978-5-7133-0704-2.
  3. ^ Bezrukova, V. S. (2000). Osnovy dukhovnoj kultury entsiklopedicheskij slovar pedagoga Основы духовной культуры (энциклопедический словарь педагога) [Bases of Spiritual Culture. The Teacher's Encyclopedic Dictionary] (in Russian). Yekaterinburg.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  4. ^ Levkiyevskaya, Yelena (2004). "Metals". In N. I. Tolstoy (ed.). Slavyanskie drevnosti. Etnolingvisticheskiy slovar Славянские древности: Этнолингвистический словарь [Slavic antiquity. Ethnolinguistic dictionary] (in Russian). Vol. 3. The Russian Academy of Sciences. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya. pp. 245–248. ISBN 978-5-7133-1207-7.
  5. ^ Blazhes 1983, p. 7.