What is kalik? Traditionally, the meaning of the word "Kaliki" is associated with transitional Kaliki - poor beggars and storytellers wandering around the cities and villages of Ancient Russia. They lived on alms from those who wished to listen to their songs of spiritual content, epics, traditions.
When pronouncing, pay attention that the stress in the word “kaliki” falls on the first syllable with the letter “and”. It’s right to say this: Kaliki.
Etymology of the word, version 1
The linguists did not agree on what kaliki means and what the origin of the word is. According to Fasmer’s dictionary, the word "Kalika" is etymologically close to a cripple - a person with disabilities, a disabled person.
Kaliki are transitional, most often blind musicians are the heroes of many paintings by Russian artists of the 19th century. For example, such as I.A. Ermenev "The Singing Blind People" (1764), I.M. Pryanishnikov "Kaliki passers" (1870), P.P. Sokolov "Beggars" (1871), V.M. Vasnetsov "Beggar singers (1873), M.A. Yaroshenko" Blind people "(1879), A.I. Vakhrameev" Kaliki passers "(1920), etc.
Musicians, as a rule, accompanied the performance of songs and epics by playing the harp or wheeled lyre, which became widespread in Russia starting from the 17th century.
Kaliki passers also existed in other countries. For example, in 18th-century France, their pastoral-spiritual tunes became so fashionable that a wheeled lyre (another name is a peasant violin) became a musical instrument of aristocratic fashion salons.
Version 2
What is the Kalik tried to explain and another version of the origin of the word. According to her, Kaliki dates back to Kaligi, in turn descended from the Latin caligae - boots.
Roman warriors called Kaligami woven ankle boots or sandals. They covered the lower leg, but they could reach the knee in height. The top consisted of belts, the sole was thick and sturdy, often lined with boot nails. The centurions (officers) on such shoes additionally had jewelry made of gold and silver nails. But the highest ranks of the Kalig were not worn. Such shoes were specifically designed for long crossings, and the warriors who wore it were called caligati.
An interesting fact is circulating that supposedly the Roman emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus received his nickname (agnomen) Caligula (a diminutive form from caligae, which could mean a boot) because of his adherence to this particular type of shoe.
Finding out what Kalik is, one can recall that much later these rough sandals with garters were picked up by pilgrims making pilgrimages to holy places, first Western, then Russian. Well, people who wear caligi were called calicos.
Kaliki from Russian epics
Other folk tales are mentioned in Russian folk tales and epics - powerful ones that have unlimited power: Kalika the hero who beat the silushka, and the mighty Ivanishka - "passing Kalika-fermenting". They were so strong that they were not inferior in strength even to Ilya Muromets.
Sometimes the story of the heroes takes on a somewhat humorous character, mainly due to the mentions of the attributes of the disease (crutches) and unmeasured heroic strength in the hero’s description, as well as alternations of the female or male gender in the story about this character. Here is a quote from the epic "Kalika the hero":
O potato crutch props up,
High the pot rises
And above the standing forest,
And th below the cloud is walking.
Or:
Kalika was in the middle.
He began to wave his club
How kudy waved
Duck fell the street
He dismissed - the lane,
Nailed all the power to the wrong.
Listeners believed that a Russian hero could dress up in such a pot in epics, in order to remain unrecognized. The epic, which glorified the remarkable strength of the Kalik - “Forty Kalik with the Kaliko”, was very popular with both performers and listeners.
It is not surprising, therefore, that it is precisely the newly arrived potions that heal the disease of Ilya-Muromets. They seem to share their own power with him to "protect the Russian land."
In addition, the Kaliki could act as messengers of the approaching enemy threat, but they themselves did not take part in the battles. An exception here is only the only epic quoted above, in which the potato-hero goes along with Ilya Muromets and Dobrynya Nikitich to the army of the evil Turchenko-Bogatyrchenko.
From all of the above, it is not difficult to conclude that the people who lived in Kaliki were perceived as God's people, wizards, elect, endowed with unknown strength and knowledge, even if in fact they were just poor musicians.
Who were the Kaliki passers-by?
Beggars or not, crippled or, on the contrary, powerful and healthy, one thing is certain: the wanderers in Russia were called wanderers moving from one settlement to another and performing for the public works on religious themes, thoughts and ballads, and sometimes songs of everyday and humorous content . A peculiar Russian reincarnation of Western minstrel culture.
It is known, for example, that there were entire schools of playing the wheel lyre and singing under it for individual masters. For example, in Ukraine, some lyre masters could have trained up to thirty people at a time. Their students went through practice, playing at rural weddings and fairs and giving the master the money they earned there as payment for tuition and housing.
At the same time, the question of what is kalik can be answered in the following way: it was a wanderer musician, wandering alone or with someone from place to place, who did not stay long anywhere. To greet and feed the pilgrim, the holy man has always been considered a godly deed. In addition, it was simply interesting to listen to his stories and songs in villages far from the noise of cities, akin to a breath of clean air.
Other values
What is calic (calic) can be understood quite differently.
For example, in the slang of drug addicts , the word "kalik" is understood to mean any pharmacological agent in the form of tablets (a slang synonym - wheel) or a drug.
This value, apparently, is an ironic rethinking of the episode from the epic "Healing of Ilya Muromets", which tells how the passersby came to Ilya and brought him the "honey drink" in the "gilt cup", having drunk it from an invalid, thirty years old sitting on the stove, Ilya turned into a hero.
And there was Mikhail Naumovich Kalik, a Soviet and Israeli director (1927-2017), who shot such tapes as “Goodbye, Boys!”, “Youth of Our Fathers”, “Lullaby”, “Price”, etc.