The article deals with a unique historical source - a sacrificial site of the X-XI centuries AD in the Eshmesskaya cave in the Pechora River basin. The finds include coins, silverware with gilding and graffiti, zoo and anthropomorphic decorations, arrowheads, animal bones,and wooden idols. The complex of metal crafts from the cave is being reconstructed as a purposefully selected cult set. The Eshmesskoe sanctuary is a monument of a homogeneous group of people, whose elements of spiritual culture trace a connection with the collectives of the far north of the Ural region. Comparison with the cult monuments of the Northern Urals allows us to distinguish here the sacred center of a local population group and an interregional place of worship. Keywords: North-east Europe, Middle Ages, sanctuary. Introduction In the north of the border between Europe and Asia, the currently known shrines are located in a rather narrow strip along both slopes of the Ural Mountains and near them, from the Belaya River basin in the south to the Pechora River basin in the north. In the Northern Urals, six cult monuments of the Middle Ages have been almost completely studied by excavations (Fig. 1). Most of them are places of sacrifice in the caves of the Urals and the Timan Ridge (Fig.1, 1-5). One sacrificial site was located in the open space of the Bolshezemelskaya tundra (Figs. 1, 7). The Sedyusskaya cave in the Izhma River basin (left tributary of the Pechora River) (Figs. 1, 6) was destroyed during limestone mining. In recent years, a number of works have been published summarizing the results of studying religious monuments in the territories adjacent to the Northern Urals, in particular, the sacrificial sites of the mountain-forest Urals [Kul'tovye pamyatniki..., 2004] and the mountain-forest zone of the Middle Urals [Izosimov, 2007]. A substantially similar study was conducted on the materials of the sanctuaries of the Eastern Slavs, Balts, and Finno-Ugric peoples (Svirin, 2007). Ho ... Read more