Religious oikonyms of Nizhny Novgorod Region as part of the regional cultural and historical heritage

We consider religious oikonyms of the Nizhny Novgorod Region. We analyze the specifics of formation of rural toponyms on the basis of cult and religious lexicon and also establish the originality of their lexical meaning. We note that religious oikonyms have a specific place on the Russian toponymic map as they represent the church importance in the Nizhny Novgorod Region and contain the memory of the Christian culture of the Russian people. The inhabited places naming as churches and religious holidays was a productive process in the 19th century and nowadays there are still religious oikonyms in the Nizhny Novgorod Region. In the researched territory the toponyms of religious semantics were not renamed therefore many settlements kept sacral names. We prove that geographical names with Orthodoxy origins reflect not only historical and social, ethnocultural, but also and language features of the Russian ethnos. We conclude that religious oikonyms study on material of different regions of Russia allows the researcher to reveal existentional values of the villager, namely – what Saints in the area were esteemed more, what religious holidays were not indifferent to the people both pragmatically and spiritually.