Sabantuy

On June 23^rd the official celebrations for Sabantuy took place. Sabantuy is an ancient festival indigenous to the Volga region, which was observed by the people here (Tatars, Chuvash and Bashkirs) before their adoption of Islam and Christianity. The name of the festival (“Saban tuyı” in Tatar) means “plough’s feast”, and the festival originally marked the start of the sowing season. Today it is a general celebration of Tatar culture (and, to a lesser extent, of Chuvash and Bashkir culture as well). There are events across the region, but the largest is Kazan’s, which takes place a short drive outside of the city. Despite the Institute’s best attempts to get us to go on a different excursion that they had organized, I went with some local friends to Kazan’s Sabantuy celebrations.

The central area of the festival was full of small stages, with various folk musicians and dancers all dressed in resplendent national costume. It seemed as though each stage had been set up independently, and that they were all in competition with each other, trying to drown each other out. Walking around, one could always hear at least two or three different sources of music, blending together into a medley of accordions and voices.

Scattered around the central area were also pristine wooden buildings: replicas of traditional Tatar abodes and banyas. There were whole families in traditional dress, apparently doing nothing but sitting in these fake houses all day. There was even a small fort.

The Russians seem to have a penchant for posing for photos next to things. There were several objects about the place that seemed to serve no other purpose than being posed with. The oddest example was a whole lamb on a spit, with a huge rusty knife sticking into it.

Further into the site was a pleasant wooded area, where there were an abundance of food stalls, most of which had their own barbecues, cooking various types of shashlyk (Russian shish kebab). There was also a chocolatier stall, where I bought a huge block of milk chocolate that looked like a massive bar of soap. Worryingly, it tasted a bit like soap as well…

Tatar man chilling out in the woods.

In the wooded area were also a host of traditional Tatar games, with which anyone was free to join in, if they could put up with the lengthy queues. Some of the games were familiar, albeit with a bit of a twist: there was a sack race, but the competitors were all running in their sacks rather than jumping; there was an egg-and-spoon race, where participants had to hold the spoon in their mouth rather than hand. Other games were completely novel: there was one where contestants were blindfolded and given a bat, and had to smash a clay pot placed on the floor in front of them; another game involved trying to walk barefoot up a long, narrow, smooth tree trunk stuck into the ground at an angle; best of all, however, was the pillow fighting that took place straddled on a log, first to fall off was the loser. Bafflingly, the prizes for these games were such desirable items as shampoo and washing-up liquid. I assume it was some sort of sponsorship thing, but none of the locals seemed in the least bit perturbed by it. I assume people were taking part for fun rather than the prizes anyway.

The focal point of the event was the enormous main stage. Various performers of folk and pop music, both Tatar and Russian, were on the stage while various games went on around it. To the left of the stage was a dizzyingly tall pole: the competition was to see how high one could climb before giving up and returning to the ground (with the help of a harness, thankfully). I assume participation in this event wasn’t open to everyone, as everybody who tried got impressively high. Most interesting to watch was kurash (also spelt köräş), traditional Tatar wrestling that was happening on the two squares in front of the stage. The games were short and usually only lasted one round: the two wrestlers locked into a sort of embrace, holding onto each other with towels, and then attempted to throw their opponent to the ground. Once one person had been thrown off his feet, the game was over and the next contestants entered the ring. The people taking part in this competition were definitely not motivated by a desite to keep in touch with their cultural heritage: the winner of the tournament received a car.

As a “cultural tourist”, this festival was a great opportunity to witness the relevance of Tatar identity and culture to modern Tatars. It seemed that most of the people in attendance were Tatars rather than Russians (although it is hard to tell), and I definitely didn’t notice any other foreigners. It seemed as though a lot of money and organization was behind the event, thus it wasn’t a “folk” festival in the true sense of the word, in that it was organized by the authorities rather than by the people themselves. It also seemed that a lot of the focus was on teaching people about the historic culture of their ancestors, rather than celebrating a contemporary culture. Nonetheless, it was a huge turnout and clearly a very important event, and shows that the Tatars are still in touch with their roots.

Russian Banya

According to the Russian Primary Chronicle (AKA “The Tale of Bygone Years”), a history of Russia written in 1113, the apostle Andrew visited the lands that today constitute Ukraine and European Russia and made the following observations of the Slavs’ bathing practices:

"I saw the land of the Slavs, and while I was among them, I noticed their wooden bathhouses. They warm them to extreme heat, then undress, and after anointing themselves with tallow, they take young reeds and lash their bodies. They actually lash themselves so violently that they barely escape alive. Then they drench themselves with cold water, and thus are revived. They think nothing of doing this every day, and actually inflict such voluntary torture on themselves. They make of the act not a mere washing but a veritable torment."

Andrew purportedly saw the Slavs’ willing self-flagellation as a sign of their spiritual strength and predisposition to Christianity. To any normal observer, that description suggests savagery, masochism or just plain stupidity. However, the tradition of the Russian banya (bath) is still a strong one, and when my friend’s father invited me to use his own banya, I pushed thoughts of St. Andrew’s description to the back of my mind and I accepted.

Although their dacha has only the most rudimentary outdoor toilet, there is a beautiful banya in the garden, which I think really goes to show the continued importance of the banya in Russian culture. It is a wooden building with three rooms: an entrance room, a second unheated room with the window open, and the steam room itself. In the steam room are a large stove, hot and cold taps and a bench.

Unheated room for relaxing and drinking water inbetween steam room sessions.
There's a venik on the bench, in the left of the image.

Steam room. It's considerably bigger than it looks in this photo.

The first step was stripping naked in the second, unheated room. Communal nudity isn’t something I’m used to or especially comfortable with, so I was dreading this a little bit. But I kept in mind that this is an entirely commonplace practice here, and in fact found myself undressing without any qualms or embarrassment. Interesting that my social conditioning was so rapidly and easily overcome by a different cultural environment. When we entered the steam room, it was not yet at full heat. We both donned ridiculous-looking felt hats that would protect our heads from the intense heat to come. I sat on the bench while Yevgenii (my friend’s dad) periodically threw water onto the stove and the temperature gradually rose. He explained that this was a “white banya”, as opposed to a “black banya”, the difference being that in a black banya some of the smoke stays inside, turning the wooden walls and ceiling black, while in a white one the smoke is all carefully channeled outdoors. After getting a considerable sweat going, we both returned to the unheated room, where we sat, rested and drank plenty of water. Then it was back to the now-sweltering steam room, where I was instructed to lie on my front on the bench. Yevgenii then took a venik (a bunch of dried birch branches and leaves), dipped it in water, heated it in the stove for a bit, and proceeded to whip me repeatedly on the back, legs and arms. He had told me an anecdote of the last time he took a foreigner to the banya: a Lebanese friend who, when the whipping ensued, had cried out in horror and surprise. This had got me expecting a thoroughly unpleasant experience, and I was preparing myself for the embarrassment of having to tell him to stop. But in fact the experience was entirely pleasant: he started out gentler and gradually got more forceful, but even at its most painful it was more like a strange massage than any sort of torture. After a sufficient whipping of my back, I rolled onto my front and received a similar treatment on my front. This was somewhat less pleasant, as I’d just eaten a huge lunch, but was still far from the ordeal I’d anticipated. At the end of the whipping Yevgenii held the leaves over my face and told me to breathe deeply. Next I had warm water poured over me before standing up and being given shower gel, a cloth and a bucket of warm water with which to wash myself.

After this I returned to the unheated room, where I relaxed, drank some water and waited for Yevgenii to whip and wash himself. When he joined me, we sat for a long time and he shared with me a lot of his views on life and imparted to me a great deal of advice: for example, the importance of balancing work with relaxation, and the importance of learning foreign languages through immersion. This heart-to-heart reminded me that communal bathing is an important social event in Russia, and that businessmen often go to a banya together in order to secure a deal. Yevgenii himself uses a banya once a week.

However this conversation marked an interlude, not a conclusion, to the bathing ritual. We eventually returned to the steam room, where I once again lay on the bench and was beaten with the venik on the back and then the front. After this, cold water was poured over my legs and torso, providing brief respite from the oppressive heat. I then stood up and was instructed to submerge my head in the bucket of cold water; as I did this, Yevgenii held my head down and ruffled my hair, which I hadn’t been expecting, and did make me fear briefly for my life. After finally being released from this baptism, he told me to kneel on the floor, and when I did so he poured the cold water over my head. This final bucket of water being dropped over me was incredibly refreshing and rejuvenating, and marked the end of the ritual.

“MARI CHODRA NATIONAL PARK”, or “An exasperating experience with Russian public transport and some unfavourable encounters with local fauna”

Based on some stuff I’d read online, plus a recommendation from a British guy I met in a bookstore here in Kazan, I decided last weekend to go to Mari Chodra, a national park a couple of hours drive west of Kazan, in the neighbouring republic of Mari El. Last year, when I travelled around the Balkans and Central Europe, I had no trouble finding myself transport from one place to the next, despite no knowledge of local languages. Here, armed with a basic knowledge of Russian, I figured it would be a walk in the park. The Briton who I’d spoken to in the bookstore had told me that to get to the national park he had taken a bus towards Yoshkar-Ola (the capital of Mari El), and gotten off at a place called “Yalchik”. A bit of internet research revealed Yalchik to be the name of a lake within the national park, purportedly a popular destination for people from Kazan. Efforts to find online information about the best method of public transport from Kazan to Yalchik, however, were more or less entirely fruitless. It was very much apparent that Mari El and Tatarstan are not popular backpacker destinations: the forums and websites I had relied upon for information about transport during last year’s travels were of no use. Furthermore, Russian bus and train companies seem to only have limited online presence, and no options to change their websites’ language. All I could ascertain for certain was the existence of a train station not far from Lake Yalchik.

So, the evening before we intended to go, my friend and I trekked to the train station to ask about times and prices. After a lot of queuing and being redirected to different booths, we eventually learnt that there was only one daily train from Kazan to Yalchik, at 17.30. No good for a day trip. And of course, nobody working at the train station knew anything about buses, so the bus station was our next port of call. By the time we got there, however, all the information windows were shut. On the wall was a sort of makeshift timetable, but it had no mention of Yalchik. However, just as we were beginning to despair, a man went up to one of the information booths and started banging on the window. Eventually, someone came and opened it. An argument ensued: the general gist being that the woman in the booth had clocked off and wasn’t going to help with whatever the man wanted. During all this commotion an elderly woman, who we had asked if she knew anything about how to get to Yalchik, took it upon herself to help us. She physically dragged us to the booth and started shouting at us “Спрошите! Спрошите!” (“Ask! Ask!”), despite the fact that the employee was already engaged in an argument. Eventually, motivated by the fervent encouragement of this old babushka, we managed to butt in with our enquiry. We were told to go and ask a bus driver, before having the window slammed shut in our faces. We thanked the old woman and headed to where the buses were waiting, behind the station. There we found a bus driver who explained to us with confidence that every bus to Yoshkar-Ola goes via Yalchik. So we returned to the timetable, and decided to take the 9.35 bus. Easy. Or so we thought.

The next day we arrived promptly and asked for tickets to Yalchik. “No buses to Yalchik, you need to get the train.” “But we asked a driver yesterday, and he said the buses to Yoshkar-Ola stop at Yalchik.” “No buses to Yalchik, you need to get the train.” Let’s just try the other booth. A similar response, though this time a bit more sympathetic: we got given directions to the train station. We walked out of the bus station, downtrodden. What were our options? We knew it wasn’t possible to go by train, and we were loath to admit defeat, so after some debate, we decided to just go to Yoshkar-Ola. After buying tickets (about 250 rubles each) we asked when return buses were. The response was predictable: “Я не знаю” (“I don’t know”). Of course, it’s completely unreasonable to expect that an employee of Kazan Bus Station might know anything about buses to Kazan. Luckily for us, the 9.35 bus that we were originally going to take was almost an hour late, so we could still catch it despite our considerable delays. As we got on, we asked the driver if it would be possible to get off at Yalchik. He had certainly heard of Yalchik, but seemed more interested in what on earth us foreigners could be doing in Kazan, and whether we liked vodka, than telling us whether he would drop us off there. After several attempts at bringing the conversation back to our destination, we eventually retired to the back of the minibus fairly sure we were going to be dropped off at the elusive Yalchik after all. 

The bus was packed full of locals and mysterious cardboard boxes, and it was unbearably stuffy as we rolled through the city’s heavy traffic. Once we got out of town, though, we sped up, fresh air started blowing in the open windows and we entered Russia’s enticing wilderness. We glided through vast meadows that seemed to stretch into infinity, through aged-old pine forests, past wrinkled old women selling berries by the roadside, past decrepit wooden barns and past pristine luxury dachas. For the first time since the train from Moscow, I felt something of the land’s enormity, saw the natural beauty to be found just a short drive out of Kazan, and was reminded that Russia is above all a land of boundless open spaces. I realized with regret just how small a section of this country I was going to see during these four weeks, and felt the call of the road: I wanted to travel out into the landscapes around me, to see it all, to live it. Russia, the behemoth at the top of the world map, dwarfing the nation states around it, was suddenly a real place, and I was in it. Eventually, the bus slowed as we approached a bus shelter with a large sign reading “ЯЛЬЧИК” (“YALCHIK”). Relieved that we had reached our destination, we started to stand up, when the vehicle sped up again. 30 seconds or so down the road the driver caught sight of us in the rear-view mirror, apologized, and turned around to take us back to our stop. 

This is where we got off the bus, just after the crashed car.

The wooden sign translates as "Yalchik Forest Area"; the blue and red
sign underneath is about not starting forest fires.

After asking a woman selling strawberries about buses to Kazan, and being assured that there was one every hour until some indeterminate point in the evening, we headed towards Lake Yalchik. On the way we passed what we thought at first to be a quaint little Mari village, but soon realized to just be a collection of dachas, probably owned by wealthy city people. As we walked through the woodland towards the lake, it really felt as though we were out in nature, far from civilization. However, when we found the lake the illusion was shattered by numerous groups of Russians scattered around the shore, sunbathing, barbecuing, playing badminton, paddling in the water and – in some cases – playing inappropriately loud music. Nonetheless, it was an undeniably beautiful area, and we found a quiet spot, settled down and enjoyed the cold water of the lake. Every Russian I’ve spoken to about Lake Yalchik has told me with pride about how clean the water there is, and it certainly seemed clean to me. There were plenty of small fish swimming in the shallows. There was a brief panic when a huge (well, OK, average-sized) black snake appeared inches away from me in the water; but after a lot of splashing and a few expletives on my part, it swam off into the reeds never to be seen again.

But the snake wasn’t the only wildlife we had to contend with: any parts of our bodies that weren’t covered by clothing or submerged underwater were constantly being plagued by mosquitoes and horseflies. Foolishly, none of us had thought to bring insect repellent. Adding insult to injury, the Russians around the lake seemed to be strutting about, scantily clad, without being in the least bit pestered by bugs. We eventually decided to head away from the lake, deeper into the forest, reasoning that mosquitoes live primarily by bodies of water. After a short walk we found ourselves surrounded by fantastic woodland, with no footpaths to be seen or cheesy Russian music to be heard. We had successfully recreated the illusion of being incredibly distant from humanity: we were in real, natural forest, without a sign of modernity. After relishing the ambiance for a while, however, we found ourselves being attacked by more mosquitoes than ever. Eventually it got so bad that we found ourselves physically fleeing; we were running full-pelt through the trees to escape the bloodsucking besetment. Eventually, exhausted, we happened upon a small outdoor bar, where we sought refuge, won over by the insect-repelling incense they had burning. But the measly incense stick was no match for our predators’ hunger, and scarcely had we put our beverages to our lips when we could stand it no longer, and resolved to go back to the bus stop.

We weren’t waiting long when a bus to Kazan arrived. This bus could scarcely have been more different than the last: a huge, comfortable, air-conditioned coach that was less than half full. We paid the driver a mere 100 roubles each for the return journey, and it was unclear whether we were really buying tickets or whether that money would be going straight into his own pocket. The next day, when our fellow students saw us covered in bites and scratching all over, they were hardly envious of our excursion, but I have to say that being lunch for hundreds of mosquitoes was a price worth paying for an opportunity to spend time in such wonderfully unspoilt nature.