A living journey to the mysterious land of Russian katskars

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

These people are always glad to have guests and are ready to talk about everything in the world from the bottom of their hearts. And even before the dump, they will feed them with cabbage soup infused in the oven and give them delicious baked milk, well, perhaps they will then offer you a little curse.

How else? Tourists in the villages of Katskar even make money by earning money, but both leave happy and happy. "Lenta.ru" also went to visit the katskars.

Russians among Russians

Katskari is the self-name of a small sub-ethnic group of the Russian people, a territorial community, historically closed in on itself. This is how the inhabitants of several dozen villages located along the banks of the Kadka River in the Yaroslavl Region call themselves. Today they number a little more than one and a half thousand people, and all of them are somehow related to each other by blood relationship. They preserve the communal way of life and remember their own ancestors up to the tenth generation, that is, in fact, from the end of the 17th century. An amazing thing - just a couple of hundred kilometers from Moscow, there is a whole world, about which in the capital, and not only in it, few people know.

The Katskars have their own language, and it is completely alive, in the Kadki valley in the space of the Katsky camp, it is in full swing. Until 2011, he was even taught in local schools. But then, due to the education reform, one of the elements of which was the notorious amalgamation of educational institutions, it had to be removed from the curriculum, because there is no such subject in the state educational standard. And then schools began to close.

Formally, Katsky is considered a dialect of the Russian language. But in addition to the original pronunciation like the soft "r" or the unstressed "yo", it contains more than two thousand original words that are not in literary Russian, therefore, without special preparation, a stranger (that is, a stranger "who came from outside the volost") cannot understand, about which the katskari bakhor (talk) among themselves. However, even a small master class is enough to switch to their wave. And the katskari are only happy. They are generally tuned in to mutual understanding.

In my house

The Katskari have recently learned to monetize their cultural identity. In the village of Martynovo, one of the largest Katsky villages, where there are about 160 indigenous people, there is an original ethnographic museum. Although quite small, it nevertheless has every reason to claim the title of one of the best in central Russia, in the historic countryside, in the very heart of the Golden Ring.

The Museum of Katskari settled in the hut of Alexandra Ivanovna Grigorieva Photo: Alexander Sidorov

It began in 2000, when a local resident, 87-year-old Alexandra Ivanovna Grigorieva, moved to her daughter's town, and sold her huge peasant hut built in 1910. It so happened that the administration of the Yaroslavl Region bought her house and handed it over to the Katskaya Chronicle club, which had been publishing the magazine of the same name for many years, as well as studying the history, culture, ethnography and language of the inhabitants of the Katsky Camp. Today, the Katskari Museum unites three huts with numerous outbuildings and a courtyard with pets.

Katsky is considered a dialect of the Russian language, but without preparation you will not immediately understand it Photo: Alexander Sidorov

The museum is located away from the main routes of the Golden Ring, about an hour's drive from Uglich or Myshkin. Today it is visited by about 20 thousand people a year, mainly as part of organized tourist groups. But there are also savage enthusiasts. Moreover, their number is growing from year to year.

Rules of life

The tourist program of the Martynov Museum presupposes an active and the most complete (as far as possible within a few hours) immersion of guests in the world of traditional Katz life. In general, it, of course, does not differ much from the village life of the Central Russian strip. The same strong, stocky houses built around a Russian stove. The same small rooms, beds, chests, attics, cellars and covered cattle yards, "saved" from the evil eye with icons. But the collection with a unique katsky flavor was selected with such taste and care that it certainly deserves attention.

In one of the houses, there is a very representative exposition of everyday objects - from wooden irons to ceremonial sleighs, which gives an idea not only about the hard daily work, but also about various trades, holidays, migrations and other significant events in the life of the inhabitants of the village.

Here you can find out, for example, why the guys did not tuck the tops of their boots and curled their hair when they went to dances in a neighboring village, why unmarried girls weaved linen horse bridles - see how thunderbolts (rattles) were made from a bull's bubble and why young children were tied in the kitchen wide strip of canvas.

Traditions and rituals are a kind of cultural codes that made it possible to accumulate, preserve and transmit socially significant information without even resorting to words. And other things, for example, with regard to the expression of personal sympathy between young people, in the conditions of village life, it was easier to show, communicate with objects, gestures or a certain sequence of actions than to say aloud. This culture miraculously survived the revolution. Today it is still quite relevant, but it is rapidly disappearing, like any rural culture in general. The more valuable are museums like Martynov's.

At the exit from the yard in a small shop, you can curse yourself, that is, make a flaw in your own wallet by buying the freshest honeycomb, a bag of fragrant herbs, an embroidered shirt, a wooden whistle or some other useless but terribly cute handicraft trinket. The museum really feeds the whole village today.

The courtyard is full of all kinds of animals - sheep (by the way, the famous Romanov breed), cows, horses, geese, chickens. They can be fed and stroked. And this activity fascinates adults almost more than children.

Food and happiness

After inspecting the exposition, where, by the way, you can touch everything and slowly examine it in great detail, the guests are invited to a katsky table. A traditional lunch begins not with a salad - not all this in a country style - but with a plate or two of rich cabbage soup, pretty much exhausted in a real Russian oven. They should certainly be generously seasoned with a spoonful of sour cream made from stewed cream, and eaten with a lush and tasty pastry.

The Katskari call the "White Cow" the Sun, which symbolizes goodness and happiness Photo: Alexander Sidorov

This is followed by the "second" of chickens and mint potatoes, again simmered in the oven, and in addition flavored with ghee, which gives it a completely unusual taste. Finally, “salads” are served with this dish - sauerkraut and pickles with garlic, one type of which causes profuse salivation.

At the end of the dinner - herbal tea and baked milk of surprisingly pure, full, rich and deep taste, sweet-spicy and shaded with stove smoke. But there are no desserts here (a spoonful of honey does not count), but after such a meal it is for the best.

The whole world is a theater

A little dull, pretty relaxed and suddenly losing all their metropolitan fussiness, guests are politely offered to drop down (go to the toilet) and are invited to the courtyard of another hut - next door. A small performance is played out there - a very simple and terribly funny commentary - in the Katskar dialect: about the unlucky peasant who first spilled a pound of peas, and then killed all the priest's cats in order to please his wife, but about a practical peasant woman who still could not marry an overage son. The glazed (spectators) are actively involved in the performance, and they suddenly, without expecting it, begin to dashingly bang on like a kick to the general fun.

A must-see element of the tourist program is a funny commentary Photo: Alexander Sidorov

The entire program is built extremely competently, organically and unobtrusively. In it there is no vulgarity, no pretense, no deliberate lubokness, precisely because in the Martynov Museum they do not reconstruct a long past life, but preserve the living. From visiting Martynovo, there remains the joy of unexpected human discovery and a long aftertaste of some kind of warm childish delight - a luxury almost forgotten by now.

PS

In the old katsky myth there are such words: "Let the White Cow masquerade to you!" The White Cow Katskari is called the sun, which symbolizes goodness and happiness, and the verb "maskalize" expresses movement. Translated from katsky, this means a wish for all kinds of well-being. And this is never superfluous.

Alexander Sidorov