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You are Welcome to the Holiday in Kruzhilin!

If you want to know what is “a reaper”, “bukar”, “tsep”, “sifter”, “chapighi”, come to the home of the author of “Virgin Soil Upturned”, “And Quiet Flows the Don” on September, 25. Here a literary-ethnographic holiday “Autumn in Kruzhilin” will take place. You will be taken 100 years back and will participate in an exciting with its absolute truthfulness holiday of a farm labour and a fairly gained crop!

Just imagine: a Cossack farmstead, quite like the one from the “golden” 1913 – a substantial house and a bread-smelling summer kitchen with a Russian stove in it… And one can try Kruzhilin pan-cakes from this stove, from a frying-pan as big as the village “parade-ground”. With sour-cream and sugar sifted…

Behind the summer-kitchen there is an ice-house, then an enclosure with cattle, poultry, a stable with a sporty horse Budulay. Under the shed there is agricultural stock, a barn with a storage space, sifter and chest… There are giant oxen called Grisha and Misha, chewing, getting ready for ploughing…

This is a structure of the Museum-Reserve of M.A. Sholokhov in the village of Kruzhilinskiy, where a Cossack homestead and enclosure of the late XIX – early XX centuries were reconstructed in exact details.

The holiday takes us back to the old times giving an opportunity to see how Cossacks lived 100 years ago as well as to try oneself to be a thrifty husbandman. Those who wish can plough on the oxen, learn to mow, sift the wheat, cut the wheat on a two-horse reaper, grind the flour on the millstones, spin the yarn on the distaff.

True lovers of the Don culture, admirers of old times, representatives of agricultural business, enterprises of food processing industries, farmers from the neighbouring districts of the Rostov, Volgograd, Voronezh regions will gather on this day at Sholokhov’s home. At the festival one can view the artistic – ethnographic composition “The Urgent Bread”, take part in sowing grain by hand, in cutting the wheat by a reaper, learn to knit a fishing-net, to wicker baskets as well as to exchange opinions, experience, to set up business contacts and think about the prospects.

All the performance will be adorned with folklore groups, folk song duets, there will take place master-classes, games, contests.

Nearby the farmstead of a Kruzhilin Cossack there is a museum which is visited by thousands of devoted admirers of the Russian literature genius: the memorial estate of the writer’s father, Alexander Mikhailovich Sholokhov. The would-be Nobel Prize winner, twice the Hero of Socialist Labour, who opened for the world the life and glory of the Don Cossacks, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, was born here. The village of Kruzhilinskiy is the great writer’s home… There will be sung his favourite songs involving you in dancing with the local performers… You will be greatly impressed. On returning from the holiday you will reread the favourite Sholokhov’s pages, where the toiling life of the Cossacks is depicted vividly, colourfully and absolutely exactly in every detail..

This year the State M.A. Sholokhov Museum-Reserve under the assistance of the Ministry of Culture of Russia, the Rostov Region Administration for the first time holds in the native village of the writer a holiday “Autumn in Kruzhilin”, timed for the end of the field work, and you can be the first visitors and participants.

The Museum sites and master-classes begin working from 9.00, the holiday opening ceremony is at 10.00.

The collective body of the M.A. Sholokhov Museum-Reserve, the residents of Kruzhilin welcome you on September, 25, 2010, to the first literary-ethnographic holiday “Autumn in Kruzhilin”.

S. Gribanov