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Kruzhilin Memorial and Historical Complex

A Cossack Homestead of the XIX-XX Centuries

A new Museum site – “A Cossack Homestead of the Early XIX – Late XX Centuries” was opened in 2006, in Kruzhilin Village, next to the memorial estate of the Sholokhovs.

The reconstruction gives a good idea of the Don Cossack everyday life, which M.A. Sholokhov described in his novel “And Quiet Flows the Don”.

In the yard there is a house (kuren) with a summer kitchen (“pekarka”), an icehouse, a barn, stables, a pen and a tool shed. In the pen there are horses, bulls, cows, sheep, goats, turkeys, geese, ducks and hens.

The visitors can feed the poultry, milk the cow, heat the stove, and after a usual routine Cossack labour they can try homemade treats: jellied meat, eggs fried with bacon, cakes with honey, famous Don stewed fruit “vzvar”.

Here the folklore and ethnographic holiday “Kruzhilin Toloki” takes place, where the participants get a rare opportunity to plunge into the atmosphere of the old village life, touch the tools of that time, try on the traditional Cossack dresses. The viewers seem to be transferring into the past: they can see bulls pulling a bullock cart, a horse harnessed to a reaper; the visitors can try to plough and harrow the earth, reap the wheat and make a sheaf, winnow the grain on the screen, grind it with the old millstones into flour and make pan-cakes.

The “Kruzhilin Toloki” is a peculiar harvest holiday, where one can learn about the Don Cossack everyday life and traditions.