Onion Domes Don't Make You Cry: A Month in Review 1.2.0

Last week I left you hanging in Barnaul. Hang onto your socks because this post will catch you up to the present - 4 weeks after my return from Siberia.

Teaching started again without too much hoopla - same students, similar schedule, same room, same language. Two things happened during those first two weeks back though, that I want to focus on.

The first, was the celebration of Epiphany. This holiday isn't terribly popular in the States, but it marks the arrival of the Magi and is celebrated 12 days after Christmas. For whatever historical reason though, the Orthodox tradition celebrates not the Magi, but the baptism of Jesus on this day. A quick skim through the Wikipedia page is telling me that wayyyy back when, in the 3rd century, Epiphany celebrated the manifestation of Christ which included the Magi, the baptism, and Jesus's first miracle. It seems that in the subsequent years, the two traditions have gradually drifted to focus on one of these three more than the other two (though not to complete exclusion) and they just happened to drift towards different events. But back to my story, Epiphany, or "Крещения"(literally Baptism) is celebrated in Russia 13 days after the Western holiday because of the calendar difference.

The entirety of the celebrations seemed to revolve around water, which seemed fitting to me. There were four major epicenters of activity. The first was quite predictably the church. There would have been probably a special service as people went into the church to light candles with their prayers, however the group I was with did not go in. The water on Epiphany is supposedly imbued with holy powers of healing, so we saw people heading to the church with empty 5 liter water jugs and 2 liter soda bottles. There was a second source of holy water however, a wellspring not far into the woods, and this also drew a large crowd of people more physically able to trek through deep snow in the dark of night. With candles lit around the lip of the well and snow surrounding, people came to draw their water and benefit from its healing powers throughout the next year.

To celebrate the LORD's baptism, Russians like to reenact baptisms themselves, or at least the act of jumping/walking/being dunked into water. Outside. In Russia. In January. At night. So, gathered around the waterfall and the купальня, or bath built to the side of a swift stream, people waited their turn to remove their wonderfully warm and protective garments, and immerse themselves in literally ice cold water. After getting out and managing to change back into winter appropriate clothing with shaking hands, I was glad I did it, and also very glad I made the decision not to get my hair wet. It wasn't too cold this year, around -15 C, whereas apparently last year was closer to -25 C so many fewer people did it. Like I said, Russians are actually affected by cold despite all stereotypes to the contrary. People do tend to hole up if it gets too cold. I managed the night without any problems from the cold though, other then a burnt lip after spilling tea on myself. But cold holy water and, possibly more importantly (sorry, I will ever be a sceptic), lots of snow, seemed to clear that up quickly. The healing properties of the water also seemed to outweigh any problems caused by the water not being filtered or distilled or boiled or purified at all which I had admittedly been a little bit concerned about. So all in all, a successful night learning about a very different interpretation of Christianity than I am used to.

My second event of interest was the following weekend when I was invited to a concert in a Russian green house. Not a green house like 'plant house', but a green house like 'self sufficient house'. It felt like the inside of a tree. Or somewhere that a children's book about mice and moles in the forest would occur. The house was round, with plaster/cement/I don't really know what walls more than 1.5 feet thick, two stories high, with lots of exposed wood furniture and open space. Everyone in the community had been invited and so by the end of the concert there were maybe 30 people packed into this small ground floor, listening to two guitars, watching the kids run around infront of the musicians playing, and singing words that everyone (minus me) knew by heart. The community itself is a development that reminds me a lot of the Berkshires, where people go to grow organic food and escape from the cities. More than half of the women wore long skirts, and almost half of the guys were sporting ponytails. I started to pick up the refrains of a couple of songs which made everyone OH so proud of me, though I definitely cannot repeat them for you now. And once the concert was officially over (though nothing had really ever been official, but once they had mostly played everything they planned to anyhow) people started giving requests, taking turns with the guitar, and two tables of Russian pies and tea were pulled out to the center of the room. Unfortunately we couldn't stay forever, and so we left the warm house out onto a wide wide wide open empty flat field covered with snow with a clear sky and the full moon hanging up above. Russia is sometimes magical.

The next day I hoped on a bus in the wee hours of the morning to get myself to Moscow for the Fulbright conference. It was really nice to see people again, hear how many of our experiences (and frustrations) are shared, and to speak naturally without trying to dredge words up out of the pits of my Russian knowledge, or actively filtering my speech to make it easier for the people I am conversing with. I did not end up giving a presentation, however there were no shortage of interesting topics. A geology presentation made me extremely happy and made me miss doing research [yay paleoclimatology!!], a historian taught us how to read a Red Army soldier's life biography through his medals and decorations, but the presentations that I want to mention a little more, were all of the ones about different nationalities that have been incorporated into the Russian Federation.

In America, multiculturalism is something that has arisen from people of all continents and colors coming to America and bringing parts of their home with them. In Russia, multiculturalism is something that arose naturally before they were brought together to be one country. We had presentations by people about the Cossacks, the Udmurts, the Buryats, the Chuvash, the Khanty, and many different ethnic-linguistic groups of the Caucus region. The history, cultures, and identities of each of these different groups are at once both independent of, and heavily heavily influenced by the fact that all of these people are considered "Russian." Many cultures have already been lost through either forced integration in the Soviet past, or through simple globalization, but in many villages you will still find people who cannot speak Russian, only their native tongue. From the outside, I never suspected the wide range of nationalities that made up "Russian." But they are here, and they are proud of who they are. Russian multiculturalism is therefore uniquely challenged not by influxes of immigrants, but by balancing traditions and cultures of these different groups while forming an overarching idea of what Russia is. I don't think it was any accident that there were so many sociologists at that conference. Russia is a fascinating case study for a lot of things.

Then I came back and had an uneventful week. Now that we are caught up to present, here are lots of pictures of the most recent snow storm in Pushchino. To complete all the stereotypes I'm suppose to be working against, all of those "people" are really bears, and the snow isn't made of "water" its made of vodka, and in Soviet Russia, pictures take you.