#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The North Wind Chants VII All-Russian festival of artistic creativity of the small Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic peoples will be held in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region from September 8 to 11. It will bring together participants representing dance, song, instrumental and arts and crafts.
Taimyr will be represented at this forum by the Ethno-Time team, which is made up of the best soloists, musicians and experts in the culture of the Taimyr indigenous peoples. They are the cultural institutions employees Natalya Sidorova, Elena Evay, Tatyana Yamkina, Anna Yarotskaya, Dmitry Koshkarev, Philip Falkov and Lidia Aksenova.
On September 9 and 10, during the business part, a round table on the Russia peoples’ cultural heritage preserving and supporting and a conference on the languages preservation dedicated to the World’s Indigenous Languages International Decade will be held.
At one of the festival venues, Lidia Aksenova, the Taimyr Local Lore Museum’s senior researcher, a member of the Nganasan Union, will perform. Her report will be heard on September 9. The famous Dudinka woman’s topic is the shamanic rite as the intangible cultural heritage object.
“The topic of the report is not accidental”, said Lydia, “I am one of the Ngamtusuo’s ancient shamanic family representatives. My grandfather – Demnime Dyuhodovich Kosterkin – became a legend during his lifetime, he was idolized. Mom told that he sang in a special voice, by his throat. Even during the Soviet era, sick and suffering people came to his hum for help. It was believed that it was impossible to survive in the north without a shaman. Grandfather cured sicknesses, warned about cataclysms and natural phenomena, pointed out places for successful hunting, saw the present and the future. His younger brother Tubyaku Kosterkin is considered the last shaman from the Ngamtusuo clan, he died in 1989. In order to preserve the history of his people for posterity, he gave the Taimyr Museum shamanic ritual paraphernalia. Until the last days of his life, Tubyaku came every year from his native village of Ust-Avam to the museum to “talk” with the costume”.
The festival’s main concert program will take place on September 10 in the city of Vsevolozhsk, where creative groups will perform, venues will open with master classes, traditional games, a costume show and a reconstruction of the Sami wedding ceremony. The festival will end on September 11 with an awards ceremony in the atrium of the multimedia historical park Russia is My History.
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Text: Marina Horoshevskaya, Photo: Nganasan Union
