Artists, sculptors, farmers, and business people joined forces to create an area of cultural tourism on a lake Baikal
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insiberia.com
On the picturesque bank of Lake Baikal, far away from noisy cities, a new nation is being born. Artists, sculptors, farmers, and business people joined forces to create an area of cultural tourism in the settlement of Buguldeyka as a part of the “Herd of Winds” project.
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Pyotr Nemoy, "Herd of Winds" project: “First it was Petersburg, then Moscow. Now it is the turn of Buguldeyka. We were so tired of the big city ambience; we craved for silence and power.”
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“Searching for a site for our new project, we came across Buguldeyka. It has ancient caves and virgin nature, traditional 18th-century Russian houses with carved, time-worn facades, and blackened Buryat yurts with a thick layer of soil on the roofs...”
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This place did not experience a tourism boom, so it is still peaceful and not crowded. Buguldeyka is a tabula rasa, where people live in old houses, keep their belongings in huge chests and use old utensils to do domestic chores.
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It is not hard at all to draw public attention to an abandoned village. It is much harder to maintain a unified aesthetic style and prevent a monstrous, chaotic building up of a place that once was beautiful. It is a major experiment.
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In order to develop Buguldeyka and turn it into a cultural center, we created a brand new nation with its own customs, traditions and myths.
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Since February 1st we have been celebrating Buryat, Russian or completely made up holidays for two months every weekend.
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For example, on March 8 we had a family metal bed racing on ice and a women’s football championship; on Maslenitsa festival we made larks of hay and ribbons, did pillow fights, played tug-of-war.
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Just imagine this scene: Buguldeyka, midnight. Suddenly we hear a knock on the door: “Hello, my name is Vitalik. I heard about your project and would like to join in. I’m planning to make ice sculptures of horses.
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By the end of March nine herds of ice, galloping to the East, had appeared on the bank of Baikal. Leading them was Baigal, a 12-meter horse, which, according to local legend, was the progenitor of these beautiful animals. They were carved so thoroughly that even the structure of their muscles was visible.
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For three weeks, sculptors from Irkutsk, Buryatia, Yakutia and Perm worked on the clear lake ice to create over 300 gracious horses, all different, each weighing a ton and a half.
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Buguldey costumes are a reflection of the surrounding terrain with its million grey and dark-green hues. // Photos made by Andrei Vershinin, Anna Islamova, Vladimir Sichev, Evgeniy Grishkevich, Marina Dorovskaya, Maria Ollenikova, Olga Tikhomirova, Sergei Ignatenko, Tatyana Merkulieva, Yulia Grineva, Clare Parry-Jones.
