Archive · Books · Ethnography

"A stout Mordvin woman in a chemise mottled at the shoulders, sleeves and hem with red wool, as though it had been inscribed in blood; her bosom weighed down with silver coins of various sizes in several rows; in her ears a ball of swan's down apiece, and

"A stout Mordvin woman in a chemise mottled at the shoulders, sleeves and hem with red wool, as though it had been inscribed in blood; her bosom weighed down with silver coins of various sizes in several rows; in her ears a ball of swan's down apiece,

Archive · Art · Books · Ethnography

A Married Cossack Woman in a Headdress Covering Her Hair, and a Young Girl with a Ribbon Plaited into Her Braid, from Cherkassk

An engraved sketch from the atlas "Travels through the Southern Governorships of the Russian Empire in the Years 1793 and 1794" by the German-Russian encyclopaedist Peter Simon Pallas

Faith · Books · Mores · Ethnography

Ilf and Petrov on the Russian Molokans of San Francisco in 1936

"And here is Russian Hill," said our mighty driver, shifting the lever into second gear. The car whirred and began to clamber up the cobbled roadway. No, nothing here recalled San Francisco! This little street looked more like the outskirts of old Tula or Kaluga. We stopped beside

The East · Art · Monarchies · Ethnography

Kashan Mohtashem carpets, their distinctive features and the end of production

Persian Carpet by Mohtashem of Kashan with a Portrait of Nicholas II. Mohtashem was a celebrated weaver who, in the Iranian city of Kashan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, produced carpets so skilful and of such high quality that his name became a byword for an entire

Art · Education · People · Saint Petersburg · Ethnography

Fedot Sychkov's path from village icon painter to the Academy of Arts and back to the village

Paintings by Fedot Sychkov (1870-1958), Honoured Art Worker of the RSFSR and People's Artist of the Mordovian ASSR. Sychkov was born into a poor peasant family and finished the three-class zemstvo school in his village. He began to draw in an icon-painting workshop. As so

Monarchies · Mores · Ethnography

Princess Anne, King Charles and Queen Camilla at the annual Highland gathering at Balmoral, the Braemar Gathering

Princess Anne is the only member of the royal family to have taken care to cover her knees. Though, the rules of etiquette for men wearing the kilt call for bare knees, since the length of a kilt, when the wearer stands, should reach the middle of the knee; when

Art · Moscow · Museums · Ethnography

Portrait of Surikov's niece Tatyana Domozhilova in a mosquito net, 1891

In the Surikov Room (Room 28) of the Tretyakov Gallery, a small portrait of a woman in an unusual headdress catches the eye; it turns out to be not a veil but a mosquito net. It is a portrait of Surikov's niece Tatyana Kapitonovna Domozhilova in traditional Siberian

A carpet with two wrestlers at the centre and three musicians in arched niches above, framed by a broad ornamental border.

NB! · Archive · The East · Art · Ethnography

The carpet “Olympiad” of 1979 by Arif Gandi oglu Ismailov

"Olympiad" carpet, 1979. Designed by Arif Gandi ogly Ismailov

Art · Museums · Ethnography

"English iron is vile, but having the means to make it cheaper, they undercut us everywhere" - in 1818 the industrialist Nikolay Nikitich Demidov complains of cheap English iron, which had shaken the international standing of a trade that was, admittedly,

Yet this very thing became one of the reasons for the intensive development of the iron trades. Do you have a handsome painted lacquer tray at home? Such ware was once an indispensable and costly part of any interior. Russian decorative iron trays, salt cellars, caskets and chests replaced artistic

Art · Moscow · Museums · Mores · Ethnography

The Dowry in Old Russia and Pukirev’s “Accepting the Dowry by Inventory”

The Reception of the Dowry According to the Inventory, Vasily Pukirev, 1873. Collection of the Tretyakov Gallery. The bride is not easy to find in this picture: all the attention is on the things. The dowry, a word still heard in our grandmothers' vocabulary, had in the old days

Coming Up · Art · Museums · Ethnography

We all love stories about old men and women who adorn their cottages with the gold of village baroque, turn plain country houses into galleries of the lubok and, with no artistic training whatever, paint vast canvases on themes…

We all love stories about old men and women who adorn their cottages with the gold of village baroque, turn plain country houses into galleries of the lubok and, with no artistic training whatever, paint vast canvases on themes of simple Russian life. These artistic phenomena are usually classed as

Archive · Books · Ethnography

Please Meet Kozyavka

A story about a Jewish boy from a Crimean kolkhoz. Chizh magazine, issue 6, 1939. The boy, in case you were wondering, was called Elya. And Kozyavka is a small ginger cow.