Mores · Ethnography · Humour

English rhyme on what cutting nails on each day of the week foretells

An old English nursery rhyme warns that cutting your nails on a Friday will bring grief and misfortune! Better make it Saturday: a Saturday manicure promises a journey. As for Sunday's nails, they will be dedicated to evil and will deliver you into the devil's power

NB! · Archive · Faith · Ethnography

Members of the Russian Doukhobor sect in Saskatchewan in 1907: the Doukhobors fled persecution at home, with the sponsorship of Leo Tolstoy and other benefactors, and founded a flourishing diaspora in Canada

Books · Observations · Ethnography

Legend of the creation of the land by the Amur and of Kado, who shot two suns

I want you to read this ancient Nanai legend at bedtime and give it some proper thought:. “At the beginning of the world there lived three people: Shanvai, Shankoa and Shanka. One day the three people sent three swans to dive, to fetch stones and sand for the earth. The

Archaeology · The East · Ethnography

Mummy of a presumed merchant of the 4th or 5th century from Tarim and the oldest cheese

The man in a costume made of European materials is presumed to have been a merchant. His burial dates from the 4th to 5th century AD. The man stood about 2 metres tall; beneath the mask with its gold appliqué lay a fair beard, and long chestnut hair gathered at

NB! · Archaeology · The East · Ethnography

One of the Tarim mummies found in north-western China in the 2000s: a superbly preserved tall Caucasoid man in a garment of Roman cloth patterned with animals, plants and little figures in togas

Archive · Faith · Ethnography · Humour

Green in Orthodox symbolism and the mantles of the patriarch and bishops

Green holds a high place in Orthodox symbolism and is associated with the Trinity: it is the union of yellow (gold), linked with Jesus, and blue, signifying the Holy Spirit. Traditionally the green mantle belongs to the Patriarch alone, and it is not a liturgical vestment but a ceremonial one.

NB! · Observations · Heritage · Society · Ethnography

On Love for One's Native Ashes and the Graves of One's Fathers

On love for one's native ashes and the graves of one's fathers. In Kazakhstan, memorial events are being held for the heroes of 1723! Not as part of patriotic strategies or state programmes, but on the initiative of their descendants

NB! · Almaty · The East · Art · Cinema · Observations · Ethnography

Remember how in "Kavkazskaya plennitsa" they called bride abduction a beautiful custom?

Remember how in "Kavkazskaya plennitsa" [Kidnapping, Caucasian Style] they called bride abduction a beautiful custom? I stand before Kasteev's 1937 painting "Bride Abduction" and cannot see what is beautiful here; it is simply dreadful!

Colour plate from La Mode illustrée: a girl wreathed in flowers and two women in sun and witch costumes, the witch's skirt patterned with bats.

NB! · Archive · Mores · Ethnography

Masquerade costumes of spring, the sun and a witch in a fashion plate of 1880

1880. Costumes of spring, the little sun and the witch. The sun has a golden fringe over the groin area, the witch a skirt of snakes and bats. Accordingly, the little girl in flowers is spring.

NB! · Art · Museums · Ethnography

Just a Seventeenth-Century Embroidery in the Shape of a Swastika

Observations · Mores · Pop Culture · Ethnography

Hallucinogenic ointments and the origin of the image of a witch on a broom

There is a version according to which the broom became one of the symbols of witchcraft not at all because it had long appeared in folklore in association with certain goddesses, but thanks to the use to which it was put in the fourteenth and fifteenth ce. It was then

Medieval manuscript marginal miniature of a woman in a red dress with a club on her shoulder and a dead hare, as a dog drives hares out of bushes.

NB! · Nature · Ethnography

Hare hunting with a stick, a method known since prehistoric times

A woman hunting hares, driving them from their hiding places with a stick. They live in forms in thick bushes or grass and do not dig burrows. Burrows are the business of rabbits. The method of hunting shown here has been known since prehistoric times