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Russian wedding traditions — the ceremonial doll
In Ancient Rus’ dolls served as a type of companion in everyday life. They helped to ensure that peace, health, prosperity and love reigned supreme in every home. Each important event — be it a wedding or the birth of a child — had its own special doll. The Krupenichka doll — named after the Russian word for grain, «krupa» — was considered the most important doll in home. During the harvest it was filled with grain and people believed that if filled to the top, the next year’s harvest was guaranteed to be plentiful. Another doll, the Kubyshka-travnitsa, was made by filling pieces of fabric with yarrow, mint, sage and hops. Such a doll was believed to protect the home and preserve a woman’s beauty and health. The Bird Woman was more of a ceremonial doll. It was made at the end of winter with the goal of encouraging spring’s timely arrival. In village homes there were as many...
Vladivostok fortress
It was in the mid-19th century on the coast of the Sea of Japan — the inner sea of the Pacific Ocean – that the city of Vladivostok was founded. Initially a military outpost, the port was located 9,000 kilometres from the capital of the Russian Empire and was of great strategic importance — both military and trade-wise. At the start of the 20th century when the world was being torn apart by bloody wars the city’s role in defending the Eastern borders of the country grew, resulting in the construction of a fortress designed to hold off enemies by both land and sea with the royal government sparing no expense or resource. With a century having past, the Vladivostok Fortress remains the greatest achievement of Russian naval fortification and a sight tourists from all over the world travel to see.
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Vladivostok fortress
The fortress walls of Kaliningrad
For more than seven centuries the city of Königsberg cultivated its defensive power through the construction of bastions, ravelins, towers, fortress gates, defensive barracks and a ring of bastilles. To this day these buildings constitute the core of the city. It was in the 20th century that Königsberg received a new name — Kaliningrad — and the city’s magnificent examples of ancient fortification were transformed into monuments of fortification art and military engineering thought from the second half of the 19th century. Host Nadezhda Lebedeva visited modern-day Kaliningrad to check out these historic constructions for herself in this RTG film.
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