Ethnopark (conception). Part I

Today the city of Kazan is more that 1000 years old. Under its grey hairs the city does have what to show to a hair-splitting onlookers and how to strike even a high-competent amateur of anciency and centuries-old beauty. Outstanding cultural and historical heritage and fruitful shades of centuries bring many and many memorials telling expressively – though even if silently – about the life of our ancestors.

It is so – how it has to be. It’s a pity, but reality doesn’t give to this case a wide berth and differs a bit from the desirable. All that is kept in the nowadays’ city touches only sooner historical periods and is unable to reflect in the full all the historical and cultural image of Kazan in the course of the latest millennium.

If to take wider area – the Volga-river and the Ural Mountains territory, including tribes and native peoples with even more deep-in-centuries history and culture, then, it’s admit that we face a global problem. The territory having been impacting the great past on the worldwide scale and the course of history of tremendous significance on the world culture are represented with odd and separate pieces of historical materials which are accessible and known first of all for professional historians only.

Let pass one-two centuries, and in result, some “live” testimonies and knowledge about history and culture of the-Volga-Ural region peoples, about how our ancient ancestors lived 100, 200, 1000 years ago may quickly fall into oblivion in dynamical event mixture of the postmodern history and may be left in annals under a little episode between the Stone Age and the XXI century. What will be reserved for our descendants? How they will be proud of their past if in their understanding all the past has been stowed as two periods only – the Stone Age and the Industrial one? While all the cultural-historical formation of the Volga-Ural region’s worldwide value has been developing between these two periods…

Perhaps, there are several solutions. From the indecently simple ones – to the unique ones.

What can be established if to plunge in shallow thought? For example, the museum complex consisting of endless train of crocks of different age: from the Hun-Bulgarian empire of Atilla (clay crocks, placer, showcase, booster light) – through train of centuries (crocks are different, placer, showcase, booster light) – till nowadays (plastic crocks, placer, showcase, booster light). Very charming. Extremely offbeat approach to exposition organization. But wait, what emotions will visitors take away? Maybe, pride and joy of being a descendant and a heir of crock piles and decrepit remains?

Man cultural beauty of the future is created with our actions in the present. Today we put into practice what will very soon become history. Okay, here it goes about us, but the same thing was concerning all the long move of many centuries before us. But we don’t create crock piles. We live. History – that’s movement, actions, life. The life of numerous tribes and peoples residing in separate settlements and vast territories. Even some outstanding picture hardly lets passing on all impressions and feelings generated by real situations: grandiose battle, calm morning in the forest, snowstorm in the field in the frosty evening…

How to tell in all its dynamics about history and culture of the whole region covering long time period at that? How to interlace emotions and impressions from learning something new with archeological findings and petrified testimonials, and to turn contemplative tourism into intellectual tourism?

The ideal and complex solution here is creation of the ethnographic park (Ethnopark) which would represent the “live” testimonies of immense cultural and historical heritage, on the one hand, and would be the bearer of system knowledge about history and culture of Eastern peoples, and first of all, those having lived in the Volga-Ural region. Ethnopark is nothing other than the park of intellectual and cultural tourism, unique and interactive training complex with no analogues in Russia and abroad.

Well, we’ll try and model what it should look like. What’s important – no matter what its organization is to be like, but the fact that people should get lively impressions from visit, and so impressions which are to be taken it away proudly as indelible memories of their own involvement in history at that.

Lofty precipitous side of the Volga-river disappearing in misty horizon – from the first side; dense coniferous forest iridescent with its dark-green sparkling needles at sun-rising dawn – from the second side; wide unmown lush-grassy meadow studded with dewdrops – from the third side.

It’s difficult to keep this harmony. Then, let’s try to keep it up by disposing Ethnopark on the forth side…

P.S. To be continued…