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Kolyadki sung by the Ensemble Sirin, a broadly-similar group
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Svetilen sings the Lenten hymn By the Waters of Babylon in the Old Style…
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These days, the old traditional peasant kolyadki are often heard in citified “Ukrainified” versions… which leads to all sorts of wild and inaccurate claims by the usual sort of unhinged Galician nationalists. Well… Svetilen, a group that specialises in authentic presentations of Russian peasant song, gives us the real deal (there’s another authentic school of performance amongst the po-nashemu people from Carpatho-Russia). You can tell that they’re singing in Pre-Petrine Old Russian, not “Ukrainian”… another one of the “Ukrainian” myths bites the dust.
Pass the jug, and enjoy these for what they are… absolutely precise and stirring performances in every detail. God bless the musicians of Svetilen and Sirin! They bring our Tradition of Holy Rus alive and embody it for the whole world to see…
BMD
