24 May 2015. Feastday of Ss Kirill and Mefody. Day of Slavic Writing and Culture

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Festival of Slavic Culture Embraces New Format

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Choir in rehearsal for this event… even though the pro-zapadnik Portal-Credo.ru reposted it, it didn’t originate with them… they’re not original enough to create such, truth be told

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The Festival of Slavic Culture will occur on 24 May, featuring 200 events that will take place in 70 oblasts all over Russia. The Festival of Slavic Culture honours the brothers Ss Kirill and Mefody, the inventors of the Cyrillic alphabet and Christian missionaries. The Church ranks them as равноапостольный (ravnoapostolny: Equal-to-the-Apostles). As before, Moscow will be the focus of the celebrations.

Vladimir Legoida, head of the MP Information Department, said, “This year, the Festival will follow an informal format; it’ll be an event on an unprecedented scale, featuring many events in one day. From year to year, we’ve been doing our best to see to it that the festival strikes a personal note with everyone who happens to attend. Our purpose is to ensure that Kirill and Mefody are household names amongst ordinary people”.

Scholars believe that in the time of Kirill and Mefody, the 9th century AD, Slavs had no difficulty understanding each other. Experts state that Slavic people believed that they spoke the same language, as they shared the same system of sounds. The two brothers developed this system into an alphabet, to translate Greek religious texts into Slavonic. The Cyrillic alphabet became a foundation for creating alphabets for other Slavic languages.

Street signs in Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Serbian, and Macedonian at the Moscow festival will remind visitors of this fact. Many of the festival’s events have the purpose of popularising the Russian language. Moscow professors will give public lectures on Russian, whilst famous performers will read excerpts from Russian classic literature near the statues of Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Some 30 choirs, comprising at least 3,000 singers, will gather in Red Square for festival’s closing event… a gala concert entitled The Most Loved Songs. The choirs will perform church anthems, along with a large number of folk and pop songs, all to the accompaniment of a combined orchestra. Those willing to join the professionals will be able to follow the songs on large screens installed all over Moscow.

Sofia Apfelbaum of the Ministry of Culture (Minkultury), said, “Moscow has never seen such a large-scale cultural celebration before. We hope that this experiment will be successful. The songs are popular and known by many people. The gala’s repertoire was picked specifically for the purpose of bringing all people together so that the crowd in Red Square could sing along with the performers and so that everyone would know that Russians have a specific cultural standard”.

Fr Pavel Shcherbachyov of the MP Patriarchal Council for Culture, said, “A harmonious combination of the secular and religious adds a particular flavour to the festival. Even though spirituality in the religious sense of the word played no role in Russian society for a long time, these songs’ lyrics reflect the traditions of previous centuries. If we analysed the words of these songs, we’d discover that they reflect the traditions of the past, when there was an alloy of culture and religion”.

The song marathon in Moscow will end with the performance of Glory, Glory, Mother Russia! by Mikhail Glinka (the closing chorus of the opera Жизнь за царя (Zhizn za tsarya: A Life for the Tsar)), followed by a spectacular fireworks display.

23 May 2013

Yelena Andrusenko

Voice of Russia World Service

http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_05_23/Slav-culture-festival-embraces-new-format/

Editor’s Note:

It was also Patriarch Kirill Gundyaev‘s name-day…

на многая лета!

BMD