Great Bolgar festival to be still held for 6,5m rubles

The festival will be held

One of the brightest annual moments in Tatarstan’s agenda of events — Great Bolgar Medieval battle festival — will be on 26-27 September. The festival was usually hosted in early August and gathered thousands of visitors not only from Tatarstan but also neighbouring regions — Mari El, Samara, Ulyanovsk Oblasts and other neighbours. While craftsmen from all over the country arrived at a fair of masters. The pandemic made its changes to the organisation of the holiday, and the dates were updated in late July — in September already.

The agenda of the festival is tight and diverse. Golden Horde and Medieval European fight reenactors will be fighting on the tiltyard for two days — even horse fights are held here. There is a big fair, master classes are given (from Medieval dance to ceramic art). The food court will offer both outdoor traditional shashlyk and crepes to Medieval recipes. Animators will entertain children in a special area — on the children’s tiltyard and in the tent.

In a word, it is a big festival for fans of history and simply amateurs of an unusual atmosphere in ancient decorations of Bolgar Historical and Cultural Reserve.

Festival visitors are invited to spend the night in a specially equipped campsite at a distance from the venue, and participants (fighters, organisers, masters from the fair, animators, dancers, musicians) stay in tents organised for them on the territory of the festival. These tents are stylised as historical — no tourist tents of bright colours.

But all this is happening in normal mode. It is not yet clear what other surprises the pandemic will bring us. Ramil Ziganshin, the director of the Bolgar State Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve, confirmed to Realnoe Vremya that the festival is actually planned to be held, but given the current restrictions in connection with the pandemic, it is not yet clear what exactly it will be: