More than 10,000 people expected at Bolgar. Journey to the Past festival

On 28-29 September, Bolgar State Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve will host Bolgar. Journey to the Past historical festival. The programme cannot but remind us of The Great Bolgar, which closed in 2022. The organisers assure people: this will be a new event for old friends. This year, the festival will be supplemented with a business forum for the first time. Read about what the audience can expect and how Bolgar is preparing for a large-scale journey through time in a report of Realnoe Vremya.

Horse riders with firearms as highlight of the programme

The new festival will be organised by Journey to the Past, which previously organised The Great Bolgar. The event will take place this weekend and will ceremoniously close on Sunday at 18.00.

According to the company's Executive Director Alexey Kokurin, this year guests will see both old favourite formats and new solutions. Thus, the familiar sites of the early Middle Ages and the Golden Horde will be supplemented this year by a site from the 17th century. Reenactors will appear in the guise of European musketeers. Experts from Bashkiria will open the world of musketry in Russia. But the main innovation will be the competition of reiters who were previously called horse musketeers.

“Reiters are horsemen who have firearms. This is the beauty of armour, the crazy beauty of costumes. And if earlier we delighted spectators with horse duels, where there were clashes with spears, now it will be musketry. Naturally, they will also have equestrian exercises, which the audience really likes,” said Kokurin.

The festival will have three sites with master classes, one of them for children. For the first time, a historical kitchen has been prepared for guests.

“Spectators will be able to make flour, sift it, bake a flatbread at the end and try it. The entire production cycle — from grain to the finished product,” the speaker explained.

At the end of both days of the festival, there will be concerts of folk groups. On Saturday, a traditional fire fairy tale for The Great Bolgar will take place. Unlike regular fire shows, it is prepared for a specific event and shown only once. This year, a group from Udmurtia will amaze with fire tricks.

There are even more participants this year than at The Great Bolgar The expected number of guests is more than 10,000 people.

“If there are 15,000 or 20,000, we will be happy,” added Kokurin.

A business forum will compile an event calendar for the Volga region

For the first time, it was decided to stir up interest in a historical event with the help of a business program. The festival will include the Volga Unites forum for leading enterprises in the tourism industry and relevant ministries. They will be given the opportunity to present event calendars for their regions, said Commercial Director of Journey to the Past Mark Rofman. The announced participants include representatives of Samara Region, Mari El, Chuvashia and Bashkortostan.

According to the speaker, as a result, an event calendar for the Volga region will be compiled. This will allow organising events in such a way as not to take away spectators and participants from each other.

“We hope that this business programme will become annual. It has a certain educational purpose. There will be lectures on marketing of the event industry. It will also be interesting for ordinary viewers, because vacations need to be planned in advance. And if you know the event calendar, you can do it a year in advance, when it is still possible to book hotels at normal prices, when you can still buy tickets for the summer period,” Rofman pointed out.

By the way, Bolgar. Journey to the Past is the first event that will attract tourists to the Bolgar Museum-Reserve in September. Usually, such events take place in the summer. Such dates were chosen so that there would be no overlap of interests of participants and spectators with other historical events that take place in early autumn. If the guests like this decision, the festival is planned to be held in the future.

Entrance to the festival will be free

Bolgar was looking forward to such an event, Director of the Bolgar State Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve Ramil Ziganshin assured the audience. He said that 30-50,000 people come to such festivals. Guests do not limit themselves to the event programme, they also look into Bolgarian museums. This weekend they will be open until 8-9 pm.

“In 2022, Bolgar was visited by 595,000 people, in 2023 — by more than 670,000, this year — already more than 700,000 tourists. We think that after such a wonderful event, the number of tourists will also increase,” Ziganshin hopes.

Admission to the Bolgar. Journey to the Past festival will be free. This is a condition of the subsidy within which the event is financed.

“The national project Tourism and Hospitality Industry helps with such real, tangible things. The festival will take place precisely because the national project has such a mechanism as a single subsidy in the regions for the development of tourism,” emphasised Chairman of the State Committee of Tatarstan for Tourism Sergey Ivanov.

He explained that the festival became the winner of the corresponding competition.

“The State Committee is currently holding the second wave of the competition for event activities. We continue to accept applications until the end of Sunday evening. There will be another list, I hope, of winners of Tatarstan events that will be able to receive support from the budget within the framework of our national project Tourism and Hospitality Industry,” summed up the chairman of the State Committee of the Republic of Tatarstan for Tourism.

Half of the guests come from other regions

Bolgar is ready for the flow of festival guests, Ramil Ziganshin is sure. According to him, there are enough hotels and parking lots. And they will come in handy: as Kokurin reported, half of the visitors to The Great Bolgar came to Tatarstan from other regions. The share of residents of the Kazan agglomeration was about 25-30%. Guests from the Ulyanovsk (20%) and Samara (15%) regions, as well as Bashkortostan, went to see the medieval battles. But residents of Chuvashia accounted for only about 2%.

“Most tourists come in organised groups from travel companies, trade unions or organise themselves and look for buses. The largest share of tourists is on personal transport,” explained the executive director of Journey to the Past.

He explained that the territory of the Bolgar Museum-Reserve can accommodate about 10,000 vehicles. This year, parking lots will also be opened in the western part, where the central entrance is located.

Kazan residents will be able to get to Bolgar on Meteor ships: the water transport will run three times a day on weekends. Those wishing to spend the night will have the opportunity to stay in a tent camp, hotels or recreation centres.

The Bolgar site is one of the best for holding events in Russia. It is not for nothing that it became the winner of the Grand Prix of the International Russian Event Award for event tourism. It is known for good infrastructure and logistics, accessible even to remote regions after the opening of M-12 highway,” Kokurin believes.