Thursday 26 July 2007

To Naushki and into Mongolia: Trans-Siberian Railway Part 8

A Seven Hour Border Crossing: The Best Way to Celebrate a Wedding Anniversary?

Ulan Ude to Naushki


Russia
Everyone knows that the Trans-Siberian Railway runs from Moscow to Vladivostok - except it doesn’t really. Once east of Lake Baikal we had transited Siberia and arrived in the Russian Far East. Vladivostok is certainly the terminus, but it is the Russian version of Hull - no one goes there unless they are going there, and for most people there is no reason to. We went to Ulan Baator and Beijing, instead.

The Vladivostok train arrived at Ulan Ude on time. The last two carriages had the word ‘Naushki’ in the window, and it was to one of these carriages that our tickets directed us.

I suspect our carriages were detached in the station, but I could not see. Wherever it happened, a short time later the main part of the train was continuing eastwards, while the last two carriages, coupled to a new engine, had turned south, following the River Selenga towards Mongolia.

Russian village beside the River Selenga

Rising in the Mongolian highlands and flowing northeast before turning north at the Russian border to reach Ulan Ude and eventually discharge into Lake Baikal, the 1000 km long Selenga must be one of the largest rivers that nobody’s ever heard of. It is a broad river, in this flat grassland sometimes very broad, and we followed its general direction for six hours to the border town of Naushki. It was a pleasant ride, sometimes beside the tree-lined river, sometimes cutting across the rolling grasslands. The few villages we saw clung to the river banks and were grey and wooden, much the same as all the other villages we had seen since Moscow, 6000 km ago.

The very edge of Russia

Naushki: The Russian Border Post

At Naushki our provadnitza, a much more lively and intelligent individual than her colleague on the Irkutsk - Ulan Ude run, indicated that border formalities would begin in three hours. We could not sit on the train - the air-conditioning only works when it is moving – so we set out to investigate. Three hours in Naushki, we discovered, is 175 minutes longer anyone could possibly need.

According to Bryn Thomas’ ‘Trans-Siberian Handbook’ (carried, in various languages, by almost every trans-Siberian traveller) Naushki station offers a bank, a crowd of black market traders and toilets that ‘..would not win any hygiene awards.’ ‘Have your insect repellent handy’ he advises, ‘as the air can be thick with mosquitoes in the summer.’ Since the 2003 edition, the black market traders have been flushed away and the toilet block has been rebuilt. Sadly the large, clean almost fragrant toilet block is the beginning and the end of Naushki’s facilities.

We soon found ourselves, along with most of the inhabitants of our truncated train, sitting on the platform at the side of the toilet block – it was the only shade available. There were about fifty of us, almost all from Western Europe, though one older French-speaking couple turned out to be Canadians. The majority were in their early twenties, overwhelmingly students, but there were a few couples like us in their late fifties/early sixties. We were, I suppose, the same people, just a generation older.

The long wait exposed another of the wonders of Russian capitalism. Why, we wondered, had nobody thought it might be a good idea to set out some tables and chairs, even an umbrella or two? Every day, fifty or sixty people were marooned here for three hours, fifty or sixty relatively wealthy West Europeans; why not sell them tea or coffee, some cold beers and hot snacks? It was fine to banish the black marketeers, the makers of dishonest money, but why was nobody trying to make some honest money by providing a much-needed service?

After three long hours we were called back to the train. We sat in our hot compartment, filled in some customs declarations and waited some more. An official arrived, took a cursory glance at our passports and wrote our names in Cyrillic on the declarations. Cyrillic has no ‘W’ so it uses Ю, which is a sort of ‘yu’ sound. There is no equivalent of ‘H’ either, which accounts for the number of cinemas we saw showing a film concerning a certain ‘Gary Potter.’ After another wait a different official collected our declarations and passports, leaving the carriage with passports, all open at the visa page, stacked up his arm.

A long hot wait for our passports to be collected, Naushki

It became increasingly hot so we were allowed out, under supervision. Having earlier sat beside the toilet block, we now squatted on the platform in the shade of the train. We heard the story of the Spanish students who were beaten up for showing insufficient respect to the head of Lenin in Ulan Ude. They had cuts and bruises and one impressive black eye, but were full of praise for the locals who came to their rescue and called an ambulance, and for the hospital that patched them up. They then had a conversation with some Dutch students, all of them speaking good English. We found this a little humbling as our Spanish is minimal and our Dutch non-existent.

We were herded back onto the train for the compartments to be searched. The smart, young border guard glanced at us, climbed up for a quick look in the luggage space, nodded and was gone. If we had been trying to smuggle a Mongolian black-marketeer over the border they would have found him, anything smaller would have remained undiscovered.

Crossing the Border

Passports were returned and, five and a half hours after we had arrived in Naushki, the train moved. We passed an air base with fighter jets hiding in oversized Nissen huts, the roofs covered with turf - camouflage which is not entirely effective from a train.

We reached the border and paused for twenty minutes in no man’s land between two barbed wire fences. Bryn Thomas advises travellers not to attempt to leave the train at this point. We wondered if the sandy strip between the wires was mined.

Sukhbaatar: The Mongolian Border Post


Mongolia
Then we moved on and soon arrived in Sukhbaatar, the Mongolian equivalent of Naushki.

The station has one platform and we pulled in some five or six tracks out from it. Passports were again collected and the provadnitza warned us our train would not leave for an hour, maybe two. Between us and the platform was a long goods train that looked as if it had not moved since the Russian revolution. Most of the younger travellers chose to squeeze under the nearest wagon. I looked at the space, considered my age and bulk and decided to walk round it. We had just reached the end of the train and crossed the track behind it when, without warning, it gave a jolt and set off. It seemed no more than good luck that no one was underneath it at the time.

Sukhbaatar may have been an even smaller settlement than Naushki, but the platform was much more lively, swarming with children, money changers and peddlers of water, pot noodles and anything else they thought they might be able to sell. Russia had been entirely European all the way to Irkutsk, and largely European thereafter. We were now clearly in Asia.

Hot and sweaty but in Mongolia at last and on the platform, Sukhbaatar Station

It was hot and sweaty on the platform and there was nowhere to sit, so we decided to return to the train. As we set off a long train arrived and a party of soldiers marched out to greet it. The sergeant waved us back and deployed his men at intervals along both sides of the newly arrived train. Looking through the gaps, we realised our carriages had disappeared.

Mildly concerned we walked back along the platform. Everybody else was still milling about and it was inconceivable that our train could have gone with all the passports and left the people behind, so we relaxed.

Nothing much happened for another half an hour and we watched children playing on the tracks, right under the wheels of the train. We felt we ought to go and pull them away, telling them that trains can start without warning, but nobody else seemed the least concerned.

Rusian saftey notice - in Mongolia no one seemed to care

After a while others started to notice our missing train and there were several anxious faces. Then the two provadnitzas reappeared. Relieved faces turned towards them and they milked the moment for all it was worth, walking down the platform hand in hand and gathering their charges behind them like pied pipers.

On to Ulaanbaatar

They led us to the end of the Mongolian train to which, we discovered, our carriages had been coupled. We climbed aboard, our passports were returned and we moved off towards Ulaanbaatar. We had arrived at Naushki just after one and were now leaving Sukhbaator at 8.20. It had taken seven hours to cross the border, a border, at least in theory, separating two democracies. We must admit, though, that apart from the elongated waits, we were treated with courtesy and saw no signs of corruption. This border crossing is the stuff of legends, and if the stories are to be believed it was much tougher in the past. We had heard of a girl, attempting to leave Russia the day after her visa had expired, being sent back to Moscow to renew it before being permitted to leave, and of Mongolian border guards emptying cases and taking the train compartments apart. We had it easy.

All we saw of Mongolia before darkness fell was rolling grasslands dotted with the occasional ger. No roads, no towns, no industry, just a few nomadic dwellings.

A seven hour border crossing had perhaps not been the ideal way to celebrate our thirty second wedding anniversary. We got out the food we had bought in Ulan Ude, gave the last of our roubles to the provadnitza in return for a couple of cans of beer, and improvised a celebratory meal of a sort.

Wednesday 25 July 2007

Ulan Ude (2), Incompetence Among the Buryats: Trans-Siberian Railway Part 7

How Not to Make Buuz, Shoot Arrows and Play the Bones Game

Shopping in Ulan Ude

Russia
Ulan Ude

In the morning we had a spare hour so we decided to buy some provisions for the next stage of our journey. According to the guide book there was a supermarket called ‘Sputnik’ in the same street as Svieta’s apartment block. It was not where the map said it was, and after some searching we concluded there was no shop anywhere in the neighbourhood. We had just about given up when we saw a small sign high on a wall saying Спумник, - Spumnik rather than Sputnik, but suspiciously close.

Ulan Ude is in the Russian far east, almost due north of Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital

Beneath the sign was a row of silvered windows. Wondering what might be behind them we walked to the end of the block. Round the corner we discovered a small door. It opened automatically and we stepped into a large, clean, well-stocked supermarket. With no indication on the outside as to what would be inside, we again found ourselves marvelling at the mysterious workings of Russian capitalism.

Atsagat Datsan

Shopping done, we met Svetlana, Andre’s wife, who was to take us to Atsagat, another datsan, this one some 50 km east of the city. She turned up not with the battered family Lada, but with a company four-by-four and a Buryat woman driver.

The outskirts of Ulan Ude

Ulan Ude stretched out in a ribbon development of army bases and factories, many of them derelict. Eventually we were in open country and made our way across the steppes to the datsan, which stands on a low rise above the village of Atsagat.

On a rise above the village of Atsagat

Although older than Ivolginsk, Atsagat was much smaller and even quieter – if that was possible. It was once a centre of learning and of Tibetan medicine, but now struggles on with only a handful of monks and students.

Atsagat Datsan

Once we had walked round Atsagat in the approved clockwise direction, looked into the various temples and wondered at the lifelike waxwork of the Dalai Lama, it was back into the car and a drive of some 10 km westwards to another of Russia’s endless supply of identical wooden villages.

Atsagat main temple - and our Buryat driver

A Buryat Lunch

We stopped outside a house distinguished by having a ger in the back yard. A ger is a large circular tent on a wooden frame, a Mongolian yurt. Inside the ger – in Part 9 and Part 10 we live in a real Mongolian ger, not a tourist ger, so I will leave further description until then - Lynne and Svetlana sat on the women’s (right hand) side and I sat on the left.

Lynne and Svetlana on the 'woman's side'

After a short wait a woman in full local dress brought us a yoghurt drink, salty rather than sweet, the sort we had drunk in Iran and would have been quite happy not to meet again. We ate bread and salad and were then offered a glass of something described as herbal and healthy. It was related to Benedictine or Chartreuse, but a little lighter in alcohol. Slowly it dawned on us that the woman was in fact our driver; she had slipped in the front door and changed while we were coming through the back and looking round the ger. It was, we learned, her house and her ger.

Making Buuz Badly

Next up was noodle soup, very pleasant if a bit salty, and that was followed by some buuz, Mongolian dumplings – or at least the kit to make them; pasta/pastry circles, chopped meat and herbs. We tried our best to wrap the first around the second, but the results were singularly unimpressive. When we had finished they were taken away to be cooked.

Dressing Up

At this point we were invited to dress up in local costume. This is a situation we usually try to avoid; it so often morphs into an ‘aren’t foreigners funny little people’ sort of activity. However as there was no one to offend except the woman offering us the clothes, we had no option but to dress up. And very fetching we looked, too.

Not really Buryats

Resuming Our Buryat Lunch

By the time we were back to normal, the dumplings had returned. Buuz are big butch dumplings stuffed with mutton. These had a pork based filling similar to Chinese jaoizi, but they had all the other buuz characteristics. Most had been properly made, our creations sat among them looking a little sad.

Buryat Games

Inept Archery

After lunch it was time for games. Riding, wrestling and archery are the traditional Mongolian sports but we had not seen a horse in the Buryat republic and in present company wrestling seemed inappropriate. We went outside for some archery. With blunt arrows and a target scarcely 5 metres away it was childishly safe – which was a good thing given our woeful shooting. I seemed to find my line quite easily, but length was another matter, some arrows soared over the target, heading for the next county, while others slammed into the turf barely beyond my toes.

This man is not Robin Hood

A Cup of Tea and the Bones Game

Having demonstrated we were as expert at archery as buuz making we went inside for jam and fritters and a cup of tea. I have been privileged to drink tea in many places and am constantly amazed at the variety of ways it can be presented. The British, of course, drink black tea with milk, sugar is optional. Americans (those that drink tea), Poles and Russians omit the milk. Iranians, stalwart tea drinkers, do the same but like to suck their tea through a sugar cube held between the teeth. Moroccans and Libyans like theirs sweet and with as much mint as tea. The Indians either dunk in a spoonful of masala or make their tea with condensed milk, pouring it repeatedly from one glass to another from a great height so that is served sweet and foaming. The Chinese are purists, permitting only leaves and water (though some of the leaves may be jasmine, chrysanthemum or rose). The Tibetans add yak butter, though Lynne and I, and most non-Tibetans, find the rancid cheesy flavour somewhat unpalatable. The Buryats (and, we wold learn later, Mongolians and Kazakhs) make a brew consisting largely of sweetened watery milk which may, at some time, have been shown a tea leaf. It is not unpleasant, but it is hardly tea.

We were joined by our host’s eight-year-old daughter for the ‘bones game’. Sheep’s ankle bones are roughly cuboid. Two ends are slightly rounded, so that when thrown they fall with one of four sides uppermost. These are sufficiently different to be recognisable and are called ‘camel’, ‘horse’, ‘sheep’ and ‘goat’. Thirty or so bones are thrown onto the table and the first player chooses a bone and attempts to flick it against another similarly orientated bone. If they succeed they take one of the bones and continue. If they fail it is the next player's turn. When all the bones have gone each player puts in as many bones as the player with the least, and play continues until somebody has no bones at all. That person is eliminated…and so on.

Camel, horse, sheep and goat from left to right (I think)

An impromptu international was arranged between the Buryat Republic and the Principality of Wales. Buryatia won easily, probably because they had played before.

Buryat bones team

Evening in Ulan Ude

If you have a shaman handy you can also use the bones to tell your fortune. Having no shaman we took our leave of the ger, though not our host as she was also our driver, and returned to Ulan Ude. We had a nap and woke not quite ready for dinner. The problem with allowing hospitable people to take control of your eating arrangements is that no one wants you to leave their table hungry. You end up with a choice of being rude or being stuffed. I would never be rude.

In fact, dinner was worth having, because along with the mashed potato and the obligatory dill salad, Svieta presented us with an omul. We had observed these fish in the aquarium in Listvyanka but were seeing them on a plate for the first time. Omul is a distant relative of the salmon, but Lynne thought it more like a firm fleshed haddock, albeit a fresh water haddock. It was excellent, not perhaps worth the five thousand mile journey on its own, but I would certainly eat it again if I spent any more time in the area.

In the evening we passed another hour in the pizza café, beer drinking and people watching rather than pizza eating. Young people were out in force parading up and down Lenin Street. Clothing tended to look cheap and again we noticed the fashion for ‘street walker chic’ which seems to be current all over Russia and indeed much of Eastern Europe.

This looks suspiciously like the same beer as yesterday

Russians outnumber Buryats two to one in their own capital, and that seemed to be reflected in the people we saw promenading. Although they live side by side, by and large Russians walked with Russians and Buryats with Buryats. There were a few mixed couples, but they were very much the exception not the rule. We tried to decide if Ulan Ude is a Buryat city with a lot of Russians or a Russian city with added Buryats. We were now further east than Singapore; Irkutsk had been unequivocally European, Ulan Ude was beginning to hint at being in Asia, but we were unconvinced we had got there yet.

Svieta’s apartment was close enough to the railway station to hear the announcements. During the night we were woken by what sounded like an argument between two station announcers conducted over the loudspeakers. We were up at 5, breakfasted on tea and pancakes, and at 6 o’clock Andre arrived to take us to the station for our journey to the border town of Naushki, gateway to Mongolia.

Tuesday 24 July 2007

Ulan Ude (1), Buddhists, Old Believers and an Enormous Head of Lenin: Trans-Siberian Railway Part 6


Ulan Ude

Russia
It’s an underwhelming city, Ulan Ude: three hundred thousand people huddled on a grassy slope where the River Uda joins the much larger Selanga on its way to Lake Baikal. If Irkutsk retains the feel of a frontier town, then Ulan Ude (pronounced Oohlan-oohday) is the town beyond the frontier, the step beyond the certainties of civilization.

The central Soviet Square sports the city’s only item of note – a giant head of Lenin (see later). From there a wide pedestrian street called, inevitably, Lenin Street descends some 800 metres to the half-restored Cathedral. Lenin Street has fountains and modern sculptures and is lined with some of the town’s less dowdy shops; elsewhere there is little but rattling trams, soviet-style apartment blocks and soviet-style industrial dereliction. So soviet is the town, in fact, that in cold war days Ulan Ude was closed to foreigners - more, one feels, in a spirit of Stalinist bloody-mindedness than because it had anything to excite a western spy.

Lenin Street, Ulan Ude

Svieta's Apartment

Andre met us at the station and drove us the short distance to a dingy courtyard behind a forbidding apartment block. In the semi-darkness of the stair-well we lugged our cases up to the third floor and Andre knocked gently on a heavily armoured metal door. Had we been met by a nervous, shifty-eyed dissident and passwords been hissed through clenched jaws I would not have been surprised. In reality, we were welcomed by a smiling, diminutive old lady who introduced herself as Svieta and ushered us into her equally diminutive apartment.

Andre left as we chose one of the two basic but clean guest rooms. The third room, which contained a television as well as a bed, was Svieta’s. It seemed she either lay down or stood up, sitting in chairs was not part of her repertoire. There was a tiny kitchen and an even smaller bathroom with an ancient shower. We made good use of this pleasingly efficient antique while Svieta bustled about in the kitchen preparing breakfast.
Rattling soviet tram - the view from Svieta's apartment, Ulan Ude

Ivolgonsk Datsan

Clean and relaxed we sipped black tea, nibbled equally black bread and enjoyed a mound of scrambled egg lurking beneath the inevitable carpet of dill. As we finished, a tap on the door signalled the return of Andre, who was to drive us to the Ivolginsk Datsan some thirty kilometres from town.

“Have you heard of the Old Believers?” Andre asked as he piloted his Lada out of the courtyard, which seemed a little less dingy and forbidding now the sun was fully up. I had been reading about them and found them a strange, even lunatic bunch, which, fortunately, was not what I said as Andre’s next remark was: “My mother was an Old Believer.”

I could think of no appropriate reply, but Andre did not seem to want one, and anyway we were on our way to a Buddhist temple.

Once beyond the urban sprawl, we were in rolling open grassland with a big sky and low hills on a distant horizon; steppes which stretch all the way from Lake Baikal to the fringe of the Gobi desert.

The highway was narrow, but well surfaced and more than adequate for the small volume of traffic. At one junction a sign pointed 450 km back to Irkutsk, a journey which had taken us twelve hours. The Trans-Siberian Railway is real enough, but the Trans-Siberian Express exists only in fiction.

A distinctive low hill became a prominent landmark. From a distance it resembled a breaking wave, but closer to we could see it was more of a cone with a shattered apex. The hill stood above the small wooden town of Ivolginsk. In a circle below its peak stones spelled out Om Mane Padme Om in Cyrillic.


Om Mane Padme Om, Ivolginsk

It was strange visiting a Buddhist temple in Russia, particularly in the company of Andre, a local man of obvious European descent. Ulan Ude is the capital of the Buryat Republic, a constituent republic of the Russian Federation, and the Buryats, like their Mongolian cousins, are traditionally Buddhist. Very possibly, the Mongols are not so much cousins as exactly the same people. Buryatia has been Russian since the seventeenth century and whilst Inner and Outer Mongolia suffered under imperial Chinese rule, the Buryats traded with the incoming Russians and enjoyed comparative freedom and prosperity.

The Buryat Republic

In the early twentieth century, Sukhbaator’s communist-inspired rebellion freed Outer Mongolia from the Chinese, although Inner Mongolia remained, and still is, a province of China. The Russians liked having a buffer state between them and the imperial giant to the east, particularly after they had murdered Sukhbaator and installed their own man to lead the new Mongolian Republic. Realising that Russia’s Mongol population might be glancing enviously at an independent Mongolia run, ostensibly, by Mongolians, Stalin set out to create a distinctive Buryat identity as dissimilar as possible from Mongolian culture. The policy has been partly successful. Buryats still have a love of archery and an insatiable appetite for mutton, just like Mongolians, but while many Mongolians remain nomadic herdsmen, Buryats are settled, living in Ulan Ude or one of the many typically Russian villages of wooden houses and grassy streets. The policy has been aided by the influx of Russians, which has continued unabated since the seventeenth century so that today Buryats are out-numbered two to one in their own country.

Before the revolution, there were hundreds of Datsans in Buryatia and thousands of monks, but by the 1930’s the Datsans had all been closed and the monks dispatched to the Gulags. In the 1940s Stalin decided it was time for more religious tolerance and Ivolginsk was among the results.

The Datsan, which opened in 1947 on a site carefully chosen by astrologers, is a large, flat rectangular compound surrounded by a low wall. We paid our photography fee and entered. A couple of lack-lustre stalls selling trinkets, fridge magnets and religious gewgaws guarded the entrance, but little effort was made to sell us anything. The officially post-communist Russians have taken to petty capitalism with far less flair than the still officially communist Chinese.


Ivolginsk Datsan

Inside the compound, the structures were largely wooden; the style of the temples and stupas reminiscent of Tibet, whilst other buildings are clearly Russian.


Monk and stupas, Ivolginsk Datsan

We ambled in the approved clockwise direction, wandering in and out of temples inspecting statues of the Buddha, thangkas and libraries of tantric texts. Compared with other Buddhist temples there is little special about Ivolginsk and the most sacred and perhaps the strangest sight is not for general viewing. In 1927, Dasha-Dorjo Itigelov, the 12th Khambo Lama (the head of Russian Buddhism) died whilst at prayer. In accordance with his wishes, he was buried in the lotus position and dug up at regular intervals, in the belief that the physical bodies of those who have attained Nirvana do not decay. In 1955, 1973 and again 2002 he was found to be remarkably well – for a man of his age and condition. After the most recent exhumation, the current Khambo Lama decreed that Dasha-Dorjo should henceforth sit in a glass case in an upstairs room. Devotees may pay their respects on one of the seven sacred days in the year. He was not open for business the day we visited.


At Ivolginsk Datsan

Temples are a reflection of those who use them. In materialistic Hong Kong, where spirituality lies well hidden, temple visits are a way of assuring good luck. An act of devotion is followed by a visit to the fortune-tellers who pronounce on the likely success of their latest venture. In Beijing, years of state atheism have made temple-goers unsure of what they are supposed to do, and there is much giggling and confusion. By contrast, pilgrims in Lhasa form a sweeping clockwise tide encircling palaces and temples, twirling their prayer wheels. Inside, among the jostling throngs, the atmosphere is of intense spirituality, the pilgrim’s belief as powerful as the odour of wood smoke and yak-butter they carry with them.

At Ivolginsk, however, atmosphere seemed absent. The monastery is of the same Yelugpa (Yellow Hat) sect as the Tibetans; the Dalai Lama himself has made several visits, but still I felt we were seeing not so much a living temple as a museum. Buryatia is, allegedly, undergoing a Buddhist revival but at Ivolginsk there were few visitors, no tourists except us, and the monks kept a low profile. In Lhasa the prayer wheels turn incessantly, the bearings are always oiled and the handles polished by the devoted grasp of generations of pilgrims. Here we could have been the first to turn the creaky wheels that day, or maybe even that week.


Turning a prayer wheel, Ivolginsk Datsan

Seeds from a sacred Bo Tree – the tree under which the Buddha sat and meditated – were brought from Delhi in 1956 and the result is carefully enclosed in a glasshouse. On a summer’s day it might well have felt comfortable, but the Siberian winter is not the winter of northern India so it needs the protection. It looked well enough, for a plant so far from its natural habitat. Buddhism, on the other hand, has been in Buryatia for millennia and was once well acclimatised; now it too seems in need of the glasshouse treatment.

As we left Ivolginsk Lynne remarked how peaceful and spiritual it had been, so my take on it is clearly not the only one. We drove westwards for a while, then, as the road swung left to by-pass a village of wooden houses Andre swung right and took us down the main street.

Old Believers

“This is an Old Believer’s village,” he informed us, although it looked like every other village we had seen on the five and a half thousand kilometre journey from Moscow. Confidently navigating the maze of streets he parked beside the churchyard.


Old Believer's Church, near Ivolginsk
The Old Believers split from the Russian Orthodox in 1667 over reforms instituted by the Patriarch Nikon. The Patriarch had set up a commission to examine the drift of Russian Orthodoxy away from its Greek template, and so claimed the weight of scholarship behind his reforms as well as the support of Tsar Alexis I. The real driving force was Alexis’ ambition to become the liberator of all Orthodox lands then under Ottoman control. Sweetening the near-eastern patriarchs did no harm to this ambition, nor to Nikon’s chances of becoming the new Patriarch of Constantinople.

Among the reforms were an alteration in the spelling of Jesus from Ісусъ to Іисусъ (effectively Isus to Iisus), a change in the direction of processions from sunwise to counter-sunwise and the use of three straightened fingers instead of two when making the sign of the cross. These were not the most trivial of the modifications.

It may seem incredible that the Slavonic spelling of a name already far removed from its Hebrew original, or the precise way of holding a hand when making the sign of the cross should be deemed to affect one’s chance of eternal life. If God was that petty there would be little hope for Catholics, who cross themselves backwards (at least to Orthodox thinking), or Protestants who do not cross themselves at all – not to mention the Buddhists of Ivolginsk. However, such issues mattered to many thousands of simple believers who had no interest in or knowledge of Alexis’ Byzantine machinations. They mattered enough for thousands to die for them, and, predictably, many Old Believers eventually found their way to Siberia where their faith was strong enough to endure centuries of persecution and survive through the communist era.

The church itself was a small, elegant, whitewashed building. To a foreigner the Russian crosses on the tiny domes spoke more of the continuity of Russian symbolism than of schism. Andre found the pastor’s wife, the pastor himself was away on business, and she unlocked the church for us.

To my inexpert eye, the interior was like any small Russian Orthodox church. The iconostasis separating the nave from the sanctuary was relatively new but incorporated a number of much older icons. In Stalin’s time, the pastor’s wife explained, many icons and churches were smashed or burnt. She remembered the Young Communists arriving, intent on destruction but the most important icons had already removed and hidden. In these, more stable times, they have been returned to grace the new iconostasis. She also showed us two bibles, lovely illuminated works in Church Slavonic that had similarly survived. 

Andre and the pastor’s wife chatted as we looked round, they were obviously well acquainted. After we had seen enough of the church, she took as across the road to a building resembling a large church hall.

For years her husband had been collecting obsolete rural artefacts, and had assembled them into a private museum. What was surprising was how similar many of the old farm and household implements were to those in museums at home – though no British museum would have had such an extensive collection of samovars.

The pastor's private museum

Sheep for Lunch

Back on the main road, we stopped at a roadside café, a drab but not quite dilapidated building with a concrete floor, metal chairs and functional Formica topped tables. It might have been a transport café, but for the absence of frying. Indeed, there was something of an absence of menu – at least in the sense of choice - as the entire clientele, largely Russian but a good mix of age and gender, were all tucking into the same Buryat sheep fest. We joined them, and after our potato and lamb soup we found ourselves sitting behind large steaming bowls of lamb and potato. We had come a long way, I thought, to eat something that was, in everything but name, Irish stew.

As we ate, Andre told us of his scheme to build the Baikal trail, a venture bringing the youth of Russia and the USA together to work on projects to serve the community, and of the visit of the Dalai Lama in 1991. “I am not a Buddhist,” he said, “and I only came within fifty metres of him, but I could feel the energy radiating from him.” 

An Enormous Head of Lenin

Back in the city we explored a little and took some photographs of the enormous head of Lenin. On the Mongolian border we met three Spanish students who had been beaten up for not showing the head sufficient respect. That, though, happened late at night; in the afternoon sunshine there was nothing more threatening than Lenin's half smile.


Lenin's enormous head, Soviet Square, Ulan Ude

Svieta provided an evening meal of stuffed cabbage leaves with cheese, aubergine slices and a dill laced salad, followed by ice cream and jam. Not wishing to cause offence, we consumed it all, despite being still full of lunchtime sheep.

Beer in Lenin Street


The beer's okay, but I wouldn't trust the pizza
Lenin Street, Ulan Ude

We joined the rest of Ulan Ude in a stroll up and down Lenin Street in the evening sunshine, stopping for a beer at a pavement café. It was fortunate that we were not interested in eating, as the only food available consisted of unidentifiable triangles of greasy mush served on paper plates. As we left I saw that I had been sitting in front of a large picture of a gondolier and the Rialto Bridge. Only then did I realise the greasy mush was pizza. In the course of our travels we have seen some sad things served up in the name of pizza, but never anything quite as dire as that.