The Moscow Shrovetide festival opens a series of entertaining and enchanting city festivities of Moscow Seasons.
The Pancake Week festival program includes fairs, excursions, concerts, and contests, as well as all kinds of fun and folk games. Actors, buffoons and jesters, singers and dancers, craftsmen and cooks wearing funny thematic costumes will welcome Muscovites and tourists in the festive venues. Bright and colorful performances, master classes and workshops, amusements and performances - all of that is free. It’s only souvenirs and all kinds of treats you will have to spend on.
Each of the 29 festive venues will be dedicated to a specific topic. In order to make them noticeable and easier to find, each site will be decorated with huge nine-meter high posts.
Practically in all the festival venues there will be craft workshops, with real craftsmen teaching the simplest techniques for making Russian souvenirs, amulets, toys and other fancy items.
A wonderful settlement with peasant houses and barns, a mill and a well, as well as swings will appear in Manezhnaya Square. All the scenery objects are wooden and, like the platform itself, are decorated with bright illumination. All comers will have an opportunity to grind flour, and learn about harvesting and processing grains.
In the pavilion in the Slava (Glory) Square, all comers will get acquainted with the leathercraft. Children in the workshops will be trained to craft leather souvenirs, toys and Pancake week masks.
Tverskaya Square welcomes all to go ice skating, take stunning selfies near the arch shining with illumination lights and treat themselves to pancakes with different fillings from shopping chalets.
Izmailovsky Park invites visitors to a real Russian Pancake Week. The organizers have prepared all kinds of traditional Russian merry-making activities, including running in bags and round dances, mock battles and tug of war, stilt walking and a skomorokh (traditional Russian minstrel) theater. Concerts, creative and cooking master classes, tea drinking and pancakes will be there as well.
Kuzminki Park is hosting an extensive program as well. In the park, in addition to performances of music bands and folk groups, you will find a strongmen’s camp, an interactive quest, a large-scale light show, drummers' performances and a rich animation program. At the workshops, you will be trained in forging, weaving straw crafts and traditional Russian painting. The festival here will be crowned with a grand theatrical performance including the burning of the Maslenitsa dummy.
The ENEA is offering a lot of entertaining and informative events throughout the Pancake Week. The visitors to the main exhibition of this country will enjoy funny round dances, performances of an incredible number of professional and amateur groups, various contests and competitions, ditty battles, a costume show and a real battle for the snow fortress with an animation program.
Sokolniki Park is also actively preparing for the winter farewell. The program includes the VkusnoFest gourmet fair, attractions, traditional Russian amusements and competitions, puppet shows and theater performances, concerts and master classes. You will have a chance to take memorable selfies next to a giant frying pan here.
In Revolution Square, the international mummers’ festival will take place for the first time. In this location, visitors will learn about Shrovetide traditions in other countries, get acquainted with folk heroes and all kinds of fun from Bulgaria, Italy and Hungary.
Visitors are welcomed to celebrate the Pancake Week in a Russian way in Krasnaya Presnya and Fili Park, in Gorky Park and the Kolomenskoye Museum Reserve, and the Red Square of course.
See the full list of festival venues on the website
Author: Vera Ivanova