Nothing still grows in the protected glade, and residents of the Kilmez district called the sacred forest angry
Kilmez is a multinational village: Tatars, Udmurts and Mari live here. All of them preserve their national culture, traditions, language, wear folk costumes. They also remember the indigenous faith. Muslims, Old Believers and pagans live in the south of the region. Many Mari still remember the time when all the men went to pray in the deep forest, which is not far from the village. Eighty-year-old Olga Nikolaevna Ryabova says:
- Right behind the village on the mountain there is a reserved forest - Konkonur, and in the middle of the forest - the edge, where they prayed and made a sacrifice.
In this small forest, the pagan Mari performed their rituals about once a year, slaughtered geese, ducks, sheep, and sang special songs. Cheremis asked the gods of rains and harvests, all kinds of benefits for the village. For three days, everyone was forbidden to work: they went to the prayer place for the whole day, and in the evening they spent a holiday in the settlement. All gathered in one house, feasted, glorified and appeased the gods.
Back in the 50s, there was a knowledgeable shaman in Kilmezi who gathered all the men for a forest sacrifice, the Mari came from all the surrounding area to pray at the reserved place.
Now that forest was called "angry", they are afraid to go there. Local residents say that it is hard to be in the dark thicket: evil thoughts go to the head, the mood spoils.
“You can't hunt there, and you can't cut trees,” a native Mari woman shares with a KP journalist. - And in general it is dangerous to enter. The forest may not be released - you will get lost and lost half a day.
Wise grandmothers - Cheremiski do not go to the "angry" thicket. But the daughter of one of the elderly Marieks somehow got a cow there. They searched for the cattle for three days - they could not find it. They decided that the spirits of the forest took the cow for a sacrifice.
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Residents recall many mysterious stories associated with the forest prayer. They say that all the wooden utensils with the help of which they sacrificed to the gods have been preserved there, that if a woman enters there, she will have misfortune, that until now nothing grows on the "shaman's" edge …
But next to the ominous thicket there is a "good" place - a steep hill Yamash-kuru (in Mari "a mountain near a spring").
“On that hill, you need to sing 40 songs in the Mari language, then a boat full of gold will come out of the spring,” says old-timer Natalya Tikhonovna. - So when we were young, my friend mowed there all day (in a "wonderful" place, and the grass was considered magical) and sang all the songs in our way. As soon as she finished the fortieth verse, the bow of the gold-bearing boat began to appear from the spring. The girlfriend got scared, screamed, threw the scythe. Here the vision was lost … Dara, one should not be afraid of this. As you yourself are scared, you will scare off wealth. It is a pity that no one remembers our songs, otherwise they would have been rich for a long time.