Dear Ladies and Gentlemen:

The Anastasia Foundation for Culture and Creative Support of the City of Vladimir along with "Ringing Cedars Ltd." announces that, from 10th of October to 17th of October 2008, it will hold an international readers' conference with the participation of Vladimir Nikolaevich Megre, author of the "Ringing Cedars of Russia" books.

It is planned to hold the eight-day conference in Turkey, city of Antalia - Belek in a five-star hotel "BELCONTI" (Internet-site: www.belconti.com).

PROGRAMME OF EVENTS

Day 1: 10 October 2008. Arrival, assigning accommodations, registration of arrivals, familiarization with the detailed schedule of events, familiarization with additional information and the grounds of the hotel. Viewing of a television programme on closed-circuit television entitled "Allow me to introduce myself," which talks about the participants in the conference and about villages under construction and in operation.

Day 2: 11 October 2008. Arrival, assigning accommodations, registration of arrivals, familiarization with the detailed schedule of events, collection of additional information, announcements, beginning of the operation of the internal mail service, operation of the close-circuit television system, programme "Allow me to introduce myself." Get-acquainted party.

Day 3: 12 October 2008. Meeting of Vladimir Nikolaevich Megre, the author of the "Ringing Cedars of Russia" books, with readers. From 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.-beginning of the international conference and answers to questions from readers.

Days 4 - 7: For the days of October 13-16 the Ringing Cedars Conference programme includes flexible schedule of events.

Day 8: 17 October 2008. Free interaction day, farewell party.

The organizing committee of the conference will invite professional interpreters from Russian to English, for a synchronized translation of Vladimir Megre's presentation. However, we cannot guarantee that we can provide interpreters for individual personal interactions, so we suggest that groups consisting of individual settlements should select an interpreter from among their participants.

During the entire period, a mail service and information-inquiry service will be operating, through which you will be able to contact any conference participant of interest. In the event you wish to submit your hand-made articles for exhibit, you must inform us prior to 15 September 2008 by e-mail which is listed below.

The schedule of events has been considered put together by us based on financial resources. If you have any suggestions or comments that are within our means, we are prepared to listen to and discuss them.

FOR THE TRIP TO THE CONFERENCE YOU MUST:

1. You must have a passport for foreign travel whose validity should not end two months prior to your departure for Turkey (if you do not have one, you have time to obtain one at the passport office of the district where you reside). You must purchase the tour by filling out the following form: https://www.ringingcedarsofrussia.org/conference/apply-to-ringing-cedars-conference.php
2. The cost of the tour for 3 nights is $250 USD and for 7 nights is $550 USD per person. The cost includes transportation (airport-hotel-airport), insurance, and residence two person suite in a five star hotel. Three meals per day, all inclusive. Single suites and luxury suites are available for additional cost. Travel by air from the closest international airport from your location is not included. In 24 hours a qualified specialist will contact you providing full information regarding booking of tickets. You can get an idea regarding the price of air tickets by the address http://www.kayak.com of the lead tour operator.
3. Organizational fee - $120. For the payment of the organizational fee please use one of the contact addresses listed below.

If you have any questions or suggestions please visit the websites listed below to receive all of the needed information, or contact us in a manner you are most comfortable with.

http://www.Anastasia.ca

USA, South Africa, South America:
http://www.RingingCedarsofRussia.org/conference
http://www.RingingCedarsofRussia.us/conference
http://www.RingingCedarsofRussia.co.za/conference

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FOR FURTHER DETAILS PLEASE VISIT http://www.ringingcedarsconference.com/

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The Realm of Berendeevo

The desire to be closer to nature and live in unity with it today is near and dear to many of us. The idea of ecological settlements that arose several years ago in one form or another is already being brought to life in various areas: the Grishino ecovillage 300 km from St. Petersburg, the Novye Lozhki settlement near the Novosibirsk academic village, Kitezh, and many others. Having moved a little further from the cities, people are attempting to carry out natural farming in harmony with nature and devote more time to the upbringing of their children, while preserving the traditions of their ancestors. "Great!" the city dweller will say, imagining an idyllic picture of a wooden house, high cedars, singing birds, a babbling brook, a mug of fresh milk on the table, barefoot happy children running through the yard. Great, but not for long. The stereotypes of the modern way of life will make him look at all this from another point of view: heating by a stove, outside facilities, no hot water or telephone, the television does not get all the programs, no place to go other than the village club, low pay for work, work that you won't even find in the village now. "But, you know, an ecosettlement bears little resemblance to a modern village," reasons Oleg Kazakov, one of the initiators and ideologists involved in the creation of an ecological settlement near Khabarovsk. "The rural way of life has today lost its attractiveness, while the peasant has lost his vital guiding points. He has become very much dependent on the employer, and he considers the work on his parcel of land to be a burdensome, hopeless, and unprofitable venture. Not everyone is capable of becoming a farmer in order to provide for himself and his family, and other work is difficult to find in the countryside. But we are not farmers, we find work for ourselves in other spheres of activity: the organization of ecotourism, the growing of edible taiga plants and medicinal herbs, phytotherapy, beekeeping, the revival of folk trades. In addition, we are advocates of plowless, organic farming."

"We are going out to live in the ecovillage not only for the sake of working on the land," say the future ecovillagers, members of the Belovode non-commercial partnership. "We have other goals, for us material prosperity is not the main thing. The stereotype of the modern person's prosperity is this: an apartment, car, high paying job or one's own business-which are not available to everyone and are acquired in the intensive pace of the city's hustle and bustle, in which stopping is the road to poverty. Work-home-work-home...no time to raise your children, your basic form of relaxation is an evening in front of the television. And our children are becoming alienated from us, we are becoming uninteresting and boring to them, they listen more to the advice of their peers than to us, they search for the meaning of life in incoherent talk shows, and respect among them for their elders is a rarity. We do not notice how they are growing up on chips, hamburgers, and beer, how at already 20 years of age they are as callous as older people, speak of money and sex much more often than about love and the family, and the television and cinema films they prefer are overflowing with violence. There is less goodness in the world....

"Do we spend a lot of time with our children? Who, on the whole, takes care of their upbringing? Daycare, school, the street. We believe that the fundamentals of goodness are laid down by bringing up children in the family, and we want to spend more time with them. Our place of work and home should be nearby, and work should bring us joy, be creative, and not steal time from us for interacting with our family."

It is no secret to anyone that, despite the achievements of modern medicine and pharmacology, the number of sick people is not decreasing, but rather the contrary. Where has the saying, "genuine Russian, Siberian health" disappeared to? What does a healthy way of life mean, in the opinion of the ecovillagers?

"We have forgotten that man is a part of nature," they say. "It is precisely in nature where the sources of vital energy and the foundations of our health are stored. Irritability, the furious pace of city life, improper nutrition, inactivity, polluted air and water, other technogenic factors surround us in any city, reducing the immunity of generations for decades. Advertising constantly convinces us that health begins with yogurts, Coca-Cola, Chupa Chups lollipops, dehydrated Maggi cubes, reconstituted milk products and juices, not to mention the advertisements for beer that fill up air time. It's all gibberish.... A person obtains health from freshly picked fruit growing next to his home. There is a good reason that the sales of Chinese vegetables and fruits fall during the summer period: people prefer the local produce. Moreover, Far Eastern flora is made up of 1700 types of edible plants, of which we use less than 5% in our food. All this variety has been created for us by nature, to provide for our existence at this latitude. In its composition, our honey is the food product richest in vitamins and trace elements, and iodine insufficiency is made up for by a common grass-Xanthium-one only has to be sincere in striving to be healthy. The health of any one of us begins not with the achievements of medicine, but with the person, with the habits he formed in childhood of eating, breathing, and moving, and most importantly, of spiritual peace, which in the modern world is catastrophically lacking."

"To build a house of ecologically pure materials, this is not yet everything," says Oleg Kazakov. "We see this approach, by the way, in the new Siberians in the Ecodom programme, there everything revolves around living space. There is economy of energy and heat, it is ecological, but surrounded by the same 20 to 25 ares (an are is one-hundredth of a hectare) of land, which is insufficient in order to develop the necessary biodiversity of plants, for which no less than a hectare is required. After all, grass, trees, and shrubs are not only beautiful landscaping, they are also your bioshield. All plants interact among themselves, help or harm each other, depending on how they are planted, influence growth and fruitfulness, one has to know how to plant them. In addition, they have an influence on man, the cedar, oak, birch, elm, all in a different way. The basic complexity consists precisely in skillfully creating a harmonious ecosystem around one's abode. We get together once a week and invite various specialists, listen to their lectures, we try to pool the knowledge we have obtained. But the ecologically pure house today is not a major problem. Heat conservation, local biological purification of sewage, autonomous electrical power, all these developments exist and are not as expensive as they seem at first glance."

"Many people ask us what we will do. Where will we work? After all, you can't feed a family on the products from your garden, and in addition to our daily bread we also need other things. And we are not prepared to wait until someone comes and gives us work, we know what we are going to do, we regard certain types of activity in a different way. For example, folk trades. Everyone regards them as the production of souvenirs, various pretty knick-knacks, while we are preparing to use them in daily life, because apart from their pretty design, they have another use. A birch basket, for example, is the best container for the preservation of dry products and honey, and a tub made of cedar or juniper is the best container for milk or pickled products. And when we are asked, how is it that we are prepared to cut down cedars, as if we contradict ourselves, we are destroying nature. We grow cedars. Today we grow them at country homes and on window sills, and when we receive land, we shall organize a tree nursery, we shall preserve the collected plantings of precious taiga plants on our land.

"We have to get rid of the feeling that we are here temporarily in the Far East, we have to set down roots, consolidate our family on this land. For that reason we call our future farmsteads 'Kin's domains.' Our children will continue our initiatives, they already help us now. People now like to say that a person should have a choice, so the choice between the city and the country should also be a worthy one. Now the country looks completely unattractive, its prosperity is being constructed on government subsidies. But there will always be too few of them. After all, this is far from being a black earth area, the fertile layer here is thin, here the village must be built another way, other farming must be practised. Fields sown with single crops require enormous expenditures for their cultivation and harvesting, we can't cope on our own. We have other riches-the riches of the taiga, we can grow new agricultural crops, they possess great healing power. Would this not be an occupation for our future generations in Kin's domains?"

Belovode is a Slavic myth about a fairyland. It has been sought for centuries, as has the mysterious Shambhala, but has not been found to this day. But the villagers are not looking, they are building it themselves.

View the Full Gallery

http://ecotown.khv.ru/
Translation copyright http://www.ringingcedarsofrussia.org/

RASSVET KIN'S SETTLEMENT

At a time when prices for real domain in Donetsk are increasing rapidly, young families are finding exceptional solutions to the apartment problem. More and more city dwellers are moving to rural areas, where life is cheaper and, as the advocates of similar steps claim, much more pleasant. Reporters from Donbass spent some time in the settlement of Novogrigorovka, where former residents of Donetsk, Gorlovka, Lugansk, and other large cities of the region have created a real ecovillage and named it "Rassvet [Dawn]."

All land-to the peasants!

All the local "voluntary settlers" moved to this village not far from Debaltsevo in order to take advantage of the Peasant Private Farmstead Act. This law, adopted in 2003, gives each adult citizen of Ukraine the right to receive the ownership, free of charge, of up to two hectares of land, on which one can lay out a garden, build a house, take up animal husbandry or beekeeping-in general, operate a farm. Soon after the adoption of this law, a group of enthusiasts was formed in Donetsk who wanted to take advantage of it. One of them was Vitaliy Krivenda, who now lives in Novogrigorovka.

"The law itself was passed, but there was no mechanism for its implementation," he says. "We fought for this land for a year and a half. The village council looked at us as if we were crazy, they didn't have either a computer or any idea about the new laws. They even suspected that we were taking this land in order to sell it later. But, you know, in Ukraine there is a moratorium on the sale of land, but we don't need that. We heard so many things-there were a lot of skeptics. But in the end, everything worked out."

In one allotment more than twenty parcels of land were assigned for the ecovillage. True, not all the "new landowners" moved here to take up permanent residence-some only periodically drop in from the city. But there are also those who have definitively exchanged the blessings of civilization for the beauties of nature.

The apartment is cramped, and work is boring

Kseniya and Evgeniy Vodopyanov have already been living in the village for four years. In order to move here, the spouses-both graduates of the Gorlovka Institute of Foreign Languages-left brilliant career opportunities in Donetsk. And they have no regrets.

"I had a good job, in half a year I became a department head in an insurance company and was going further," says Kseniya. "Then everyone was surprised: 'How could you turn down such opportunities? This is so sudden!' No, this was not really sudden. At a certain moment, I felt that I could not go on this way any more. I was sitting at work from morning to night, but in fact was doing nothing useful for anyone. I wanted a child, but knew that if I dropped out of that rat race even for a year, I could forget about the progress of my career. What's more, we couldn't find an apartment at a reasonable price for a whole year, we were living with my grandmother. But I didn't really feel like living in an apartment. After the institute, I worked in Germany for eight months in the au pair programme, I lived in a private home. Even after that trip I had a sense of how cramped it is in a city apartment. Abroad it is thought that only poor people live in the city, people who don't have the money to buy their own home."

And then Kseniya came across the books from the "Ringing Cedars of Russia" series by Vladimir Megre-a very popular author among the Russian supporters of life in the open air. His basic idea is that a person can be happy only when he has his own land on which he can build a house and plant a garden.

"Of course I regarded these books simply as literature, but the idea itself seemed beautiful to me," says Kseniya. "And when I shared it with my husband, he suddenly said, 'So let's get ourselves some land.' I was amazed, 'What land? I'm not ready.' But he began to look, read on the Internet about the creation of an ecovillage, then we decided to come and have a look. At the beginning what we saw didn't impress us. You know, everyone immediately wants a woods with a lake and a house with an attic. And here was just a bare steppe, everything was drab. But we thought it over, and nevertheless started registering the documents. In 2004 we moved to the country and rented a house, and in 2005 we finally became the owners of three hectares of land."

Without water, but with the Internet

To do this, Kseniya and her husband had to quit their jobs. It was complicated at the beginning. They planted a garden on their land, but the winter turned out to be very severe, and all the young saplings perished. However the spouses did not give up. Newly planted trees took root, the couple had a little daughter, to whom they gave the old Russian name "Zabava." And last year the family bought a house in Novogrigorovka. It doesn't have running water, but they do have the Internet.

Evgeniy does translations at home. Kseniya got a job as a teacher in the village elementary school, and in addition works part-time at her alma mater. It turned out that, even living far from civilization, you can make not a bad living.

Other founders of Rassvet have also found jobs in the new area. Vitaliy Krivenda created and is developing the Debaltsevo city portal on the Internet, and at the same time is working at the local newspaper. He gets to work by bicycle-the trip takes only ten minutes. To get to Donetsk, he first has to use a regular taxi, then a fixed-route taxi. But this does not trouble the local residents-not long ago Kseniya and Evgeniy even went to the ballet. They say that when they lived in Donetsk, they only got out to the cinema on a couple of occasions, there was no time or inclination to do more.

"It can't be said that our style of life is all that very different from the city," says Kseniya. "It's just that our daughter has somewhere to play, she is healthier than children living in the city. She is three years old, and has not once had to go see doctors. I don't feel at all deprived. On the other hand, I have what many other people do not-a house and garden, and, most important, the goal in life to create beauty on my own land with my own hands."

They have arrived!

The native residents of Novogrigorovka initially gave a hostile reception to the settlers. They simply could not understand why these people were doing such an obviously stupid thing-leaving the city for the country, when all normal people were doing exactly the opposite. In addition, they had an iron-clad argument: "You don't drink vodka, so, something is wrong here. Probably members of a sect."

There was also another problem: although the land assigned to the settlers by law was considered to be unoccupied, the local residents had been grazing their cows on it for a long time. And when the new owners stopped allowing them onto the usual areas, they became enraged. The most dissatisfied even turned to arson attacks-many parcels were severely damaged at the hands of the vengeful villagers.

With time, the villagers became accustomed to their new neighbors and even turned out to be rather pleased. After all, now Novogrigorovka is perhaps the only village in Donetsk Oblast where people come from the cities and restore the abandoned houses and infrastructure.

Internet address

The Rassvet Ecovillage has its own page on the Internet: www.rassvet.dn.ua

The Ukrainian statute, Peasant Private Farmstead Act of 15 May 2003, may be found at the site of the Supreme Council at the address: www.zakon.rada.gov.ua

Instead of taking three-year-old Zabava around to see doctors, Kseniya Vodopyanova lets her run barefoot through the grass all summer.

The most comfortable, pleasant, and useful means of transportation in the ecovillage is the bicycle. Vitaliy Krivenda uses his bicycle to travel to work in Debaltsevo.

Alisa Sopova

http://rassvet.dn.ua/
http://www.anastasia.ru/forums/topic_23861_330.html

Translation copyright http://www.ringingcedarsofrussia.org/