Roadtrip 2014. Part 1. Elista: the capital of the Kalmykia & the biggest Buddhist center in Europe.

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The golden temple of Buddha Shakyamuni is one of the most prominent landmarks of this beautiful city.

Elista is the capital of the Kalmyk republic. Kalmyk are part of the mongolian group of families, more specifically The Oirat the western most of the mongolian tribes, that separated from the main force and settled in what is modern Russia, while keeping their culture mosly intact. If you've read the Intro it ended with the picture of traditional yurt. Before visiting Elista we stayed in it over night, via counchsurfing. It is all about living with the locals, but you usually don't expect the yurt. Anyway, they have a center of ethnic culture right on the main road going towards Elista from the North, so if you are ever in the area, do check it out.

The mongolian cultural connection is still quite strong. For example a lot of monuments like this can be found in the capital of Buryatia:

Not the best quality photo, but it is located near the entrance to the city, and we could't find the place to park our car.

The Kalmyk mostly speak Russian and Kalmyk and use Russian alphabet, but they still have the old Mongolian script, although it is almost not used. Both Buryatia and Mongolia also use modified cyrillic alphabet.

The old Mongolian script is in the center and only place we've seen it used.

The Kalmyk are predominantly buddist, and Elista is one of the biggest centers of buddhist culture on the European continent. When you think Europe, you brobably conjure an image of the old european towns with narrow winding streets, not some place in the steppes, right?

Europe. That ethnic culture center, just outside Elista.

The contrast between the city and surroundings is pretty striking. Here is the city center.

This is part of the main city square.

The buddhist influence is quite evident, but still you'd expect something like this in China town, not the main square of European capital, right?

Perhaps the most impressive landmark in Elista is The Golden Abode of Buddha Shakyamuni. As such it is featured on the preview for this post. Built in 2005 it IS the largest buddhist temple in Europe. If you follow the link, the site has much more and better photos then mine, as well as the official information about it, as well as Kalmykia as a whole.

The wrought iron gates feautred some nifty designs that I just had to take photo of.

One of the coolest things on the temple grounds are the statues of the great teachers of buddhism, with those little plaques that explain what they are famous for. Unfortunately they are in Russian, so I am not going to post all 17. But here is one of them.

His pose just invites those memes like with Jesus spanking someone, right? :-D

Another thing if note in Elista is the chess city they've built for the chess olympiad, but we were able to visit it only after dusk, so I don't have any photos of it. You can still check it out at that Elista site linked above.

That is all for today! You may have noticed, that most of my photos lack people in them. It is just that I am a bit shy about taking pictures of people, since I beleive that portraits take much more skill than nature & city photos.

Next time Abrau-Durso which was our next stop, surroundings, as well as... city of Volgograd, that is much better known as Stalingrad, was a place of one of biggest battles during WW2, as well as our previous stop.

This is Leonid Utesov Soviet era jazz singer and comic actor. Originally from Abrau.