Welcome to Bashkortostan!!!

Republic of Bashkortostan.

The Republic of Bashkortostan – a sovereign republic within the Russia Federation- is located along the South Urals and the adjacent plains. Bashkortostan’s territory is 143,600(one hundred forty-three thousand six hundred )square kilometers and the population is over 4 million people. And about a hundred nationalities inhabit in Bashkortostan: Bashkirs, Russians, Tatars, Chuvashes, Maris, Ukrainians and Germans.

The capital city is Ufa. It is the social and political, cultural centre of the republic. The population of Ufa is more than 1 million people.

Today Ufa also is a spiritual centre of Russia. For last years the Russian Drama Theatre, Faizi Gaskarov State Folk Dance Company and Bashkir choir have received an honourable rank – “academik”. There are six theatres, a philarmonic society, ballet and choreographic studios, houses of culture, cinemas, museums in the city. The main educational institutions of the republic, the Academy of Science, Scientific organisations and institutions characterise Ufa as a large intellectual centre.

Bashkortostan’s climate is continental with moderately warm, sometimes hot, summer and cold winter. Bashkortostan is rich in forests.

Culture.

Every nation has developed a unique experience of education of the rising generation. The Republic of Bashkortostan is one of the inimitable regions of our country in its multinationality. People of more than hundred nationalities live there. Therefore great attention is paid to questions of the national and cultural building.
The republic bound itself to create conditions to exercise the natural, inalienable right of nations to self-determination and satisty their national hopes. One of the major conditions of the revival and development of the Bashkort people (including those who live outside the republic) is the preservation of the native Bashkir language and culture.
The world public has realized that the dehumanization of education had negative consequences on scientific and techical potential, a moral and psychological atmosphere of any society and intellectual riches of people.
The Americans were the first to shift to humanisation, first of all, to humanization of university education and they included the humanities into the educational plans of technical universities.
So, the teaching such subjects as “Culture of Bashkortostan” and “History of Bashkortostan” to school children and students of our republic reflects these changes; it should promote bringing up spiritually rich and harmonically educated citizens of a new Bashkortostan.
The cultural heritage of any people (its songs and legends, customs and traditions, clothes and ornaments, works of applied and professional art, etc.) is unique.
Phenomena of spiritual and material culture can be explained by conditions of any epoch. A great variety of cultures, have been existed from time immemorial, each has contributed and is contributing to the development of the world culture. At the same time many cultures have been forgotten.

Monuments of world importance created on the territory of historical Bashkortostan refer to such works. It is possible to find phenomena of the world culture in any sphere of culture of Bashkortostan, for example, colourful pictures of animals (of mammoth, horse) in the cave Shulgan-Tash go back to the XX-XII centures B.C. They were first discovered in 1954 by A.V. Ryumin and later were identified by professor O.N.Boder, an archaeologist. Owing to him this monument became worldly known. At present such monuments of art of the Palaeolithic era are few.

The town-fortress Arkayim, discovered by the archaeologists of the universitu of Chelyabinsk, is also ancient, it dates back to the XVII – XI centuries B.C. The names of this district (the koragan, which flows into the utogan, a small hill Syntash) sound like modern names of some places of Bashkortostan.
Doctor of History, professor N. A. Mazhitov states that there are about twenty monuments similar to Arkayim in Southern Ural.

It should be emphasized that the world known monuments are on the territory of historical Bashkortostan where thousands years ago the Bashkort people ware formed as an ethnos.

One of the forms of culture is folklore, being the first by origin. The genre originality of the Bashkort folklore is well-known. Dozens of Russian students of local lore, writers and scientists, such as P.M. Kudryashov, V.I. Dal, R.C. Ignatyev, S.C. Rybakov and others admired, registered and studied it.
The Bashkort national musik – song othon koy (drawling song) are considered to be a phenomenon of the world national song classics level.

Five or six years ago musical experts from Japan, who had heard much about the Bashkort othon koy, came to Ufa. They visited several districts of our republic, registered songs, studied the musical records of the Bashkort radio, the Institute of History, Language and Literature in Ufa Scientific Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and invited our kura, players to Japan. It turned out that the Bashkort and Japanese national songs have much in common. So, our musical experts are faced with much work.

The exhibitions of the artists of Bashkortostan were held in Amerika, Australia, Germany, Switzerland. Many pictures of the artists of Bashkortostan decorate halls of museums abroad. The pictures were exhibited in Germany, France, England, Sweden, Japan and purchased in more than 70 countries.

Literature is the greatest property of culture of any people. The talanted peoples of Bashkortostan created works, which were included into the Golden Fund of the world Literature. It should be noted that the first known historians and writers Gilmetdin Sanzharal. Bashkordy and Nasretdin as-Nasry of Bashkortostan became popular not in their native ground, but in the Arabian countries.
At present we have great number of works of the Bashkort writers, translated into Mongolian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Turkish, Bulgarian, Hungarian and many other languages.
It is necessary to add that Bashkortostan in the native land of Sergey Aksakov, Mikhail Nesterov, the classic of the Mari literature Yanysh Yalkayn,Doktor of Science of Mari-El and Tatar writers. The reason is the friendship of peoples, exchange of spiritual values, wisdom of different ethnoses. Is there any place in Russia, where the cultures of the Turkik, Ugro Finnish, Slavik peoples are so closely connected. It is necessary to keep the tradition of friendship, mutual understanding, exchange of our cultural values.

Thanks!