A Dacha Refuge for the Siberian Kupala Tradition: How Children’s Dacha Communities of Novosibirsk Reinvented the Celebration of Ivan Kupala Day in the Second Half of the 20th Century

Abstract

The article inquires into the origins of the unique tradition of celebrating the Ivan Kupala Day (July 7) in Novosibirsk, tracing its evolution from the common 19th-century Siberian variant to a contemporary urbanized form. We pose a question: What is the role of specific “intermediary” loci – dachas as mediators between “rural” and “urban” spaces – in sustaining the calendar cycle of traditional festive rites in Siberia? The principal custodians and transmitters of the Kupala tradition from the mid-20th century up to the 1990s were children and adolescents integrated into the dacha communities of Novosibirsk. Throughout the 20th century, the Kupala tradition would recurrently subside, becoming an exclusively children’s affair, and gain momentum, spilling beyond garden plots and courtyard spaces into city streets and squares, with participants in the ritualized dousing and other mischiefs including not only children and teenagers but also young adults and even people of quite mature age. The primary objective of this article is to conceptualize the dacha territory as a space of reinvention and transmission of tradition – in this case, the Kupala tradition – during the period of its temporary displacement from the public urban sphere. The study is based on field materials collected both in villages of the Novosibirsk region during long-term ethnographic expeditions of the 1980s–2000s and in the Novosibirsk dacha communities between 2015 and 2022. One of the authors draws on her own autoethnographic childhood experience as a member of the informal children’s community of the “Ivushka” garden association in the 1980s–1990s.