Moscow Maslenitsa Festival to take place at 23 venues

At a Moscow Government Presidium meeting, Head of the Department of Trade and Services Alexei Nemeryuk said that the Moscow Maslenitsa gastronomical festival will be held at 23 city venues on March 1-10.

Festival venues will open in different districts in Moscow, including eight in city parks. Guests will be offered pancakes made to old and modern unique recipes, as well as fresh and tasty foods from farms from all over the country including cheeses, fish and meat delicacies.  

Food products will be offered by producers and farmers from 20 Russian regions. They will bring over 70 cheese brands and 30 tea varieties, more than 30 wild game meats and 40 species of fish and sea products.

Cafe chalets will offer over 50 hot meals made with meat or fish. Menus will include Balkan Pljeskavica (ground beef with bread, cheese and other side dishes), traditional Dagestan Kurze dumplings, Caucasus Chudu flats, English (potato) and Belgian waffles, and lazy Belyashes (fried, round, open-faced patties with a meat filling).

Pfannkuchen and blue small pancakes

Over 60 types of pancakes (bliny) with 150 fillings and toppings will be fried at the Moscow Maslenitsa festival. Visitors will have an opportunity to taste Qatayef for the first time. These are Arab pancakes made in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. In addition, they will be offered Czech rolled Palacunkys, Swedish Raggmunk potato pancakes, German Pfannkuchen Crepes and Belarusian Chachokhi thick pancakes. Delicacies based on ancient recipes will be a special treat at the festival.

Chefs will bake Guryev, Lace and Multi-Coloured pancakes. Thus visitors will be offered pink desserts with a strawberry jam and basil, blue desserts with an orange jam, vanilla sour crème and chocolate chips, black pancakes with salmon, as well as yellow pumpkin and green spinach pancakes. For dessert, visitors will be offered bird cherry tree pancakes with buckthorn crème and condensed milk, lemon-poppy and mint pancakes with chocolate chips, and crepes with bananas and honey butter.

Cooking schools and handicraft workshops

Eleven cooking schools will open at the Moscow Maslenitsa festival. Free classes will be held for children every day in warm pavilions on Revolution Square, Slavy Square, Profsoyuznaya, Gorodetskaya, Yartsevskaya, Mitinskaya and Khachaturyana streets, Orekhovy and Dmtry Donskoi boulevards, and Youth Square in Zelenograd and Sirenevy Boulevard in Troitsk.

Every school has its own name, themes and recipes. Thus chefs at the Blin-Club on Profsoyuznaya Street will tell guests about the secrets of making pancake tarts, rolls and unusual striped pancakes and treats from buckthorn. In the Food Shop on Slavy Square visitors will learn to cook pancakes with stuffing and from unleavened dough, as well as a pie with vegetables and delicacies based on recipes from Sofia Tolstaya’s Cook Book.

Cooking classes on Tverskaya Square will be held both for children and adults. In the cooking school they will be taught to make Lace Pancakes for the Swan Princess and Emerald Pancakes (based on the Squirrel’s recipe from the Fairy Tale about Tsar Saltan).

In all, 1,500 workshops will be offered during the festival, including 700 cooking and 800 handicraft and creative classes. At creative classes young guests will master the ABCs of folk crafts and learn about ancient Maslenitsa traditions. At the Gostinaya on Revolution Square children will be told about the seizure of a snow city, Petrushka puppet fights, sleighing and knockabout comedies, and will also be offered a chance to draw or make Russian Maslenitsa characters. In the House of Crafts children will learn the ABCs of woodwork and make toys and souvenirs.

In the Mansion of Creativity on Profsoyuznaya Street guests will learn about different types of handiwork and will make straw dolls and horses, amusing masks for outdoor festivities, creative oven mitts and panels for home décor. Visitors at the Handicraft Mansion on Slavy Square will be taught to work a pottery wheel. They will also learn the foundations of Gzhel and Zhostovo painting.

200 plays and 150 concerts

Festival guests will have an opportunity to attend about 350 performances by creative teams — over 200 plays and entertainment programmes and about 150 concerts. Puppet theatres from different regions of Russia will present five plays as part of the Golden Mask project. On Revolution Square and around it children will be shown the following plays: “Scarlet Flower” (Puppet Format Theatre from St Petersburg), “The Little Round Bun” (Yekaterinburg Puppet Theatre), and “Once Upon a Time” based on the “Masha and the Bear” fairy tale (Puppet House Theatre from Penza). In addition, there will be interactive performances. “Gorshok-Teremok” will be presented by the Petrushkina Sloboda Theatre from Mytishchi and “Tea-Drinking in Petrovskaya  Sloboda” by the Puppet Theatre of the Republic of Karelia.

Puppet plays will be shown in the Gostinaya pavilion on Tverskaya Square. Guests will be able to see “The Beauty and the Beast” the authors of which were inspired by the traditional wooden toy of the Russian North, and the magnetic version of “The Little Round Bun.”

Concerts by the Lyudmila Zykina State Academic Folk Ensemble Rossiya and the teams “Teasing Accordion Players” and “Girls” will take place as part of the Territory programme on Gorodetskaya and Profsoyuznaya streets and Orekhovy Boulevard. In addition, the teams “Peter’s Gusla Players,” “Free People,” the Moscow Cossack Choir, Mishel, Doodkee Project and Monkey Folk groups will also perform at the festival.

Tea drinking with fairy tale characters and reenactors on Manezhnaya Square

The urban atmosphere of the late 19th-early 20^th centuries will be recreated at this place. There will be stylized trade rows with a meat shop and a tea house, as well as a poultry yard and some other structures. About 100 reenactors dressed as tipteerers, organ grinders and salespeople will invite children and their parents to take part in Maslenitsa pastimes, games and performances.

Tea drinking devoted to the fairy tale “Alice in Wonderland” will take place on March 8, 9 and 10. Guests will get to know the White Rabbit and the Red Queen. They will sit at the same table and sample freshly baked sweets.

The Moscow Maslenitsa Festival is part of the Moscow Seasons city street events. In 2018, 4.75 million people attended the festival. They bought about 250,000 pancakes and visited about 3,000 entertainment events.