Knot of common fate

In the Osipovichi District people know how to preserve the traditions of their ancestors

Ancient burial mounds, the legend of Rogneda, the miraculous spring in Proshcha, the history of the noble family Daragan, whose representatives laid a railway line in Osipovichi in 1872 at their own expense. Despite its young age — Osipovichi was given the status of a city in 1935 — it has something to charm tourists. But the main attraction here is the people. Remembering their roots, loving their land, they write a new history of their small homeland.

Don’t lose their track

As the theatre begins with a hanger, so Osipovichi begins from the railway station. With the advent of the railway, a new era began in the history of the region. It is not surprising that steam locomotives are everywhere here: on the coat of arms of the city, bright murals of buildings, and in the history room of the Osipovichi railway junction. More than 2 thousand residents of the district work for the railway. One of the oldest workers is Vladimir Simanovich, he has worked for 46 years.
“I am a local, since my childhood I have been falling asleep and waking up to the sound of wheels, I loved to travel by train. Parents worked all their lives on the railroad. So I didn’t see myself in any other industry,” tells Vladimir about himself. “I came here as an odd labourer, after serving in the army and receiving an education, I became an assistant driver, and a year and a half later I became a driver. For ten years I drove freight and passenger trains. Even without an assistant: there was such an experiment in the 1980s. I travelled not only in Belarus. In the 1990s, I drove tourists — from England, Africa — around Ukraine on P36. Such passenger locomotives are now a rarity. And in our P36 there were sleeping cars, a club car, a restaurant car, a sauna car...”


In 1992, Simanovich was offered to become an instructor driver for locomotive crews. The position entails many responsibilities: not only experience is needed here, but also pedagogical abilities. Over the years, he taught about a hundred young specialists to competently drive trains.
Pavel Dombrovsky, Deputy Head for Ideological Work, Personnel and Social Issues of the Osipovichi Locomotive Depot, speaks highly of Simanovich,
“They say about such people: they will ride even on one wheel. It means that he is a first-class specialist. If a breakdown occurs in an open field, everything will be sorted out, the malfunction will be eliminated. I myself used to be his student, gaining experience. Vladimir Simanovich worked on all types of rolling stock: steam locomotives, diesel locomotives, diesel trains, freight and passenger trains, electric locomotives, electric trains. For many years of conscientious work, a significant personal contribution to the development of the country’s railway transport, he was awarded the Outstanding Specialist of the Belarusian railway badge, as well as the badge for accident-free mileage on a locomotive of 1,000,000 kilometres.”
“It was 16 years and 1 million kilometres ago,” smiles Simanovich, who has ‘run’ on the railroad for about the same amount since then.
Today he is 63 years old and does not plan to be ‘side-tracked’. Even when Vladimir retires, the Simanovich labour dynasty will not end: his son Aleksandr has been working here as a driver for 18 years. Daughter Tatiana graduated from the Belarusian State University of Transport and, like a mother, became an economist.

Observing folk traditions

For 35 years now, not a single holiday in the Osipovichi District has been complete without the Vyazanka folk group. The team, created at the Vyazye Village Centre of Culture, has 13 participants aged 30 to 62 years. The band is famous for performing ritual songs. Its leader Nikolai Zabavsky can talk about Vyazanka for hours, “In our repertoire there are carol, wedding, Maslenitsa songs, songs for St. George’s Day, all those that our great-grandmothers sang to celebrate the end of the harvest, the beginning of the harvest. In order to collect them, to preserve the legacy of our ancestors, we once travelled the entire district in search of bearers of traditions, asked the old-timers how to conduct rituals correctly, how these tunes sounded in the old days, looked for information in museums.”
The band is a laureate of regional, republican, international festivals. The geography of touring activities of the rural team is impressive. Before the pandemic, they performed in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Moldova. In 2019, Vyazanka was invited to Moscow by Gediminas Taranda. The famous choreographer staged a performance on the theme of Kupala, in which he involved powerful singers from the Osipovichi District.
The Vyazanka members play on the drum, accordion, button accordion, cymbals, pipe. They also use an old wooden oiler as musical instruments, because it ‘makes sounds like a dull drum’, and a 100-year-old ironing board as a ratchet.
“Our specialty is ritual songs,” says the oldest member of the group, 62-year-old Zhanna Solovyan. “For example, we conduct an authentic wedding ceremony called Three Towels. When fellow countrymen get married, they invite us, and we show what each towel symbolises, accompanying the action with songs.”
By the way, the accompanist of the ensemble, the wife of Nikolai Zabavsky, Irina, embroidered towels and costumes. They also have their labour dynasty.

Soulful patterns

Irina Zabavskaya became interested in embroidery about eight years ago. She decided to make authentic costumes for Vyazanka with her own hands. Having trained for a start on making towels, she instructed her husband to bring her 40 meters of linen fabric from Minsk. And then she sat down to work. As an example, she took the costume of one of the local women born in 1926. She used it as an example of the Belarusian ornament. It took several months to make the ‘kashulya’ (shirt) for her husband. Now he is performing in it. By the way, Irina Zabavskaya’s work won the Grand Prix at the national costume festival of the Kupala fest Alexandria Gathers Friends.


Irina Zabavskaya sewed the costumes for the rest of the team together with her singing friends Renata Paramonova, Irina Malinovskaya and Galina Gulyayeva. The work is painstaking, requires patience, perseverance. There are much more patterns on the women’s outfit than on the men’s, it takes a year, or even more to ‘paint’ linen with floss threads, then manually sew a shirt, apron and skirt.
But Irina likes both the process itself and the result. She is working for the revival and popularisation of traditional embroidery, she also studies the features of the local, Osipovichi traditional costume: “It turned out that we have our own, authentic ornament. Many crosses that mean the feminine beginning, fertility. Now I immortalise them in a towel.”
And Irina Zabavskaya also has a whole collection of homespun belts made on a reed. The craftswoman willingly shares the secrets of her craft with her fellow countrymen: the Pasazhnitsa club of lovers of traditional needlework, which she leads, invites both adults and children.
Irina Zabavskaya also makes beautiful charm dolls, which are instantly sold out at our fairs, as well as in Ukraine, Poland.
This winter, Irina Zabavskaya took her dolls, authentic Belarusian costumes to the republican exhibition of folk art called Kalyadnyya Uzory, where she was awarded the title of the People’s Master.

By Olga Kislyak
Photos by Andrei Sazonov