Last weekend, friends of mine, Oe Karpov and Andrey Dyakonov, arranged the great event. It was a BIG city event, but done in a TINY manner. They rented a wooden house in the wooden part of Yakutsk City, invited close friends and let the rock music sound in all power and authenticity.

Yeah, it was the «103″ rock band performing the unique ethno Siberian heavy music. It was utterly awesome!

Frankly, I am a big fan of «103″. Like its story. It is a little group of young people, who arrived into the city from a little Yakutian village called Khatassy by the public bus «103″ a few years ago. This village is mainly known as the producer of pork & beef. Nothing special could appear over there, apart from the delicious meat.

And here they are. Authentic ethno rock music! Delivered by guys, who learned to play musical instrument themselves in a little wooden village hall. By the way, they use the sound of the khomus, Yakut Jews-harp instrument.

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Enjoy khomus (Yakut Jew’s harp) music and images of Yakutia in the amazing video slideshow created by Marianna Leontieva in 2008. The author lives in Moscow and she called the video «Khomus… A Yakutian’s Nostalgia…» Think, no additional info is required.

By the way, Yakutsk will host the 7th International Jew’s Harp Society Congress on June 23-26, 2011. It will be held right before the Yasyakh national holiday celebration in the area of Ys Khatyn near Yakutsk. My god, my fingers are crossed, don’t want to miss this must-be-awesome event.

Download the Congress Program (pdf, 525 Kb).

Kolyma in Yakutia by Alexander Mekheda

Eight years ago I made the website for Guerman Arbugaev, director of the Arctic Travel company. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist anymore. The site owner failed to renew the domain name arctictravel-yakutia.com. By the way, it was my first website about Yakutia done in English.

Praise god, I saved some of its content, including Yakutia nature wallpapers. Here I am posting them. You may download and use them free for your computer desktop. The collection is small, but it is based on the works of my first favourite photographers, Evgenia Arbugaeva (Central Yakutia, the Lena River), Alexander Mekheda (Yakutia’s Kolyma) and Nikolay Zavodsky (South Yakutia, mainly the area of Peledui).

See further 17 nature photo wallpapers. To download, choose the tumbnail, click on the right mouse button and use the function «Save the link as.» Read the rest of this entry…

The Kolyma Highway (known also as the federal automobile highway ‘Kolyma’ and the Road of Bones) connects Yakutsk and Magadan.

Distance:
- 2032 km (through Ust-Nera)
- 1197 km (by the old roadway via Tomtor near the Pole of Cold).

Item details:

- PDF, 7 pages, A4, 17 Mb.
- In English.
- Available maps for…

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