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My Letter from Yoshkar-Ola, a town in the republic of Mari El in central Russia, is published in The Calvert Journal – a guide to the New East.
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At 7am the streets of Yoshkar-Ola were dark and empty. As I shuffled over dirty snow and treacherous black ice, the only sound was the bickering of ravens overhead. The shops on ulitsa Kremlyovskaya – Apteka No. 67; Evroset; Moda 21 vek – told me that I had arrived in provincial Russia. Except that ul. Kremlyovskaya is also Kreml urem: street signs and building plaques are written in Russian and Meadow Mari, the most widely spoken of the four Mari dialects. I made a beeline for the peculiar buildings in the distance.
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