Maslenitsa A popular Russian folk festival called Maslenitsa (this word has something to do with butter) is coming to its end. Russian Maslenitsa is very similar to French Mardi Gras or Anglo-Saxon Shrovetide. People are seeing off winter and meeting spring. The difference is in the festival length. In Russia it lasts the whole week, from Monday to Sunday after which Lent fasting begins to commemorate the passions of Christ and so many kinds of food become prohibited. So people try to eat various delicious things on the Maslenitsa week. One of the traditional meals are pancakes or bliny in Russian. It's a liquid mass of milk, flour, eggs with a little sugar and salt and a tiny bit of sodium fried in oil on a pan. Instead of milk you can add kefir (a drink similar to yoghurt). If you put kefir and more flour you can get oladyi with are thicker than bliny. Bliny and oladyi are eaten with confiture, sour cream, condensed milk and sometimes with caviar. Winter amusements such as the construction of a snow town, its siege and capture, snowball fights, skating, snow sliding and toboganning are also associated with this holiday. The culmination is burning Maslenitsa's scarecrow since Maslenitsa is the personification of winter which people have been very tired of by now. In fact Maslenitsa also called Marena was an old pagan deity of winter, cold and death. She was worshipped and dreaded at the same time by the Slav tribes before the introduction of Christianity. And even now, more than a thousand years latershe is not forgotten completely. Asking pardon, remembering dead relatives and going to a banya (Russian sauna) are the customs also connected with Maslenitsa.