In Russian fairy tales, the Otherworld lies beyond a vast, shadowy forest filled with monsters, wild animals, and countless dangers. The hero must pass through these perils to gain Power and Knowledge. We followed that same mythic path on May 1, 2021, when we set out for the sacred grove near the abandoned village of Dumino in the Arkhangelsk lands.
Ten kilometers of snow-covered trails, fresh bear tracks, and a relic northern forest led us there.
This grove is the very essence of sacred space—a memorial grove where offerings are made to commune with the spirits of departed ancestors, a tradition reaching deep into prehistory.
Here, everything delights the seeker of living antiquity: centuries-old pines and spruces that evoke the World Tree linking the three realms, their mighty trunks carved with ancestral marks; anthropomorphic grave posts recalling the idols of the northern peoples; and stump-headstones—ancient wooden memorials that preserve the belief that a soul can live again in plant form.
Long ago an old chapel of St. Elijah stood here, embodying the northern blend of Christianity and pagan devotion.
In the 1930s Dumino still thrived with nearly two hundred residents and about fifty houses, its roads stretching toward neighboring settlements that have since vanished.
Today only a few weathered houses remain, and the village paths are churned by wild boar—primeval inhabitants who were here before people and will remain long after.
In this utterly silent, sacred place, as the sun sank toward the horizon, a strange dual awareness arose: the sense of stepping onto another planet—familiar yet otherworldly—and, at the same time, a profound feeling of belonging Here and Now.
And then came the inevitable pang of leaving, the reluctant return to the ordinary, all-too-human world.
