Tag #114676 - Interview #102852 (Chaya Sakhartova )

The town of Roslavl, where our family lived, is a big ancient Russian town founded in the times of the Rurik dynasty [the most ancient regents of Russia], famous for its artificial mounds. The town is very beautiful, green and hilly. At the time mostly merchants lived there. There were a lot of Russian Orthodox churches. Thus it was a native Russian Orthodox town. When we visited it for the last time – about ten years ago, in the 1990s – we went into a Russian Orthodox parish, where the municipal administration arranged an exhibition on the history of Roslavl. What was most interesting, those merchants, who had been deported from the town years ago [after the Russian Revolution], left their property to the town, a lot of china and crystal objects. We thought it unbelievable. We couldn’t understand how people, so much wronged by the Soviet power, could behave like that.