HOME OF THE COSSACKS

We got to sleep in this morning because we were mostly cruising all day until we arrived. Zheromonov, home of the Cossacks.  

We visited the Cossack museum today.  It was pretty interesting.  The building is made of granite, and the various artifacts are nicely displayed.  

For what it's worth, the Cossacks weren't an ethnic group of any kind, but were a loosely organized band of escaped slaves and serfs, tough guys, and the like who were a law unto themselves because they said they were and had the cunning and muscle to pull it off.  Think pirates, but on shore.  They were mercenaries for anyone whose ideals loosely matched their own.  They wanted freedom and fought for the Ukrainians to be out from under Poland.  But Katherine the great made them offers, and they ended up fighting the Ukrainians. After they did Katherine's  dirty work, she broke them up, exiling them to Siberia and elsewhere so they wouldn't be a threat to her.  Some were still around during the revolution, but made the unfortunate mistake of siding with the whites rather than the reds.

After visiting the Cossack museum we went out to another place on the island where they claim to have a Cossack horse show.  I was looking forward to this, because we aw one in Hungary, and it ws fabulous.  This one was so-so.  They did wonderful tricks on horses, but they did a very long and boring part of the program that was just kind of slapstick version of guys acting like sixth graders.  I also thought they didn't have the professionalism of the Hungarian horsemen.

 They kind of looked

Ike they learned the tricks yesterday and were still practicing.  More interesting to me was the fact that there was a bridal party there, all in their fancy wedding and bridesmaid dresses, sitting in these dirty stands and waiting for five busloads  of tourists to arrive before they could watch the show.  Thy had nice souvenirs there, and I got. Very nice plate from a woman who said she painted it and showed me her artist union card.  

Following that we came back to the ship for dinner, followed by a fairly uninteresting music performance of Ukrainian music played too loudly, IMHO.