wordofreedom

This is an interesting finding… As one day I happened to google Dagestan and its culture, I found out striking similarities it had with my own Himachali customs and pristine culture. So, I thought it will be useful to share.

Let’s start with geography. Dagestan or Respublica Dagestan forms the Northern Caucasus region and is located in the southern part of Russsia. It has several ethnic groups in which Russians form a minute part but still the lingua franca of the region remains Russian. The languages of Dagestan are Caucasian, Turkic and Iranian languages.

Now let’s come to the cultural aspects of Dagestan. Dagestan has a very rich cultural heritage. It is famous for its jewellery, pottery and carpets. Its carpets are famous because of its proximity to Persia and as we all know that Persian carpets have been famous since ages. In fact in Dagestan, handmade rugs are the most valuable things in the household. In some area within Dagestan, they can even be traded for a few horses and in some of the others it is considered necessary for a new bride to weave a carpet all by herself.

And quite similar, rather almost identical is the colour scheme and design pattern of the Himlayan rug as you can see below.

Another striking similarity comes in the form of clothing. In both the regions women use a very similar head scarf to cover their heads. In fact even the manner in which that headscarf is worn over the heads is also very similar. The heavy jewellery worn by the bride during wedding is also quite identical. It is not much difficult to draw analogy between the jewellery design and the use of silver as the predominant metal in ornaments. Below are some of the pictures of Dagestani women wearing their ornaments and native dresses. In the first pic as you can see there are coins on the headdress of the lady. It is a custom in Dagestan to have more and more coins on the headdress because more the coins, wealthier the bride’s family.

Now have a look at the Himalayan dresses and traditional ornaments …….

In many of the pictures above, you can see the coins in Himalayan jewellery too. The intricate patterns but similar designs show too much in common. But below is one of the strangest and my favourite set of similarities. FOOTWEAR. Dagestani footwear, I mean their traditional footwear has the same colour and the design pattern as the Himalayan home slippers. The first picture below shows Dagestani footwear and the second one shows the Himalyan footwear.

The astonishing similarities may be attributed to similar geographical conditions in the two regions. Moreover, the region around Dagestan which is the Central Asian part, is said to be the origin of Aryan race and it is believed that the inhabitants of Himalayan regions were Aryans. There are many speculations about this but let’s move on to traditions. In Dagestan, as well as in countries like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, livestock is very vital part of the people’s lives. Similar trend can be seen in the Himlayan region,where livestock plays an important role in the survival. Traditional animals in Russian region are camels and horses, whereas in Himalayas these are mainly cow, sheep, goats and yaks. One of the surprising things is that Yak is considered the holy cow of the cold regions, still it is slaughtered for meat and quite similar is the trend in Russia and its former states.

On further research, I found out that not only were the Russian dresses and customs similar to Himalayan culture. But other European adjoining nations too had a very similar dressing. Have a look at this Serbian woman.

Armenian Woman (below)

Bulgarian woman (below)

Montenegro woman ( below)

French women in traditional dress ( below)

Croatian women ( below)

See the arrangement of hands and dancing pattern of Greeks

Observe the same for folks of Himachal

I will continue this topic in detail in my future posts.So keep following wordofreedom for more stuff like this..