The Mediaeval Knights Festival (part 4)

After a rest, we left the fortress and went to the huge field nearby, where a great new festival event was about to begin. It was called “bugurti”. As far as we knew it was supposed to be real battles between troops of knights. It wasn’t a joust with strict rules. In this event the knights wanted to fight quite seriously.

There were a lot of spectators, somewhere around 1 or 2 thousands of people. Some of them were in ancient costumes, others ones – in modern clothes. Small boys and girls fought each other with wooden swords and shields, climbed up and down on ancient constructions that were placed here for the actions or just ran across the field.
The people sat down on the grass around a huge round place that was roped off from the spectators and the show started. We took our place right in front of a rope fence.

At the beginning there was a short spectacle, where some ancient warriors demonstrated the art of fighting on a horseback with swords and lances. The spectacle was about the hard and dangerous life of Russian people in the Medieval Ages. In those days enemies from the west and east attacked Russian towns very often. Therefore, Russian warriors had to fight well with different types of weaponry, especially by swords, lances and bows. Also, they used horses in wars a lot; a horse cavalry was considered one of the main strengths of an army.
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After the Russian warriors had beaten all their enemies :)) the horse spectacle finished. After a while, two troops of knights had arrived on the both sides of the field. Each troop included 30 or 40 knights, armed with swords and shields and dressed in metal armour and helmets. Each of them had thick wadded clothes under the armour to protect his body and head from heavy sword strikes.
After a signal of a judge/referee, the battle began.
I think this battle was very similar to a real one in the past… All these guys went slowly to each other and then began to fight. An incredible sight! An awful din of swords!
However the battle was over after only 3 or 4 minutes, because most of the knights were already lying on the ground…
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