Are you familiar with Perm? No? I’m not surprised. I’ve only heard of it because I’ve read Tom Holt’s comic fantasy novel Who’s Afraid of Beowulf?, in which one of the characters gets a lot of ribbing for having gone to Perm. It’s on the western side of Urals, near Ekaterinburg. Maybe not exactly Siberia in my American mind, but pretty darn close. A place I don’t spend much time thinking about, and a place I didn’t expect to have a pumpkin festival.

But they do!

ТыкваDay [Tykva = pumpkin] 2013 was September 12-15, in Gorky Park. (Not the Gorky Park in Moscow, the Gorky Park in Perm.)

From the Gorky Park in Perm website

 More than 2000 pumpkins arrived in Perm from villages in the Primorsko-Axtarsk Krasnodarskogo Region. It is particularly there that the sticklers who organize the festival found the very orangest and roundest pumpkins.
…will also take place a “pumpkin concert,” on the farm of the pumpkin city is being built an exhibition “remarkable harvest,” and in the station PumpkinCity you can learn 101 uses for the orange vegetable.

Apparently during the concert the pumpkins were to be used as percussion. I can’t find any video and I’m dreadfully disappointed.

There is video of a carving demonstration last year, though.

They approach the carving a little differently than Americans do, but the festival seems to have had a general “Western America” theme.

There are a ton of photos from this year’s event on its VKontakte [Russian Facebook equivalent] page. A 2012 photogallery is here.

My very favorite photo, though, is this one from 2012, which I found on this Russian blogger’s livejournal. Is the facial expression match by the lady on the left intentional, coincidental, or permanent? We may never know.