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.) Read More →