On October 17 in Cheboksary Chamber Theater a new festival will take place - Chuvash and Udmurt Cultures 'Aptӑra Fest'.

This is something new for Chuvashia. Our neighbors - the Udmurts - are much ahead of us in design, electronic music and maintaining ethnic city culture. The reverse side of art and culture, however, is much more developed in Chuvashia.

So Chuvash and Udmurt have something to teach each other. The festival events include Chuvash Fine Art Exhibition, literature lectures, concerts, fashion shows and dance parties.

The Fine Art exhibition will feature artists Praski Vitti, Vladimir Ishutov, Igor Ulangin, Georgiy Fomiryakov. Literature lectures will be by Bogdan Anfinogentov (Udmurtia), Dmitriy Vorobyev (Chuvashia), Alesha Prokopiev (Chuvash Moscow), and Iosif Trer (Chuvashia).

The notable pop acts participating are Şilarman (Chuvashia) and 'Dukes' (Udmurtia).

The St. Petersburg Chuvash national culture autonomy runs a fairly successful Chuvash language club.

The members of the club gather together on Wednesdays in the national literature library, among them are Chuvash expats and their children residing in St. Petersburg.

Not long ago a language festival took place in the city. Ekaterina Danilova presented Chuvash to the audience of 450 people.

The viewers observed the softness of Chuvash sounds, and the song-like melody of it. Language enthusiasts asked many questions about the Turkic influences and foreign loans in the language, about the similarity of old Chuvash script with runes and the place of traditional script-like embroidery in today's life. Ekaterina felt sorry that the hour appointed for Q&A was not enough to answer all the questions.