Has anyone heard of the Kalmykya in Russia? Inhabitants are Mongol people
(Oirat-Torgut) and they are Europes only Tibetan Buddhists. Kalmykia is located to the west of the Wolga River & North of Dagestan bordering the Caspian sea.(Capital: Elista) Once they where fierce archers. I wonder if they have something like a Naadam festival that includes archery.I've met two Kalmyks in India where they studied Tibetan traditional medicine with the Tibetan community there. We talked a lot. There seems to be a revival of traditional Kalmyk culture, but progress is very slow as the country is very poor and they do not get much help from the Russian central Gvt.
Here is a Kalmykia travel story from the web:
http://www.russian-travel.net/lifestories3.htm
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Alam ed Din, Adnan
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Jeno Major
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If I may add something to Jack Farrell's report on the decline of traditional archery of the nomads living in the former Soviet Union, there are data about traditional archery competitions among the Bashkyrds even at the end of the 1960's, organised in the frame of their national festival called Sabantuy (e.g.: J. Boros, L. Rapcsanyi: Vendegsegben ?seinknel ['Staying with Our Ancestors']. Gondolat, Budapest, 1975. pp. 194-195. in Hungarian). If somebody is looking for recent reports on the events of Sabantuy on the Internet, no archery competitions are mentioned, suggesting that the extinction of the Bashkyrd traditional archery (which was so famous in the ages of the Napoleonic wars) have just happened during the last three decades. If it was true, there can be a good news in it: some old people taking part in those archery competitons in the 60's probably are still alive (waiting for a bashkyrd Murat ?zveri? 
)
)okuz