FREEFORUM

Peace to everyone. JANYL_watch told me about this forum. I keep a small guesthouse in Iyık Janyl: three rooms, one kettle, near the lower steps to the church.

Every year for the Feast of St. Janyl people come from Talas and Nurzhan with no bed and sleep in the cathedral square. Please book something. The town has too few beds for the feast and the square is cold at night, even in August, at our height.

I can vouch for the kettle. Also: from Talas it is about 235 km over the Fergana Gateway, then the 12-km branch above Tash-Kömür. Leave early. The checkpoint on the corridor is slow on the 23rd.

Tash-Kömür also has beds and nobody ever thinks of us. Twenty kilometres. Buses every hour on the feast days. Our town is not beautiful but our tea is honest.

I walked the last 12 km in 1986 with my mother. She said the walk was the prayer and the church was the amen. If any of the young people walk it this year: water and a hat.

Pilgrimage is fine. But notice: every year more jandarm on the corridor "for security". They COUNT the pilgrims. Why does the state need to know how many people pray? WAKE UP IRAD

Feast report: all three rooms full, two families in the yard, and a man from Nurzhan who slept in his Lada and would not come inside because "the Lada is blessed". We passed him tea through the window.

That is my uncle. The Lada is not blessed. It is held together with prayer and electrical tape, in that order.

For first-timers: the vigil on the 23rd is long, the chants are in Syriac and Iradi, nobody expects you to know them. Stand at the back near the juniper smoke if you want to understand nothing and feel everything. And please don't ask the guards about the Grail. They are tired.

Feast 2017. Very hot. A woman from Kara-Buura walked up from Tash-Kömür with her daughter, both in white headscarves, singing the whole way. When they came into the square it went quiet, then everybody sang with them. I have seen forty feasts. I will remember this one.

We were not the only ones in white that day. But thank you for the tea on the steps, whoever you were.