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What valenki are in fashion now?
Recently in Gatchina near to Saint Petersburg passed fashionable display: models came on a podium in "glamour" – with fur, beads, srtasses – valenki of different colors. Such unusual "chuni" produce local group of industrial enterprises in Gatchina. The fashionable footwear is popular not only at Russians, requests are coming from abroad too. Curiously – what about our Byelorussian fullers? Do they watch the fashion? maybe, somewhere in out-of-the-way place, for example, at the area of Dribinsk, glorified since XVIII century by a felting craft, the youth since far-away times prefers high jack-boots on heels to the advanced nice warm valenki?
— Really, there are a lot of customers. Even this year, notwithstanding winter’s late coming, persons who are wishing to buy valenki was not lowered, — assures me Anatoly Mikheyev, fuller from Dribinsk. — I’m fulling valenki about forty years. And there are more then ten such masters with the experience in our area .Probably did not remain any city in territory of the former USSR in which it’s impossible to found even pairs of our valenki. And nowadays people are going to us from everywhere: from all regions of Byelorussia, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Tyumen. Even southern are taking our footwear willingly, this year I have fulled valenki for the asian by request. The tastes are different: someone likes dark grey, someone – black as bugs, and someone takes exclusively white.
Anatoly Evgenievich sells in a month about hundred pairs of valenki. And this winter footwear uses demand not only at elderly peasants.
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