Russia celebrates one of its best loved holidays - Maslenitsa.
Maslenitsa is a festival which celebrates the beginning of spring. Its roots date back to pre-Christian times with pagan traditions. For centuries in Russia, Maslenitsa was a time of fun and celebration and its practices became so important to the people that the Christian church had to recognise and adopt its rituals.
Traditionally, an effigy is burned, people cook pancakes and have snowball fights..
This year St Petersburg has hit the record in terms of burning of an effigy as a symbolic of all sorrows and hardships are gone. Also the rite symbolizes the farewell to winter. Another important purpose of burning the effigies in old days there was improving of the fertility of the land.
