My First Dark Ages Impression! Portraying Kievan Rus at Medieval Days:

About a week ago, Marc and I went to our first “early period” reenactment.  We attended the Medieval Days even at the Colonial Plantation in Newtown Square, PA with our newly-formed Kievan Rus unit, headed by our friends Chris and Natasha.  It was my first early period impression for a legitimate reenacting unit (my Mongol impression, while at reenactor standards, is for SCA use), and Marc’s first Dark Ages impression.

I have to say, I really enjoyed getting to do a Dark Ages impression.  The clothing is comfortable and fairly simple to sew, the research is fun (and you have to do a lot of it, as there aren’t exactly uniform manuals!), I’m able to do a male role without raising too many eyebrows, and it’s an era that captures the public imagination while also being something that most people don’t know much about.  Marc and I had a good time explaining to the public how the Rus were quite an interesting mix of Eastern/Central Asian and Western cultures, and it was something that many of the public seemed to be able to understand.  As such a diverse group, we were also able to have quite a bit of variety in our dress and the goods we had with us, which gave us a lot to talk about when the public came by.

Anyway, that’s enough chatting for now.  Here are the photos of our new unit!