My name is Alisa BIziaeva. I’m a journalist, artist and writer. I moved a lot in my life. I was born in Odessa, Ukraine, spent my childhood in Moldova, I studied at a university in Belarus. Then I traveled a lot with my husband and children. We were part of the Rainbow Gathering family and participated in every meeting of the community we could. We visited some communities in Italy, Germany, Russia and Ukraine. We were in Auroville for several months and were inspired a lot.

I realized that living surrounded by nature in the community of beautiful creative people is the only way of living for me and my family. We started to look for a nice place to build this life. And we found a wonderful Valley in the Crimean mountains, with wild nature, rivers, forests, lakes and nice authentic villages. It was Belbekskaya Dolina.

We rented an old house and struggled with some difficulties: living in complicated conditions, learning gardening and raising our kids. But it was a very interesting and colourful life. We communicated a lot with locals, invited people to our place and arranged some activities to attract them to stay. I kept in mind a dream about a community, “our little Crimean Auroville”.

More and more interesting and creative people were coming to the Valley and starting their new life there. Someone opened a cheese-making or bakery craft-factory, someone grew organic food, made chocolate, built natural houses from cob, bred horses, created an alternative school, made music and musical instruments and so on. We suffered a change of regimes in 2014. Someone left and someone made a decision to stay and tried to continue building a community in the new conditions.

In 2019 I was inspired to make a weekend market of arts&craft Belbekskaya Yarmarka, which was not only a trade area, but also a place for community meetings - creative collaborations, making music and art, playing with kids and so on. Day after day it has been turning into a very beautiful and huge project, which attracts many newcomers to our community and many guests to visit Valley every weekend. Many families, locals and organic farmers found an opportunity to earn money and grow their business, many artists and artisans found an audience. It inspired them a lot and helped to grow their skills and improve their products. Thanks to Yarmarka our community has grown fast from five to three hundred families.

Several months ago I had to leave my home and start a new journey, under the threat of the war. The Crimea is not in a war zone but it is a disputed territory between Russia and Ukraine, so I feel that it is not safe for me and my family to stay there. Now I live in Belarus, at my ralative’s house. It is my temporary shelter. And I’m not the only one. There are many people, who had to leave or who lost their houses because of war, and my idea is to make a nice place (not in Russia), where we all can help each other, build a community and our new life in nature.

Some links and articles:

Yarmarka and the beautiful life in nature we have built in the Crimea: http://lisalisa.tilda.ws/belbekma
Story about Community in Belbekskaya Valley, in English, starting from page 90 https://belavia.by/webroot/delivery/images/OnAir_2021_FEB.pdf
Story about me and my family in Auroville: https://34travel.me/post/schastlivy-vmeste
‘Crimea for children’ by Alisa Biziaeva travel guide https://www.labirint.ru/books/500556/

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Подкаст Город Волшебных Снов http://SoundCloud.com/goodnightcity
где собраны авторские сказки, начитанные авторами.