Many of the songs you are about to hear are more than a thousand years old. For centuries, these songs have been carried on from generation to generation, preserved only by the oral tradition. Then, in the early 1990's, a Russian singer and ethnomusicologist Juliana Svetlitchnaia made it her life's mission to eternalize the sounds of her culture's past. Juliana traveled to some of the farthest outposts of Russian civilization, places accessible only by helicopter and lacking basic amenities. Yet it was places like these that gave Juliana the most authentic sampling of the fading tradition she had sought to preserve. She worked day and night, interviewing singers, listening to their songs, singing along with them—and recording it all on a simple tape recorder. Upon her return, Juliana combed through hundreds of hours of the recorded material, transcribing the lyrics and notating the songs. Driven by her passion to share these gems with the world, Juliana founded PAVA: the ensemble of Russian female folk sing