who wants to see/hear something cute
YOU DO
okay so there was this little kid called Onfim, and he lived in Novgorod in the middle of the 13th century.
HOW DO WE KNOW?
Because Onfim went to school, and he did his homework and wrote class notes on sheets of birch bark, a very popular disposable writing material in those days. When they were thrown away, they were preserved by the clay soil and later discovered by archaeologists.
Most of his writing is only interesting if you can read Old Slavic and are really interested in mediaeval pedagogy, but what we can ALL enjoy are the DOODLES.
On the left we can see writing practice, but on the right he’s drawn a long-necked curly-tailed beast with a weird tongue (maybe breathing fire). It’s labelled ‘I am a wild beast’ and carries a sign reading ‘Greetings from Onfim to Danilo’
IT’S CUTE.
And here’s Onfim’s portrait of himself and his dad.
CUUUUUUUUTE.
I’ve seen these before! My favorite part is definitely the pitchfork fingers he puts on everyone. It makes me think he learned it from someone else and copied it dutifully; this is the symbol for hands, this is how you draw them, now you can see all my people have hands. Like how I learned how to draw little carrot noses and didn’t think to deviate for like, five freakin’ years. (Thanks Tristyn!)
If you click through to the link, you can see this one drawing he does of other people and one dude has these GIANT GOOGLY EYES and I choose to believe that is his teacher giving him the death stare to stop fooling around and get back to work.
I hope Onfim grew up okay and had a happy life. I hope he got better at writing, but drew like that all his life. And I hope he always drew pictures and wrote notes to Danilo.
