Stary Olsa performs "Fatalia Blazienska" at the 2018 Brevard Renaissance Fair in Melbourne, Florida (2018-02-04).
From Stary Olsa's web page:
"STARY OLSA is a mediaeval Belarusian music band. It was founded in 1999 by its present leader Zmicier Sasnoŭski and now consists of six musicians. It takes its name from a brook in the west part of Mahilioŭ Region (Belarus).
The band's repertoire includes Belarusian folk balladry and martial songs, Belarusian national dances, works of Belarusian Renaissance composers, compositions from Belarusian aulic music collections (e.g. Polack Notebook, Vilnia Notebook), Belarusian canticles of the 16th - early 17th centuries, as well as European popular melodies of the Middle Ages and Renascence.
STARY OLSA cooperates with many knightly clubs from Belarus and Europe, museums and research centres, masters of early instruments, bands of folk, aulic, sacred and city avital music, as well as with solo performers using old instruments, as well as with fire show theartes.
The band's music makes it possible to restore sounds of many forgotten instruments. STARY OLSA uses for its performances maximal exact (in appearance, technology and materials) copies of old aged Belorussian instruments such as Belarusian bagpipe, lyre, gusli (Baltic psaltery) , svirel (reed pipe), jew's-harp, ocarina, Belorussian trumpet, birch bark trumpet, hudok (Belorussian rebec), tromba marina and drums.
The purpose is to completely reconstruct (whenever possible) musical traditions of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania where Belarus was the main cultural and geopolitical part in the 13th – 18th centuries, and where there was a unique combination of Belorussian folk and aulic music with European musical achievements of that time. In order to revive this cultural peculiarity the band's members mix early Belorussian instruments sound with all-European medieval instruments such as lute, rebec, cister, flute, Arabic drum.
Besides its own theatrical concerts, the band performs at medieval culture festivals, spear-runnings and folklore festivals."