Our compatriot Eleonora Danilovna Devnarain (Kalina) sent the material below to the editorial office of the magazine from distant Mauritius. She graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1968. Since 1969, she has been living in Mauritius, where she began teaching Russian for the first time in the island's history. While studying Creole, folklore, and literature, she gradually immersed herself in Mauritian culture. For many years, as a guide of Russian culture in Mauritius, E. D. Devnarain decided, in turn, to introduce Russian readers to the history, traditions and culture of the islanders. Mascarene Islands Keywords:, Rodrigues, Mauritius, history, traditions, culture An hour and a half flight on a small plane from the island of Mauritius, and out of the boundless blue of the Indian Ocean appears a tiny piece of land, you can say, rocks. It looks like the plane is about to land right in the ocean... In fact, we are approaching the airport, on the edge of the southern shore of Rodrigues Island, the smallest of the Mascarene Islands. If it is customary to say about the island of Mauritius that paradise on Earth was created in its likeness, then the author of these lines found his paradise on the island of Rodrigues (in Mauritius it is called Rodrigue). After visiting Rodriguez for the first time in 1973, my thoughts kept returning to it, but only 20 years later, in 1993, I was able to visit this fabulous island again. Since then, for the past 15 years, I have been there every year, and it has become a part of my life. MASCARENE ISLANDS The Mascarene Islands are a group of 3 small islands in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar: Reunion (2,515 square kilometers, population 800 thousand people, French ownership), Mauritius (1,865 square kilometers, 1.2 million people) and Rodrigues (110 square kilometers, 37 thousand people, part of independent State of Mauritius)1. All the Mascarene Islands are of volcanic origin, and on Reuni ... Read more