RUSSIA: Mourners have turned the school into a shrine, reports Chris Stephen who recently returned to Beslan.
Shrines began to appear in Beslan High School Number One hours after the September 3rd massacre. By Monday morning I found them in almost every classroom.
A space would be cleared by someone on a desk or windowsill and a pair of shoes put there, with a photograph of a missing loved one, a favourite exercise book, pencils, often topped by a red rose or carnation.
For one shrine, marking the classroom of an art teacher, someone had arranged her brushes and paints. Another, also to a teacher, featured half a dozen pairs of scissors among the class papers and books. I never discovered the reasons.
All day, from dawn to well past dusk, Beslan's shocked population would trudge through the ruined building, feet grinding on dust and shattered woodwork and lots of broken glass.
The men were in dark coats or leather jackets, looking stern. The women were often weeping. Nobody seemed to know why the shrines were being built. There is nothing in the two beliefs of the Ossetians, Christian Orthodox and paganism, to explain them.
Perhaps shrine building is simply a universal human instinct, a desire to mark the loss of someone with a collection of their possessions.
There were two kinds of shrines. One consisted of favourite items or photographs or books or toys, often brought to the school. The other was simply a collection of artefacts, often retrieved from smashed cupboards, ready for collection.
On a table outside the principle's office someone had laid out a group of sick notes from the year before, each signed by the parents of a child and left for the parents to claim.
Entering one room, I met an old woman in dark shawl and dark skirt, clutching a single shoe and crying that it was all she had left of her daughter. So she was looking through the school for the other one.
Upstairs was a classroom where many of the male hostages were taken, shot, and their bodies dumped out the window. Balanced on a blood-spattered pipe under the windowsill someone had put a bunch of red roses. On the sill itself, and on a chair nearby, men had marked the spot by lighting cigarettes and leaving these to burn, creating a great stack of butts, symbol of their desire to give their loved ones one last cigarette.
Downstairs by the canteen Russian soldiers had left a simple shrine to one of the 10 commandos who died: A plastic glass full of vodka topped with a piece of black bread. But the most impressive shrines were in the gym. And here, stretching across the blackened wooden floor where most of the dead were found, parents and families put hundreds of bottles of water, full and with the tops unscrewed.
Like the cigarettes left burning up above, the gesture was to offer the children what they had desperately needed, and were denied, during three days packed in there in stifling heat.
To the bottles were added food: sometimes the flat bread and raisins traditionally offered at funerals, but also including cakes and many bars of chocolate, the silver paper peeled back, and the chocolate broken into little squares ready for little hands. At least one child, a 9-year-old, was killed on her birthday and unopened presents, teddy bears, a toy car, and a portable CD still in its open packing case were placed on the gym floor.
As the week went on, the blackboards filled up with graffiti. This was mostly the names of loved-ones or defiance of the terrorists. Slogans of hate or revenge were mostly absent, while the tone was more of shock, sorrow and defiance. Poems, some by grieving parents, others taken from their dead children's classbooks, were taped to the walls of the gym.
A taxi-driver told me that revenge was not on people's minds yet, because they were burying the dead. But it would come, on the 40th day after the killing. And then there would be trouble. Local people do not blame Muslim fundamentalists: They blame their old enemies, the Ingush, and also the Chechens. Not only were there Ingush among the terrorists, but also the townspeople said the Ingush had given them a place to hide in the days leading up to the attack.
Most poignant of all were photographs of missing children which began to be printed on posters by anxious parents, each one printed with the parent's phone number and a plea to get in touch. More than 100 children were too badly burned to be identified, and with more than a month needed to get a DNA operation running, rumours began to circulate that these children were still alive.
Wild rumours told of people seeing these children brought alive from the school, then handed over to volunteers only to disappear on the road to hospital.
The idea of Ingush bandits capturing these children is hard to imagine. Almost certainly the missing children will eventually be identified among the mass of human material sitting in the morgue, but the parents cling to slivers of hope. Good luck and bad luck stories intertwine amid the sad visitors to the high school. I met a teenage boy who's family had moved here from Kazakhstan just 20 days before, his father anxious to complete the move in time for his 9-year-old sister to start school. She died in the siege.
Another man was at the school to fix the sign announcing that his sister was the new entertainment officer.
He was out of the school 10 minutes before the terrorists held it up. "I should have been there, I should not have left," he told me. He tried to find the door sign for me, but it was somewhere under the smashed door, itself covered in bricks and roof spars and a mountain of dust.
Instead, he gave me a children's book with a bullet hole in it and a brightly drawn child's painting of local men in fur hats and fur boots.
I told him I could not take something from the school.
He said: "It is correct to say that you cannot take something from here. But I am giving you these things, and that is different." By the end of the week the gym was overflowing with mementos of all kinds. Orthodox Christian icons had been stacked on one windowsill.
Many teddy bears were added to the mix, including a huge brown bear who sat in the middle of the gym all week, every day more buried than before inside a mountain of flowers.
It was hard not to feel the violent contrast between the ruined building, most of its blasted open by the special forces, and the delicacy of the visitors. Flowers are laid with such tender care over great holes gouged in masonry.
Bouquets arrived from across Russia but none from abroad, with the exception of Israel, whose food ministry flew more than 300 bouquets direct from Tel Aviv to show solidarity in the war on terror.
By night candles were lit around the gym, throwing ghastly shapes across the opposite walls. They were kept lit on some nights by relays of young people.
Even then, with the school frightening and dark, some mourners come. Taking photographs in the gym on the last night I heard a teenage boy crying outside. This was not the gentle weeping of the women who come to the school by day, but a wild howl of pain that went on and on.
The wife of the family who had offered me a place to stay, Fatima, was standing beside me.
She tut-tutted and repeated a mantra I heard many times last week, that men are not supposed to cry.
"He is a teenager, so he is very young," she said. On the way home late on the final night Fatima stopped me and showed me shrines that had been staring me in the face all week.
She told me that it was an Ossetian custom to leave a light on all night at the house of a deceased person.
As I looked around I saw dozens and dozens of lights still burning in houses and apartments right across Beslan.