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Mobilvetta Tekno Line K Yacht 95 2022

By Peter Baber Published: June 21, 2022

The rear-lounge layout of this comfortable and spacious four-berth should appeal to UK buyers, says Peter Baber

We’ve recently reviewed the K Yacht 59, Mobilvetta’s A-class take on an increasingly popular end-washroom layout.

But that is not the only new A-class model the Italian manufacturer – whose vehicles are brought to the UK exclusively by Marquis Leisure – has launched for the 2022 season. Ever mindful of the UK market, the Trigano Group brand has also launched the rear-lounge K Yacht 95.

This 7.45m-long vehicle has many of the same external upgrades as its sibling – a bigger windscreen, 4400kg MTPLM (which gives you a 1002kg payload, easily enough for four), Alde heating and Fiat’s nine-speed automatic gearbox.

In addition, you still get the driver’s door on the ‘right’ side for the UK, and a rear-view camera. The main difference is the garage that runs right across the motorhome under the rear lounge.

Inside, the front dinette includes a large permanent table, easily big enough for four.

While the windows let in plenty of daylight, an LED under the drop-down bed lights the area at night. There are TV sockets and a bracket above the travel seats , and so long as you are not sitting in those seats, TV viewing should be fine.

A cloth pocket on the edge of the settee closest to the door is a handy place to keep your magazines. There is a mains socket on the other edge of this settee, and two USBs on the forward edge of the offside settee.

The rear lounge is spacious, but the base cushions rest on boards, rather than slats, which these days feels a touch old-fashioned.

The foldaway table here is plenty bit enough, although getting it out of the wardrobe was quite a challenge.

The side kitchen has a useful ambient light at worktop level – great at night and a helpful addition to the daylight coming through the large window.

Work space is a little minimal, but usefully the three-burner hob does include an induction plate. You also get a handy spice rack, and a socket above the hob for a kettle. There is a 149-litre fridge with an ample freezer – easily enough for the provisions of a family of four, although it is only three-way, not AES. Pleasingly for a Continental-built motorhome, you do get a combined oven and grill here.

Despite being a side washroom, the shower cubicle gets its own roof vent. It also has two drain holes – handy if the ‘van is not quite level when you’re pitched up – and a shelf for toiletries.

The main washroom has a salad-bowl style handbasin, ladder radiator, mirror, toothbrush mug and toilet roll holder. The offside location means the cassette toilet hatch is away from any awning.

The drop-down bed is easy to manage and a good width at 1.3m. It includes a well-placed light for reading.

The two settees in the rear lounge are 1.94m long, so they make comfortable single beds on their own by removing the backrests. But you can almost as easily make up the double by pulling out slats. The cushions fit snugly.

In terms of storage: there is internal access to the area under the offside settee. There is to the nearside settee too, although much of this is taken up with the Alde heater. There is no internal access to the rear gage. There are six overhead lockers, and  a wardrobe, too; the latter is half-height, and there’s a small cupboard below it.

In the front lounge there is storage under the nearside seat, one overhead locker and cubby-holes in the cab

The kitchen has two further lockers, two useful pan cupboards and two drawers.

The washroom has a large cupboard and a shallower one behind the mirror. You can open these without having to open the main washroom door.

PRACTICAL MOTORHOME SAYS…

This A-class model certainly looks and feels luxurious – it’s stylish and everything feels good quality. For the price, we’d like to have seen a microwave and separate oven, but storage is good, allowing you to make the most of that large payload.

The K Yacht 95 certainly makes Mobilvetta’s line-up even more amenable to the UK buyer than it already was. Its rear lounge is very comfortable, and will provide more than adequate sleeping for growing children right up until they are teenagers.

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Best A-class motorhome for 2022

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Its rear lounge is very comfortable, and will provide more than adequate sleeping for growing children right up until they are teenagers

Technical Specifications

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The Batsbi?

Other peoples, resources & links, the pagan religious practices of the chechens and the ingush.

The following article on the pagan religious beliefs and practices of the Chechens and the Ingush was copied from the December 2010 edition (Vol. 8, No.3) of Interreligious Insight ( link ) — "a journal of dialogue and engagement" published by the World Congress of Faiths. The article was written by Dr. Michael Berman, a teacher and writer whose publications include The Shamanic Themes in Armenian Folktales , Shamanic Journeys through the Caucasus , Georgia through its Folktales and Shamanic Journeys Through Daghestan (please see my short Caucasian bibliography for full bibliographical information). "Michael originally trained as a Core Shamanic Counsellor with the Scandinavian Centre for Shamanic Studies, but these days his focus is more on the academic side of shamanism, with a particular interest in the folktales with shamanic themes told by and collected from the peoples of the Caucasus. For more information: www.Thestoryteller.org.uk". Dr. Berman's article is of great interest, for it contains many quotations from Bashir Dalgat's remarkable "Pervobytnaia religiia chechentsev" ("The aboriginal religion of the Chechens"), first published (in abriged form) in 1893 in Vladikavkaz in Terskii Sbornik , the journal of the "Terskii Oblastnoi Statisticheskii Komitet" ("Terek oblast Statistical Committee"). Dalgat's book is one of the earliest sources of information on the traditional i.e. pagan religious beliefs and customs of the Nakh peoples, and is a highly-valued "primary" source of information for any student of such matters.

Before considering the religious practices of the Chechens and Ingush, it might be best to start with some background information on the region. The Chechens live in a small territory called Chechnya bordered by Daghestan to the east and northeast; Ingushetia and north Ossetia to the west; Russia‘s Stravrapol Province and Cossack region to the north; and Georgia to the south and southwest. The Caucasus Mountains, which stretch along a line 1,100 kilometres long between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, protect the people not only from enemies but from outside influences in general. The Chechens therefore have retained many traditional customs and practices. As for Ingushetia, it was created in June 1992 as a result of the secession of the Ingush from Checheno-Ingushetia, where the Ingush had been very much in the minority. The decision to break away followed the declaration of independence by the Chechens in 1991 (see Matveena, 1999, pp. 91 & 92). The Chechens and Ingush have lived where they are now since prehistoric times, and while the Mesopotamians, Persians, Turks, Mongols, Slavs and others have greatly influenced the region with their wars, conquests and trade, being fiercely proud and protective of their roots and background, the inhabitants of Chechnya have remained ethnically the same for thousands of years. As for the languages spoken by the peoples, both Chechen and Ingush belong to the nakh branch of the nakh- Daghestanian, or northeast Caucasian, language family and they can both understand each other. Although the current generation of Chechens and Ingush are Muslims and what they practise is a localized Sufi tradition, they still preserve remnants of their pagan past in both their traditions and their folktales. Like many other tribal peoples, the Ingush and the Chechens believed in existence beyond the grave and this was reflected in their burial practices: The belief was based on the evidence of eye-witnesses, of people who have visited the other world – very typical of many other peoples of the world. The other world is similar to this one; it is constructed with the imagination of the Ingush and Chechens by analogy with their native land, the mountain region... The other world is under the ground. It is ruled by the underground God, Eshtr or Eter. A man dies only when that God wishes to take him. The other world is called in Ingush Deli-Ailli, while this present world is Deli-Malkhli. The Ingush say, Deli-Malkhli was built in three years, Deli-Ailli was built in seven years. (Dalgat, 2004, p. 25) This, no doubt, partly explains why the numbers three and seven feature so prominently in the folktales from the region. (The fact that traditionally an Ingush or Chechen man is expected to know the names and birthplaces or origins of his paternal ancestors going back seven generations is yet another indication of the importance attached to this number). These peoples did not view death as going to one’s eternal rest, since the deceased in the other world were believed to do “all their work just exactly as in this world, and moreover simultaneously with the latter: when haymaking or harvesting finishes in this world, the work ceases simultaneously in the other world. The only difference is that the dead people work at nights, when the sun leaves the world of the living for the land of the dead” (Dalgat, 2004, p. 26). According to folk belief, at the moment of death, on the boundary between this world and the other one, when the divine Eshtr has already taken half of a man’s soul for himself, the dying man sees the other world with all those who have died before him. Those around him... pose him questions like: “How is such and such a dead person living?”... If the deceased had not been buried in the proper manner... [in a burial vault that was regarded as the necessary dwelling for a dead person], then the dying man would usually reply that the dead man was troubled without a roof. If a memorial feast had not been made for the deceased, then the dying man would say that the deceased had no food and was living on charity. The dying man would be given various errands to perform in the other world too. (Dalgat, 2004, p. 27) As for the burial of a dead person, he was buried along with everything it was thought he might need on the road to, and in, the other world. And at one time in the distant past, this would have included both his horse and his wife (see Dalgat, 2004, p. 32). The Chechen and Ingush concepts of the soul had much in common with those of other tribal peoples, as we can see from the following tale. One day lame Temir, whose son had been lost, called into a smithy. At that time the blacksmith was sleeping, and Temir, not wanting to interrupt his sleep, sat down next to him and began waiting for him to wake up. He noticed that a fly came out of the blacksmith’s nose, crawled along the tongs across a basin to the anvil. Beyond the anvil there was a huge fissure; the fly descended into this fissure and stopped there quite a long time. Then it crawled back out and, after passing the anvil, crossed the basin by the same tongs, but while crossing it fell into the water. For a long time it was struggling in the water, with difficulty it crawled out on to the tongs, and went back into the nose of the blacksmith. “It seems I have been asleep for a long time!” “Yes, and I was sitting here all the time you were asleep”. Temir replied. Temir said to the blacksmith, “Amuse me. I have lost my son, and I am in great grief. Tell me something”. “But what can I tell you. After all, we cannot reach what I have just seen in my dream”. Temir started asking him to relate his dream. The blacksmith began, “In my dream I crossed a big river and an iron mountain and went down into a large cave, where there was treasure of gold and silver; for a long time I stood there, not having the strength to tear my eyes away from the brilliance and the splendour. But being conscious that I had to return, I climbed out of the cave. On the return journey when I was crossing the river, I fell off the bridge and almost drowned”. Temir realised that the soul of the blacksmith had come out in the form of a fly. And guessing that there had to be a treasure in the smithy, he persuaded the blacksmith to give the place up to him. Then after digging up the place where the soul of the blacksmith had crawled, Temir exposed untold wealth, with which he collected an army and subjugated the whole world. (Dalgat, 2004, p. 39-40) This traditional folktale illustrates the ancient Ingush belief in the reality of dreams and that the soul for them was something material rather than an abstract spiritual concept. In fact, it demonstrates an understanding of the soul that is remarkably similar to that of the Siberian Buryats. There is a parallel Buryat tale in which the soul takes the form of a bee when it crawls out of someone’s nose for an out-of-body experience (see Dalgat, 2004, p. 40). What the people practised can be described as a form of polytheism. Among the Chechens there were two systems of gods – a cult of ancestors and folk heroes and the worship of the deified powers of nature. The High or Supreme God, the King of all creation and the Father of all other gods is called Dela, Dyala or Deyla... The relation of Dyala to the other gods is like that of a father to his children: everything of course depends on Dyala; what He wants, that has to happen; but the other gods also act independently, each in his own sphere. (Dalgat, 2004, p. 98) The Chechens also had great respect for the one-eyed god Elta, the patron of hunters, who rules over the forests and the wild animals. He is the king of the forests and of all its inhabitants, both the forest people and the beasts. Success in hunting completely depends on Elta... In translation Elta means corn (breaded grain), and actually he performs two functions in parallel – the god of hunting and the god of the harvests. (Dalgat, 2004, p. 91) The Sun and the Moon are also anthropomorphised in Chechen folklore. The Sun and the Moon have mothers; the mother of the Sun, or Malkh-Nana, is called Azoy, and the mother of the Moon, or Betti-Nana, is called Kinch. The Chechens say that the Sun comes out of the sea in the morning, and sinks into it once more in the evening; when it comes up on to the horizon, something black separates from it; the people say that it is the sea pouring off the Sun. (Dalgat, 2004, p. 92) The Mother of the Winds was important as well. At the god’s command she would raise a terrible storm to blow away the goods of the dead who had sinned before God. For mediation between the gods and people the Chechens developed a special type of priest or shaman known as a tsaynsag. In order to become a tsaynsag , besides intelligence and good conduct and the respect of the population, the man also required the ability to interpret his dreams and to tell fortunes – qualities required from the Roman augurs, Siberian shamans and Indian priests. These qualities make the priest a real mediator between God and the people... The priest learns the cause of bad fortune and the will of the gods by means of divination, and several methods of divination exist among the Chechens... In former times there were very many sorcerers and sorceresses throughout Chechnya; everybody treated them with respect and resorted to their mediation in every difficult situation such as illnesses or general misfortunes, asking them to find out the cause of the misfortune and advise them how to be saved from it. “They were the mentors of the people and, like the gods, faithfully gave interpretation of dreams and explained illnesses”, said Ganzyh; they were called dzyry. (Dalgat, 2004, pp. 84, 85) Various forms of divination were practised, including the measuring of a shawl with the elbow, winding cotton wool round a spoon, making use of stones, mirrors, sheep’s bones and also by consulting Arab books (see Dalgat, 2004, p. 86). Of all the Chechens’ gods, the most mighty and honoured was Seli the Thunderer. In the Caucasus Mountains, the land of thunderstorms, this god found suitable soil for himself. In the mountains the most terrible phenomenon is the thunderstorm with thunder and lightning from them the Chechen has to suffer many problems of all kinds; every minute both his field and his very life suffer dangers from them. It is not surprising that Seli is held in such honour by the Chechens. He is the most terrible and most capricious god for them, and he has to be propitiated more then the others. But at the same time he is just, and punishes only those who deserve it... All the Chechens honour him equally, and one could say that even all of the inhabitants of the Caucasus Mountains (of course under various names) he is a god, not of one community or tribe, but of them all … One can judge the strength of the cult of Seli by the fact that they consider a man killed by lightning (Seli’s firebrand) as blessed, and he is buried quite separately from other dead people” (Dalgat, 2004, pp. 94, 95). A sacred place for the Chechens was the domestic hearth, believed to be chosen by God himself and so inviolable. A terrible retribution follows any insult or disrespect towards it. The fire, the chain, the cauldron and hearth enjoy the highest respect in the home: the chain and the cauldron are respected as symbols of the domestic hearth, while the fire [whose deity is known as Seli] is an indissoluble component of it. Even the ashes, and soot on the ceiling, are considered sacred, thanks to its connection with the hearth. (Dalgat, 2004, p. 53) Apart from the fact that it was considered to be sacred, the family hearth, in concentrating the members of the family round itself, also had an “organising” importance: Its cult sanctifies the power of the head of the family, as a devotee who brings sacrifices to the gods. Its influence [helps to explain] …the sacred character of the family as a community..., and the sanctity and inviolability of a guest as a temporary member of the family. (Dalgat, 2004, p. 55) And anyone who visits Chechnya will have the opportunity to experience firsthand the people’s legendary hospitality. In view of the fact that the peoples clearly believed in the existence of at least one other reality, that it was possible for adepts to undertake soul journeys, and in the efficacy of divination, to regard what was practised by the priests as a form of shamanism would surely be a reasonable assumption to make, even though the term itself would of course have been totally alien to them. As to whether the priests actually entered trance states in the course of their work, though, remains unclear. However, given the popularity of the mystic dance among followers of the Sufi tariqat or religious path, it would seem that people in the region have a natural propensity for doing so, which would suggest that even though we lack concrete evidence, it was very likely to have been the case. BIBLIOGRAPHY Dalgat, B. K. (2004) The Aboriginal Religions of the Chechens and Ingush , Moscow: nAUKA. (Translated from the Russian by David Hunt October 2009, and kept in the British Library. The book was first published in an abridged form in 1893). Jaimoukha, A. M. (2005). The Chechens: A Handbook . new York; London: Routledge Curzon. Matveena, A. (1999). The North Caucasus: Russia’s Fragile Borderland . London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Smith, S. (2006). Allah’s Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya . London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks.

The .pdf of this article can be downloaded from this page of the Interreligious Insight website.

Unless stated otherwise or obviously not the case, all the text and images on this website are © A.J.T. Bainbridge 2006-2011

Do get in touch! Gmail: alexjtb

Chechnya, Russia and 20 years of conflict

How the tiny region shaped post-Soviet Russia on the 20th anniversary of the start of first Chechnya war.

Moscow, Russia – Twenty years ago on Thursday, Moscow started what it thought would be a “blitzkrieg” against secular separatists in Chechnya, a tiny, oil-rich province in Russia’s North Caucasus region that had declared its independence.

But the first Chechen war became Russia’s Vietnam; the second war was declared a victory only in 2009. The two conflicts have reshaped Russia, Chechnya, their rulers – and those who oppose them.

In 1994, s hortly after Moscow invaded Chechnya in an effort to restore its territorial integrity, Akhmad Kadyrov, a bearded, barrel-chested Muslim scholar turned guerrilla commander, declared jihad on all Russians and said each Chechen should kill at least 150 of them.

That was the proportion of the populations on each side of the conflict: some 150 million Russians and less than a million Chechens in a small, landlocked province, which the separatists wanted to carve out of Russia.

Western media and politicians dubbed the Chechens “freedom fighters” – an army of Davids fighting the Russian Goliath.

Moscow was lambasted internationally for disproportionate use of force and rolling back on the democratic freedoms that former leader Boris Yeltsin was so eager to introduce after the 1991 Soviet Union collapse.

Tens of thousands died amid atrocities committed by both sides – and many more were displaced before 1996, when the Russians retreated, leaving Chechnya essentially independent.

Retreating was a humiliation for Russia’s military machine that less than a decade earlier had presented a seemingly formidable threat to the entire Western world.

Chechen against Chechen

Independence did not quite work out for the Chechens.  The separatist government based in the ruined capital, Grozny, lost control over the rest of Chechnya.

Feuding field commanders and  foreign jihadists, such as the Saudi known as Emir al-Khattab,  ruled small districts with their own little armies. Kidnappings for ransom – along with primitive extraction of oil – were their main sources of income.

Many of the foreigners adhered to a puritanical Muslim ideology  known as Wahhabism  that ran counter to Chechnya’s Sufi traditions.

Akhmad Kadyrov, who was appointed as top Mufti of Chechnya, came into opposition with the puritans and their Chechen supporters, because he saw their extremist views as a threat to the separatist movement. In 1998, Kadyrov openly renounced the Wahhabis – and barely survived the first of many assassination attempts.

Kadyrov soon switched alliances, siding with the people upon whom he had once declared war – the Russians.

A virtually unknown ex-KBG officer, Vladimir Putin  became Russia’s new prime minister i n August 1999 and w ithin weeks led a military operation against the Chechen fighters.   

RELATED:  Timeline: Attacks in Russia  

When a series of explosions in apartment buildings in Moscow and two Russian towns killed more than 300 Russians, Moscow blamed Chechen rebels and embarked on an epic “anti-terrorist operation,” which became the second Chechen war.

Putin’s approval ratings skyrocketed, paving the way for his first presidency.  A ided by Kadyrov and other Chechen clans who had pledged allegiance to the Kremlin, t he Russian military  quickly returned most of Chechnya to Moscow’s control. In 2003, Kadyrov was elected Chechen president.

Russian targets

Cornered in Chechnya, the separatists took the war to Russia.

Attacks throughout the country became a grim reality of the new war and involved explosions in cities and towns, on planes and public transport.

At least two dozen attacks were carried out by female suicide bombers. Dubbed “black widows”, they became a sinister image imprinted on Russia’s collective psyche.

One such attack killed Akhmad Kadyrov in May 2004. His son, 27-year-old Ramzan Kadyrov, was too young to run for president at the time, but as head of his father’s security service, he quickly became Chechnya’s de facto ruler. I n 2007, soon after he turned 30, the younger Kadyrov  was elected president.

Four months after his father’s assassination, Chechen separatists seized a public school in the town of Beslan taking more than 1,000 hostages, mostly children. Almost 200 kids died when Russian forces stormed the school. The incident changed the world’s attitude towards the Chechen cause – “freedom fighters” became “Islamic insurgents” in the Western media.

Meanwhile, the media in Russia came under attack.

“The saying was that it was journalists who won the first Chechen war,” says Tatyana Lokshina, deputy director of the Moscow branch of Human Rights Watch, an international rights watchdog.

Moscow used unfavourable media coverage of the war as an excuse to curtail press freedoms. The Kremlin took over all national television networks and most major newspapers.

“For years, Vladimir Putin saw the pacification of Chechnya as his main achievement,” says Stanislav Belkovsky, a Moscow-based political analyst . “In that respect, Putin has a colossal psychological dependency on Chechnya and Ramzan Kadyrov who ensured the pacification.”

The Beslan crisis also served as a pretext to tighten political screws in Russia. Putin eliminated regional gubernatorial elections, complicated participation of opposition parties in elections, and limited democratic freedoms.

The public hailed Putin for bringing stability and pacifying Chechnya.  The victory revived Moscow’s imperial ambitions – at least in the area of the former Soviet Union.

Shaping today’s Russia

Moscow won the brief 2008 Russo-Georgian war over the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia . In March 2014, Russia took over Crimea from Ukraine and helped unleash a civil war between pro-Russian separatists and the central Ukrainian government just a month later.

Both Chechen wars became systemic factors in shaping today's Russia. Instead of peaceful development inside the country we moved to the priority of external expansion by  - Stanislav Belkovsky, political analyst

“Both Chechen wars became systemic factors in shaping today’s Russia,” says Belkovsky . “Instead of peaceful development inside the country, we moved to the priority of external expansion.”

Putin declared “the counter-terrorism operation” in Chechnya over in 2009 – just when things in North Caucasus took a turn for the worse.

Dagestan and several other provinces in the region became the new hotbeds of radical Islamism. A new generation of Moscow’s foes did not want secular separation – instead they are fighting to establish a “Caucasus Emirate” that includes adjacent Russian regions with sizable Muslim populations.

At least 529 people were killed and 457 wounded in North Caucasus in 2013, according to Kavkazsky Uzel, a Russian web portal that monitors the situation in the region. The confrontation has turned into “Europe’s most active armed conflict ” , according to the International Crisis Group, a conflict-monitoring organisation.

The insurgency became self-sustaining because of a vicious circle perpetuated by corruption and brutality.

Federal forces and police trigger the violence with extra-judicial killings, arrests, kidnappings and other abuses, according to rights groups and critics. They claim young men have no other options but to join the rebels because corrupt officials blacklist their families to extort bribes.

The fighters, in turn, blackmail corrupt officials who embezzle lavish funds from Moscow. The practise involves “sending a flash card” containing a video message in which bearded men demand a “jihad tax”.

Storming Grozny again

Ramzan Kadyrov was, perhaps, the least attentive man in the crowd of about 1,100 officials in an opulent Kremlin hall on December 4 during Putin’s annual address. The stocky 38-year-old Chechen leader fidgeted in his seat and constantly checked his phone.

Just hours before the Kremlin ceremony, a dozen Islamist fighters attacked Grozny, Chechnya’s newly-rebuilt capital. Shootouts in a publishing house, an empty school, and an office building killed 11 insurgents and 14 law enforcement officers.

A day after the attack, Kadyrov said the attackers’ families should be thrown out of Chechnya, their houses destroyed. At least six houses that belonged to relatives of the Grozny attackers have been burned down by masked men, Lokshina of Human Rights Watch said.

Kadyrov’s threats were not new to Chechens. During the second Chechen war, he led paramilitary squads known as kadyrovtsy  that soon gained notoriety for abducting, torturing and killing separatists and civilians suspected of aiding them, according to human rights groups and survivors.

A string of his political enemies and critics, including a former bodyguard, an investigative reporter, and a human rights activist have been gunned down in Chechnya, Moscow, Austria, and Dubai.

Kadyrov denied involvement in the contract-style killings.

Over the years, Kadyrov developed a penchant for luxury – he has a private zoo, race horses, and numerous sports cars. Pop stars, Hollywood actors and sportsmen show up at concerts held on his birthday.

His portraits are seen on billboards, government buildings and schoolchildren’s lapel pins; while streets, schools, mosques and military units are named after his father and mother.

Whatever he does is breaking news on Chechen television – he is shown threatening rebels and corrupt officials, boxing with his ministers, welcoming foreign dignitaries,and bestowing money, apartments and cars upon average Chechens.

Some say Kadyrov’s lifestyle and political ways make him look like an eccentric sovereign, not a public official on the Kremlin payroll. 

“Today, Chechnya is a de facto independent state,” says Belkovsky. “Although formally [Kadyrov] shows loyalty to Putin and formally Chechnya is part of Russia.”