On the evening of Saturday, Feb. 14, 2004, a young girl named Sophia witnessed her first Carnival parade. She was only about 7-months old and already had lived a lifetime of activity. On the day before, she had arrived in New Orleans from her birth country of Kazakhstan. Newly adopted by Jeremy and Karen Zollinger, Sophia Rose Zollinger, as she would then be known, was taken to her new West Bank home.
Having already crossed the world, on the next day, she crossed the Mississippi river for the second time to see the Sparta parade. There was the music and the flambeaux, and then a man riding a white horse approached. Dressed in glittering white and wearing a sparkling medallion, he looked somewhat like a European knight. Then something strange happened. Sophia was just a newborn in a new world, but the man in white stopped before her. He was Sparta’s captain, the equivalent of prime minister in the land she came from. Though English was literally foreign to her, she might have noticed the excitement in then Captain Dave Mulnick’s voice as he proclaimed something futuristic, “Hail Queen Sophia!”
There are no queens in Kazakhstan, which is a part of the old Soviet Union but has managed to maintain independence. Oil is its biggest industry. The country is also the site of “Baikonur”, the largest space launch complex in the world. The country’s most famous celebrity is fictional, “Borat,” the Kazakhstani journalist played in the movies by English comedian Sasha Baron Cohen. Reportedly the Borat character has such a following that he has been a stimulant for the area’s tourism.
Sophia has never visited Kazakhstan, nor does she have immediate plans to do so. She has lived the life of an American girl blessed with having the New Orleans experience.
Unique to that experience is Carnival. Her dad and uncle are both in Sparta. She has been a junior maid and a senior maid. Last year, she got the news that the rider in white had tipped her off to way back at her first parade. She will be the Queen of Sparta, 2023.
Her king will be Dr. Marc Ryan Matrana,
and they will reign over a krewe now renamed from the Knights of Sparta to the Sparta Society, in recognition of the influx of female members who now make up the majority of the formerly all-male krewe.
Sophia’s resume is fit for a queen. She attended Sacred Heart school. Working with kids has been one of her favorite pastimes. Now she is majoring in kinesiology (the study of body movements) at LSU with plans to be an occupational therapist.
At the Bal Masque, she will be making the gracious movements of a queen, for which she says she is “very excited.”
On parade night she will watch from a royal reviewing stand as the path connecting Kazakhstan and Sparta winds through a land where beads dangle from trees.
On the evening of Saturday, Feb. 14, 2004, a young girl named Sophia witnessed her first Carnival parade. She was only about 7-months old and already had lived a lifetime of activity. On the day before, she had arrived in New Orleans from her birth country of Kazakhstan. Newly adopted by Jeremy and Karen Zollinger, Sophia Rose Zollinger, as she would then be known, was taken to her new West Bank home.