Sleeping on Graveyards

Traveling Through 300 Years of Khakass History

In the summer of 1720, Tsar Peter I dispatched the German explorer Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt to carry out a “physical description” of Siberia, to “discover all manner of rarities and pharmaceutical 

 substances: grasses, flowers, roots and seeds.” He was also tasked with investigating the fauna. His charge was not restricted by length or region, and so he ended up traveling Siberia for seven years, from Tobolsk to Lake Baikal. His findings were collected in a 10-volume encyclopedia, “Survey of Siberia.” Included in this monumental work is a description of what many consider to be Russia’s first scientific archaeological survey. 

The focus of Messerschmidt’s archaeology was Khakassia, in south-central Siberia. Through this, Messerschmidt brought Khakassia world fame as an “archaeological Mecca.”

Yet Khakassia is not just for archaeologists. The Siberian explorer Semyon Remezov, who visited the region about the same time as Messerschmidt, described Khakassia this way: “A fertile land, rich in vegetables and livestock, lacking nothing, except for honey and grapes… More than anywhere else on Earth, there are countless open spaces and rare wild animals. And traders freely import and export. There are countless large and midsized rivers, lakes and ponds. Fish in abundance, numerous and easily-caught. Ores, gold, silver, copper, tin, steel and every sort of beautiful pigment for silk and precious stone...” 

Five thousand years ago, the ancestors of the Khakass arrived in Southern Siberia along with the Huns. Over the millennia, they mixed bloodlines with numerous Turkic tribes (see box, page 55). While the modern Khakass nationality emerged relatively recently – in the 17th and 18th centuries – their cultural foundations have changed little from ancient times, such that it can be said that the Khakass have lived on the territory of modern Khakassia for some 2000 years.

Today, Khakassia is sufficiently Russified that in many ways it seems, on the surface, to differ little from the rest of Siberia. But then you begin to notice the graveyards. Along roads... next to villages... everywhere there are ancient graveyards marked with gravestones. And whether you come across them in the morning, amidst a pastoral landscape filled with grazing cattle and frolicking children, or whether it is in the evening with a descending fog and thickening gloom – straight out of Tolkien, they are always a surprising sight. Perhaps even a frightening one. People live day in and day out atop these graveyards, sleeping on them at night and rising in them each morning... and they see nothing surprising in this.

Perhaps this is because Khakassia is really the East. Or at least a crossroads to the East: caravan trails once passed through here to and from Mongolia, China, Tibet and India. Thus, the locals have always had different views on graveyards from Europeans.

The Khakass were also pagan-animists for thousands of years. And, according to their beliefs, spirits ruled over all things. Every piece of the landscape had special spirits responsible for it. Mountain spirits presided over the mountains, river spirits over the river, taigezi over the taiga. Spirits could be good or evil, peaceful or vengeful. And death was only a formal transition from one world to another. What is more, the graveyards were ruled by the ancestral spirits – in other words, the spirits of one’s own people. Thus, a graveyard was a good, light and comfortable place. 

A real Khakass will therefore calmly pass the night atop a graveyard. Yet he will not spend a night in an abandoned home for any price. This is because every home has its own spirit – a domovoy. It lives in a special wooden block (in Russian, a churka), accepting various tributes and petitions from the home’s residents. It behaves properly as long as there are people living in the house. As soon as people leave the house and stop taking care of the domovoy, however, he leaves his churka and becomes the master of the house, and not a hospitable one, but an unruly, angry and unpredictable one. Meeting up with such a domovoy is like coming face-to-face with a vampire: you don’t know if you will come through it alive...

There are also spirits responsible for specific geographic places of special importance to the Khakass. One of the most famous and awesome of these is Sayan – spirit of the Sayan mountains. There are many legends about this mythical deity, most centering on the notion of a sleeping Sayan which should not be awoken. In fact, the shape of the main ridge of the Western Sayan and its passes is quite similar to a huge body, lying on its back. You can even see its hair, the profile of its face, its arms lying across its middle, and its socks and shoes. As legend has it, the sleeping Sayan is merely dozing, occasionally opening his huge eye to keep watch over his land. Should people not behave themselves, he will rise up and severely punish them.

Khakassia – today a republic within the Russian Federation – was joined to Russia in 1727, the same year Messerschmidt finished his travels. Over the past three centuries, relations between Russia and Khakassia were never simple. Russia conquered Khakass lands, brutally repressed indigenous populations – as is common in empires – and forcibly converted Khakassia to Christianity. Yet unification with Russia did protect  Khakassia from some pillaging by Mongolian warlords, enabled the development of its economy and created conditions for the formation of a modern Khakass nationality.

The region’s history, meanwhile, has always been closely tied to that of Krasnoyarsk region – a massive geographic formation in central Siberia which straddles the Yenisey  river. In 1628, Cossacks built an ostrog – a military fort – named Krasny Yar (“Red Bank”) above the Yenisey. With the building of the Achinsk-Krasnoyarsk-Kansk trakt (road) in the 1730s and 1740s, the settlement developed rapidly, soon becoming the industrial and administrative center for central Siberia. 

Just south of Krasnoyarsk, the Abakan river flows down from the mountains and into the Yenisey. In 1675, at the confluence of the two rivers, another ostrog – Abakansk – was founded. A century later, the Ust-Abakansk settlement was founded here. In 1931 it was renamed Abakan, the modern capital of Khakassia (current population 150,000). Today, 300 years after the region’s assimilation into the Russian empire, the river still connects everything. One can float all the way from Abaza (population 18,000) at the head of the Abakan, just 200 kilometers from Mongolia, down the Yenisey to the Arctic Ocean, a distance of some 4,000 kilometers.

Today, of the 580,000 people who live in Khakassia, just 11% are Khakass, and 80% are Russians. Yet this Turkic people has largely preserved its ancient traditions, including aspects of shamanism. The modern manifestation of shamanism is actually a strange mix. On the one hand, a shaman – one who communes with the unseen spirits and cures with divination and magic – is a rather theatrical profession, whose representatives must be able to put on a show for tourists. Yet, on the other hand, in the evening, the shaman must dispense worthy advice to villagers. A shaman, it turns out, is far from a simple person. The Khakass live in small family communities of 40-60 persons, so if a shaman were a charlatan and had no common sense or useful knowledge, then everyone in his community would soon know it and no one would turn to him for assistance.

It is something of a mystery to scientists, how these small family communities, living in isolation, have managed not only to avoid assimilation, but to preserve their original culture. Some ethnographers focus on the Khakass people’s connection with nature. Those who lived on the Khakass steppe were not subjugated by their environment, nor did they seek to subjugate it. Instead, they learned to adapt what they found in nature to fit their needs. A graphic example of this are their open-air shrines. The Khakass did not construct special buildings as churches, but turned parts of the natural world into shrines, sanctifying the ground itself. Such sanctuaries were created wherever there was a place of importance to those living here: in mountain passes or in so-called clan spaces – places which had historical significance for a particular family. Often, stone pyramids or wooden poles were erected on these sites, to which ceremonial ribbons are fixed. Ribbons are also sometimes simply tied to nearby trees. 

At one time, the ribbons were made of scraps of cloth torn from pilgrims’ clothing. Now pilgrims prepare ribbons before setting out. And the ribbons’ colors are symbolic: they must be blue, red or white (no connection with the Russian tricolor flag). Among the Khakass, white symbolizes the male essence, red the female, and blue the color of the sky, or holiness. Yellow is never used, as this is seen to be the color of sickness. In this, the Khakass differ from their eastern neighbors, for whom the color of yellow signifies the Golden Lotus, or happiness. Green is also not to be tied on – though you will still sometimes see it; this is because the color green belongs to the mountain spirit himself. In rare cases, one can use black ribbons, in order to commune with the spirits of one’s ancestors.

Among outdoor shrines, rock faces are peculiarly interesting. In the village of Kazanovka lives the Maynagashev clan, which traces its roots directly to the nearby cliffs. Their family history goes something like this. When searching for the best place to settle down, the old woman Iney and grampa Absakh lead their family to a brook, at which point the family began to fight over whether to settle on this or that side of the brook. In her fury, Iney hit the cliff so hard that Absakh flew across the brook and fell on the neighboring mountain, where he himself was transformed into the rock face. In her anguish, Iney also petrified into rock, and so the clan settled on both sides of the brook, between the two cliff faces known as the old woman and the grampa. 

The grampa cliff is visible from a long way off, but the old woman is no longer there. It was blown up in 1962 by the Soviets. The official explanation was that the mountain was destroyed to make way for a railroad. But in reality it was part of the overall struggle against religion. Only older residents or past visitors can recount what the mountain looked like. As a matter of fact, it was first described by the German explorer Daniel Messerschmidt. He wrote that the cliff was known as Khurtuyakh-Taz, which translated means, “old stone woman.” The cliffs, he wrote, resembled a female profile, and that near the top someone had carved eyes and a mouth into the face. 

Long-time residents tell of how, after the old woman was brought down, the village was visited by all manner of suffering: sicknesses, in-fighting and the death of livestock. And while some of these stories are certainly apocryphal, official statistics indicate that, in the 1960s, suicides increased by a factor of six in the region. And there should be nothing surprising in this. After all, open air shrines, thousand year-old burial sites, myths and customs, were all natural parts of life that had developed here over the centuries. To deprive people of such things is like taking the forest from its animals. But, thankfully, the loss of a few trees in that forest, while painful, did not lead to catastrophe. Khakassia is full of myths and miracles. And, of course, ancient gravestones.

Walking through fields, you can freely run your fingers over these grave markers and, as a matter of fact, do whatever you wish with these artifacts. In Krasnoyarsk, just 270 kilometers from Abakan, such gravestones are museum pieces, protected in glass cases and separated from their “natural habitat.” 

When the power of the ancient Khakass khans was at its greatest, their power spread over neighboring regions, including the area which now encompasses Krasnoyarsk, a city of 900,000. And today, when a strong wind blows from Khakassia, down the Yenisey and over Krasnoyarsk, locals say that “Khakass is cooling off our tea.” Interestingly, this expression is not far from being a modern manifestation of pagan inclinations: comparing nature’s actions with the breathing of a large neighbor.

But to comprehend this exotic neighbor and to understand how a graveyard at night can be a not so terrifying thing, a resident of Krasnoyarsk must spend a long time traveling in the south, over Khakass steppes and hills. The distance is not far, yet the horizons are so removed that one can look in all four directions and see four different weather patterns. 

In Khakassia, one fully experiences the charm of a long road, where the traveler is not in the same place he began, nor yet where he set out for, but in a fantastic country of Orcs and Hobbits, where clouds shroud the mountain spirits and where a thick gloom condenses on the graveyards.  RL