Altai Old Believers of the Uimon Valley

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

A short story about the people, customs, customs of the original land - the Uimon Valley in the Altai Republic. From the second half of the eighteenth century, the time of the settlement of these places by Old Believers, and up to the present day, a unique community of people - the Uimon kerzhaks - has been formed here.

The ancestors of the current old-timers of the Uimon Valley came here, fleeing the persecution of the old faith. After the split of the Russian Orthodox Church, the keepers of the old rituals first went to the Kerzhenets River (hence the "Kerzhaks") in the Semyonovsky district of the Nizhny Novgorod province, but there they did not find salvation. The flight from the reforms of Patriarch Nikon led the Old Believers to the North, to Polissya, to the Don, to Siberia … Old Believers call themselves "old men", which means "people of the old man's faith."

Old-timers of Upper Uimon date the appearance of their ancestors in the valley to the end of the 17th century. Luka Osipatrovich Ognev, a direct descendant of one of the first settlers, said: “Bochkar came first, began to cultivate the land, and the land here is good, fertile. After that, others settled. It was about 300 years ago. Old-timers assure that in fact Upper Uimon appeared a hundred years earlier than the official date of its foundation (1786).

At the end of the 19th century, the famous geographer V. V. Sapozhnikov explored these places:

… The Uimon steppe lies at an altitude of 1000 meters above sea level and along the Katun it represents the last and highest inhabited place. Among the surrounding high and partly snowy mountains, this is an oasis with a rather dense population … In addition to the three main villages of Koksa, Upper Uymon and Lower Uimon, there are settlements of Bashtal, Gorbunov, Terekta, Kaitanak and many huts and apiaries. The main population is schismatics, but recently Orthodox settlers have been settling here.

The Uimon valley is surrounded by mountains, they, like a luxurious necklace, adorn this reserved land, and the brightest jewel is Mount Belukha - the two-humped Sumer-Ulom (sacred mountain), as the Altaians called it. It was about her that legends and fairy tales were composed. Ancient legends about the mysterious land of happiness are also associated with this mountain. The people of the East were looking for the country of Shambhala, the people of Russia were looking for their Belovodye. They stubbornly believed that she was - a country of happiness, that she was somewhere here, in the kingdom of snowy mountains. But where?..

The oldest village of Upper Uimon is located in the Uimon Valley. Professor of the University of Dorpat, the famous naturalist K. F. Ledebour, who visited Upper Uimon in the summer of 1826, wrote in his diary:

The village of Uimon, founded 25 years ago, has 15 peasant huts and is located in a mountain valley about three miles in diameter. The peasants live in very great prosperity. They keep a lot of livestock, and hunting brings them a lot of prey. The peasants, the inhabitants of this village, I really liked. There is something open, honest, respectful in their character, they were very friendly and did their best to make me like them.

The wild, pristine nature was so rich and so generous to new people who came to the valley that for a long time they considered the word "Uimon", which passed to them from the Kypchaks and Todosha, to be the same root with the Russian "uyma" - in the sense that everything in the fertile valley for they were in abundance, in abundance, and they thanked God, who had opened this "quietest desert" to them.

Ust-Koksinsky district attracts tourists from all over the world. In recent years, there has been a great development of this type of tourism, as excursion and educational. Tourists visit such sights as Belukha Mountain, the Multinsky and Taimennoye, Akkem and Kucherlinskoye lakes, the Katunsky nature reserve, the Museum of Old Believers in Upper Uimon and the N. K. Roerich, monuments of history and culture (ancient rock paintings, “stone mounds). Health tourism is also developing. Guests are attracted by unique antler baths on maralniks, picturesque panoramas, healing springs and clean mountain air. And finally, fishing tourism also finds its adherents. For guests organizing fishing (taimen, grayling) and commercial hunting, picking pine nuts, medicinal plants.

So what does the word "Uimon" or "Oimon" mean? There is still no consensus on this matter. Some translate the name of the valley as "cow's neck", others offer a simpler translation: "cow gut". But Altai storytellers and sages do not agree with simple explanations and translate the word "Oimon" as "ten of my wisdoms", and in this name one can hear the echoes of unknown knowledge, which they went to Belovodye.

The Uimon region is often called the land of legends and legends. They talk about secret passages and caves through which the keepers of secret knowledge left, but they often return and come to the righteous. In 1926, Nicholas Roerich wrote down the legend about the Altai Chud:

Here the chud went underground. When the White Tsar came, and as the white birch blossomed in our land, the Chud did not want to stay under the White Tsar. The chud went underground and filled up the passages with stones. You yourself can see their former entrances. Only the chud is not gone forever. When the happy time returns, and people from Belovodye come and give the whole people great science, then a chud will come again with all the treasures that have been obtained …

Inhabiting the fertile valley, the first settlers adapted to the customs and traditions of the indigenous Altai population. Mastering high-mountain meadows and tracts in the upper reaches of the Katun and Koksa, they successfully combined agriculture and cattle breeding with fur hunting, fishing, pine nut harvesting, beekeeping, and handicrafts. The food of the Old Believers consisted of what nature gave, they disdained "bazaar" food, therefore everyone was obliged to get his own bread in the sweat of his brow.

Bread and meat, dairy products and cereals, nuts and fish, vegetables and berries, mushrooms and honey - everything is only their own, so their Charter demanded.

They sowed rye, oats, barley, flax, wheat. Agronomists did not know, trusting the experience of the elderly and relying on the prayers of the Almighty. Farmers were especially pleased with the “uimonka” wheat. For its copper-red color "uimonka" received the affectionate name "Alenka" from the local peasants.

Before the revolution, bread from the Uimon valley was supplied to the tsar's table. Altai lands remained the fiefdom of the imperial court. And oil from the mountain valleys, and alpine honey, and cedar nuts - everything that Altai is rich in got into the Winter Palace. Famous royal loaves were baked from wheat of the "alenka" variety. The breads stood like a wall on the left bank of the Katun near the spurs of the Terekta ridge. Warm winds from the Terekta gorge protected crops from the cold. “They will always be here with bread,” the guests who came to the Uimon Kerzhaks from other villages of Gorny Altai said with envy.

By the end of the 20th century, after all the initiatives and experiments, the Uimon Valley was left without its own bread.

The Uimon villages impressed with the incredible abundance of livestock. Vladimir Serapionovich Atamanovrecalls what his grandfathers told him: “At the end of the 19th century we had a lot of livestock, they did not know any accounting, and no one needed it. The Erofeev family had about 300 horses, while Leon Chernov had more than three hundred. The poor kept two or three horses. The prosperous farms kept 18-20 cows."

Old Believers in a new place got acquainted with the experience of Altaic herders. Ulyana Stepanovna Tashkinova (Born in 1926) tells that the Altai people milked the cows differently from the Russians: “First, a calf was allowed near the cow, he would call the milk, suck the whole return, and then they tied him up near the mother and began to milk. The milk is boiled, allowed to settle, then the sour cream is cut with a knife, and the milk is put into a bucket. They will bring a red talnik, dry it, make a bunch and put it in milk. It will shake (harden), then it is only poured into the churn. And from what was left, they drove arachka - light milk vodka. Her head does not hurt, but you get drunk, like with vodka. If it is on, it means good."

Of the bird were chickens, geese and ducks, and the dog was considered the most terrible animal: according to signs, after the "dog's tooth", re-breeding a bird is worth a lot of work, and it is better to take care of it than to toil later.

Most prosperous farms kept marals, and in large numbers. The maral antlers were sent to Mongolia and China, receiving a lot of money from the sale. It was believed that not only the horns of the maral were curative, but also the blood: during the cutting it was drunk fresh and harvested for future use. “The peasants say that it is more profitable for them to keep the marals than the horses,” wrote GN Potanin in 1879, “they eat hay less than a horse, and the horns can help out as much as the horse will never earn. And, I must say, the benefits from maral breeding were so great that Uimon residents even sacrificed arable land in order to fence off new maral farms”.

It is not known which of the peasants laid the foundation for this new trade; it began, apparently, in the villages in the peaks of Bukhtarma, where it is now most developed; the second most developed place is Uimon. Not one year, not two people were treated with antlers. Both in pure form and in a mixture with medicinal herbs they relieved themselves of many diseases. Antlers were fried in oil, made into powder, infusions. There is no price for this medicine. What does it not heal: heart, nervous system, heals wounds and ulcers. Even the boiled water (the water in which the deer horns are boiled) is curative. Old recipes are still used to make pantocrine.

Uimon settlers could not imagine their life without hunting and fishing, fortunately that fish and game were then apparently invisible. We fished in different ways, but most of all we liked to “shine”. They chose a quiet, windless night and from the boat, highlighting the bottom, they looked for the largest fish and beat it with a spear. Each house had its own fishermen, and each owner had a boat. In Verkhniy Uimon, samples of those boats have been preserved. They were hollowed out of the trunk of a large old poplar up to four meters long. Heated the barrel, bred it with arched struts. Three or four men could make such a boat in one day.

The fields around Terekta are sown with Skala wheat. But Aleksey Tikhonovich believes that sooner or later he will be able to return the famous Alenka wheat to the valley. During the years of collective farm construction, the old variety seemed to disappear forever. But recently Klepikov learned that the Uimon Old Believers took with them alenka wheat to China and America and kept it clean there. A little more time - and she will return home from abroad.

Fragments from the book by R. P. Kuchuganova "The Wisdom of the Uimon Elders"

Raisa Pavlovna Kuchuganova is a historian, founder and director of the ethnographic museum of Old Believer culture and everyday life in the village of Verkhniy Uimon, a person fascinated by the history of his native village warmly tells about unique people - the Old Believers of the Uimon Valley.

See also: Testament of the Old Believers

See also the film with Raisa Pavlovna Kuchuganova "Life of the Uimon Old Believers" based on the materials of the 2007 folklore expedition of the Pesnohorki Center: