Mysteries of giants from the Urals and Siberia

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

Legends and tales about giants - people of enormous stature, can be found among many ancient peoples. Stories about giants, claiming to be authentic and told by travelers or chroniclers, are much less common and the more valuable is this evidence.

According to these records, once upon a time many hundreds of years ago in the Northern Urals and Siberia one could meet people of unusually tall stature. Moreover, these were not isolated cases of physical anomalies (gigantism), which sometimes occur in our time, since there are reports of entire tribes (!) Of Russian giants.

One of the documentary evidence of the Russian giant belongs to Ahmed ibn Fadlan, who in 921-922, together with the embassy of the Baghdad caliph, visited the king of the Volga Bulgars, having traveled before that through the Russian possessions. The book written by Ibn Fadlan is an invaluable source on the history of pre-Christian Russia, including the Urals, but the passage of interest to us is usually shyly hushed up. And it tells about nothing less than a giant who lived in the vicinity of the Bulgarian capital.

The Arab traveler told how, while still in Baghdad, he heard from one captive Turk that at the headquarters of the ruler of the Bulgar kingdom one giant was kept in captivity - “a man of extremely huge constitution”. When the embassy arrived on the Volga, Ibn Fadlan asked the king to show the giant.

Unfortunately, the giant was killed not so long ago before the visit of the Arab due to his violent and vicious character. As eyewitnesses said, from one glance of a gigantic creature, children fainted, and pregnant women had miscarriages. The feral giant was caught far in the North, in the country of Visu [in the opinion of modern historians, this is the entire chronicle who lived somewhere in the Pechora region] and taken to the capital of Volga Bulgaria.

They kept him outside the city, chained to a huge tree. Here and strangled.

Ibn Fadlan was shown the remains: “And I saw that his head was like a large tub, and now his ribs are like the largest dry fruit branches of palms, and in the same way the bones of his legs and both of his ulna. I was amazed at this and left."

By the way, there is information relating to the end of the 19th century: during the opening of one of the burial grounds in the Volga region (however, to the south of the places that Ibn Fadlan speaks about - in the Saratov province), the skeleton of a giant man was found there.

If someone thinks that they want to mystify him, then let him get acquainted with another testimony: it can be found in a book with the poetic title “A Gift to Minds and a Selection of Wonders”. It belongs to the pen of another Arab traveler, scientist and theologian Abu Hamid al-Garnati. More than a hundred years after Ibn Fadlan, he also visited the capital of the Volga Bulgaria and met there the same giant, but only alive, and even talked to him:

“And I saw in Bulgar in 530 [1135-1136] a tall man from the descendants of the Adites, whose height is more than seven cubits, named Danki. He took a horse under his arm like a man takes a little lamb. And his strength was such that he broke the shin of a horse with his hand and tore meat and sinews like others tear greens.

And the ruler of the Bulgar made him a chain mail, which was carried in a cart, and a helmet for his head, like a cauldron. When there was a battle, he fought with an oak club, which he held in his hand like a stick, but if he hit the elephant with it, he would kill him. And he was kind, modest; when he met me, he greeted me and greeted me respectfully, although my head did not reach his waist, may Allah have mercy on him”.

Similar information has been preserved in Scandinavian sources. They concern the raids of the Varangians in the remote regions of the Russian North. Here indefatigable robbers-explorers have repeatedly encountered tribes of giants, both ordinary male giants and tribes consisting exclusively of female individuals (so to speak, giantess amazons):

“When they sailed along the coast for some time, they saw that there was a very tall and huge house. They saw that the temple was very large and built of white gold and precious stones. They saw that the temple was open. It seemed to them that everything inside was shining and sparkling, so that there was not even a shadow anywhere.

There they saw a table, like a king should have, covered with expensive cloth and [filled] with various precious vessels of gold and precious stones. Thirty giantesses were talking at the table, and the priestess was in the center. They [the Vikings] could not understand if she was in the form of a person or some other creature. It seemed to all of them that she looked worse than words can express."

After some time, about the same picture was described by the Danish historian-chronicler Saxon Grammaticus (1140 - c. 1208), talking about the sailing of the Viking squad in the White Sea, with the difference that here it was not about the temple and the "Amazons", but about the cave where the giants lived.

The Russian North is actually full of stories about giants. At the beginning of the 20th century, among the Pomors who sailed to Novaya Zemlya, there was a legend that there, in one of the coastal caves, there are giant human skulls with bared teeth.

Siberian legends about encounters with giants were collected and recorded by the world famous archaeologist Alexei Pavlovich Okladnikov (1908-1981). The hunter and reindeer breeder Nikolai Kurilov from the lower reaches of the Lena told him that a man who hunted Arctic foxes in winter discovered huge human footprints on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, which came out of the sea.

The hunter decided to find out where the tracks lead by land. After two days of driving, he saw a mountain in front of him, towering in the middle of the taiga, like an island. There were especially many footprints here. Suddenly a woman several fathoms high appeared. She took Nikolai Kurilbva by the hand and led him into the house where the giant man was.

He said to the hunter: “It is my own fault that I showed my tracks, otherwise you would not have come here. Go back home, just do not tell anyone about what you have gone. And I will help you return. Don't come out until I get the sled ready. You’ll come out later.” After a while, the giant returned to the house and ordered: "Now come out." There was a solid fog all around, not a single glimpse of it. The giant put the hunter on a sled, blindfolded him and said: "When you get to your land, let the dogs go."

The return journey took the hunter only one day and without an overnight stay. When the hunter untied his eyes, he saw that he was being carried not by dogs, but by two wolves. Behind him, his own dog sled, laden to the top, was racing. Arriving home, the hunter let go of the wolves, and they immediately disappeared. When he opened the load, he saw a mountain of expensive furs. The fact is that the giant asked the intruder: "Why are you wandering alone along the seashore." He replied that this is how he lives. That is why the giant, out of pity, gave so much furs.

Until old age, Nikolai Kurilov did not say anything to anyone, but only told him when he died.

Various Siberian peoples have preserved many legends about taiga giants. There is a belief that they take away burning embers from hunting fires. These giants differ from ordinary people not only in height, but also in long thick eyebrows or in that they are completely covered with hair. Therefore, their other name is “bearded people”. The "bearded" people live not one by one, but whole villages. The shape of the houses is domed, inside they were illuminated not by stoves, but by an unknown “glowing stone”.

In many legends, the land of the tribe of giants is associated with the islands of the Arctic Ocean. In the middle of the 19th century, according to an eyewitness, the following story was recorded. A certain industrialist examined the hunting tackle on the islands near the Kolyma estuary. There he was overtaken by a blizzard, and he lost his way. He wandered for a long time in the icy desert, and finally the dogs brought him to an unfamiliar village, consisting of several huts.

Late in the evening, men of enormous stature came from the fishing industry and began to ask the stranger: who he was, where he came from, on what occasion and why he came here, had he heard of them before and, finally, had he been sent by someone? They kept the industrialist who told the whole story under supervision for six weeks, placing him in a separate house and not allowing him to leave a single step. Often he heard the ringing of a bell, from which he decided that he had ended up in a schismatic skete.

Finally, the owners agreed to let the industrialist go, but took an oath from him to be silent about everything they saw and heard. Then they blindfolded him, took him out of the village and escorted him very far. When parting, they presented a large number of white foxes and red foxes.

At the same time, the Verkhoyansk police chief informed the Irkutsk bishop Benjamin that there was an “island unknown to geography” on the Arctic Ocean. In good and clear weather, it is a point from the island of New Siberia to the northeast.

There are inhabitants on this island. They are called bearded because, they say, the people are completely overgrown with hair. With them very rarely and on pain of death the wild Chukchi have intercourse, who pass on this secretly to the Chukchi paying yasak. Those, in turn, and also in secret, tell about everything Russian.

Popular legend says that bearded men lived on the islands of the Arctic Ocean a long time ago, and that some bishop with his retinue was brought here and thrown ashore. As if he had heard the sounds of bells on that island, but the bearded men did not let him into their dwellings. They trade only on the coast, and do not allow strangers to approach their islands.

In addition, already at the end of the 20th century, one Kolyma old man, having heard about Sedov's expedition to the North Pole, said: “Well, it means that they will definitely visit people in houses with golden roofs,” hinting at the mysterious islanders, about whom the legends of the Russian and the indigenous population of the Arctic Ocean coastline.