Lake Baikal

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In late winter the whole surface goes hard. The ice thickens until trucks can cross it, and it clears in places to a black glass through which the water shows a great depth of nothing, and the cracks boom out across the miles like something breathing under the floor. That the largest body of fresh water on earth should turn to a road each year is the first of its improbabilities. The Buryat who live along its shore have a word for what lies beneath the road, and it is not the word for a lake. They call it a dalai — a sea. Baigal dalai, the sacred sea: a body of water not to be measured against the ponds and rivers of the world but against the ocean itself, and the geology, when it came to be read, agreed with them. This is the one inland water old enough and deep enough to be a sea in the middle of a continent.

A sea inside a continent

The lake lies in a crack in the earth. Southern Siberia is being pulled slowly apart along the Baikal rift, a continental fracture cradled between the Baikal range to the northwest and the Barguzin mountains to the east, and the lake is what the fracture has filled with. As the two sides of the rift draw apart the floor between them sinks, so that Baikal is not merely deep but still deepening — the deepest continental rift on the planet, and by any reckoning the deepest lake, reaching a maximum of about 1,642 meters, some 5,387 feet, from the winter road to the mud of its bottom. It is also the oldest lake on earth. The rift began to open perhaps twenty-five to thirty million years ago, and the basin has held open water across that whole span, while every other great lake of the world has silted up or frozen over or drained away in a fraction of the time. UNESCO, listing it, calls it simply “the oldest (25 million years) and deepest” lake in the world (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, List no. 754).

The scale answers to the sea that the Buryat named. Baikal is about 636 kilometers long and covers roughly 31,722 square kilometers, a surface the size of a small country. But its distinction is in its depth: because it is so deep, it holds a volume of water — on the order of 23,600 cubic kilometers — greater than any other freshwater lake, more than all five of the North American Great Lakes together. That single basin contains, by the common estimate, close to a fifth of all the unfrozen fresh water on the surface of the earth; UNESCO puts the figure at twenty percent of the world’s total unfrozen freshwater reserve, and other measures give a range of nineteen to twenty-three. More than three hundred rivers run into it — the count is often given as around three hundred and thirty — the greatest of them the Selenge, coming up out of Mongolia. Only one river runs out. The Angara leaves the lake at its western side and carries Baikal’s water north to the Yenisei and, in the end, to the Arctic Ocean.

The name itself carries the argument about what the place is. To the Buryat and the Mongol-speaking peoples of the shore the lake is Baigal dalai, and the word dalai means sea, or ocean — the same word that stands in the title of the Dalai Lama, the ocean-wide teacher. To call Baikal a dalai is to refuse, in a single syllable, to file it among lakes. The Russian and later Soviet name Baikal is generally taken to descend from that Buryat Baigal; a rival derivation traces it instead to a Turkic bai-kul, “rich lake,” and the etymology is genuinely contested among linguists, with the neighboring peoples’ own names — the Yakut “rich lake,” the older Kurykan “much water” — pulling in more than one direction. What is not contested is that the peoples of the shore reached the outside record before the outside record reached them, and that they had already decided what kind of water this was.

To the wider world the lake came late and from the north. The Russian conquest of the Baikal region in the seventeenth century brought Cossacks and then administrators onto its shore, and behind them came the collectors. Jeremiah Curtin traveled the southern-Siberian shore at the turn of the twentieth century and gathered Buryat lore for A Journey in Southern Siberia (1909); the Buryat scholar Tsyben Zhamtsarano worked the same ground from inside the tradition; and the modern ethnography of the region — Nicholas Poppe, Caroline Humphrey, Roberte Hamayon — has read the older material against the living practice. The double lens matters. Much of what the outside world knows of Baikal’s sacred life was set down by Russian and Soviet observers working, at times, for a state set against the very religion they were recording, and the record is read here at that distance. To the tradition itself the lake needs no such introduction. It is the axis of the Baikal shamanic world, ringed with holy capes and mountains, its waters and its islands the dwellings of the master-spirits.

The frozen surface of Lake Baikal near Olkhon Island in late winter, when the ice grows thick enough to cross and clears in places to black glass. Sergey Pesterev, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The living water and its owners

Within the Baikal world the lake is not scenery and not a resource. It is a presence — the great water into which the middle world drains and out of which its life is renewed, and it has masters. In the ordered cosmos of the Buryat there are three worlds: the upper heaven of the tengri, the sky-powers; the middle earth of people and of the ezhin, the owner-spirits of its places; and the underworld beneath, the ground of the lord of the dead. Baikal stands chief among the waters of the middle world. Its capes and its deeps have owners, and to the owners respect is owed and offerings made — at the headlands where a traveler pauses, where the hitching-posts stand and the small gifts are left before the water and the shore are crossed. The doctrine, plainly put, is that the water is alive and sovereign. One does not master such a lake; one keeps faith with it.

The holiest point of the sea is an island. Olkhon, the largest of Baikal’s islands, runs some seventy-two kilometers down the western side of the lake, a long spine of steppe and rock, and the tradition holds it the sacred center of Baikal shamanism — the place where the powers of the lake are most densely gathered. On Olkhon’s western shore, near the village of Khuzhir, a twin-peaked rock of white marble and crystalline limestone stands out from the water, pierced through by a cave. This is the Shaman Rock at Cape Burkhan, held to be the earthly palace of Khan Khoto Baabai — rendered locally Khan Khute-Baabay, or Oikhon-ekhe-babai — the ezhin and lord of Olkhon, counted the oldest and strongest of the northern heavenly lords, the sky-son who came down to take the cave for his seat. His cave was a place of sacrifice long before it was also, later, a Buddhist sanctuary, and the etiquette of the rock was exact: it was not to be approached carelessly, and to fail the owner of the place cost a traveler his luck. These are set down here as the recorded custom of the Olkhon Buryat, described at the distance of the public record and not reproduced as instruction; their meaning, from within, is the meaning of a lord’s inner chamber, the most charged point of the owner’s ground.

The lake is woven, too, into the longest of the tradition’s songs. The Geser epic — the vast oral poem the uligershin, the epic-singers, have carried around Baikal for centuries — sends its heaven-born hero down out of the sky to clear the middle world of the monsters that are eating it, and he contends across the very landscape the lake anchors. Above him in the poem stand the bright fathers of the western heavens, among them Esege Malaan Tengri, and beside the epic in the wider tradition stands Sagaan Ubgen, the white grandfather who owns the life of the earth. The powers of the lake are not a scattered folklore but a peopled and ordered world, and Baikal is its central water.

Because Olkhon lay all but sealed by the lake’s own isolation, the tradition remembers it as a refuge. When Tibetan Buddhism spread through Buryatia, the island and its rock are remembered as the last stronghold of the North Asian shamans, a place the boo, the shamans of the Baikal world, could keep their rites when the datsans were rising elsewhere. The ancestral spirits of the region, the ongon housed in their felt and wooden figures, belong to this same crowded world of owners and powers, and the lake is the water at the middle of it. The teaching that runs through all of it is the one the ice makes literal each winter: the water is alive, and it belongs to no one; it carries those who keep faith with it.

The Galapagos of Russia

To science Baikal is a chain of superlatives, and its long isolation is the reason. The same age and depth that made it a sea made it a closed world, and life in it has been evolving apart for so long that the lake has become, in the phrase UNESCO borrows, “the Galapagos of Russia” — its age and isolation having produced “one of the world’s richest and most unusual freshwater faunas, which is of exceptional value to evolutionary science.” Of the more than two thousand animal species cataloged in it, the great majority are found nowhere else on earth, and it is that concentration of endemism, not the mere size of the water, that gives the lake its standing in the study of how life diverges in isolation. The nerpa, the Baikal seal, is the only wholly freshwater seal on earth, marooned a thousand miles from any sea, its ancestors somehow arrived and then sealed in. The golomyanka is a pale, scaleless, half-transparent fish that bears its young live in the cold dark and ranges deeper than any other freshwater fish. The omul, the endemic whitefish, has fed and paid the people of the shore for as long as there have been people on the shore. It was for this living record, as much as for the water itself, that the lake was inscribed as a natural World Heritage site in 1996 — site number 754, a property of about 3.15 million hectares ringing the whole of the sea.

The sacred sites of the shore have their own layered afterlife, and the pattern is overlay rather than erasure. When Tibetan Buddhism reached the Buryat in the eighteenth century and raised its datsans, the older holy places were not struck out but written over. The very name Burkhan at Cape Burkhan is the Buddhist word — “God,” “Buddha” — taken up for the shamanic rock, and the lamas are remembered using the Shaman Rock’s cave as a sanctuary where shamanic rite had long been kept. This is the Buryat coexistence of boo murgel, the shamans’ way, and the Dharma, two devotions on one marble rather than the defeat of one by the other; the fuller history of that rock belongs to the account of Cape Burkhan itself.

Then the Soviet decades fell hard on both. The repression of the 1930s executed shamans and lamas, closed and destroyed the datsans, and pressed the sacred practice of the lake into the margins as “backwardness” and “superstition” — the framing of an ordered, living religion as ignorance, a colonial and Soviet distortion that is named here for what it was and not adopted. That history in full — the executions, the closing of the temples, the epic itself put on trial — is carried in the account of Geser, whose 1948 condemnation and 1953 rehabilitation are uniquely its story; on the lake it is enough to say that its shore was a dangerous place to keep faith through those years. From about 1990 came the recovery. Shamanic and Buddhist practice returned openly to the capes, the hitching-posts and the ritual offerings marking the headlands again, and Olkhon draws pilgrims and practitioners once more, its shamans organized now in registered associations that gather from across the region.

The lake’s own reception is not finished, and its newest arena is its ecology. The Baikalsk pulp and paper mill on the southern shore discharged into the sea for half a century before its closure, leaving a legacy of waste that the region is still reckoning with; the surge of tourism onto Olkhon and the western shore presses on a shoreline that was long protected chiefly by being hard to reach; and the water level itself swings with drought and with the dams downstream on the Angara. The endemic omul has been fished to the point of bans and closed seasons. The clarity of the deep water — Baikal is among the clearest large lakes on earth, its surface ice reading like glass — is now something monitored rather than merely marveled at. The living Buryat tradition holds the sea sacred in the present tense, and the old teaching turns out to have a new edge: the fate of the water and the keeping of faith with it have become, on this shore, the same question. What was owed to the ezhin at the cape is owed now to the seal and the whitefish and the black depth under the winter road.

Lake Baikal photographed from the International Space Station in April 2019 — the long crescent of the deepest continental rift, a sea set in the middle of Asia. NASA Johnson Space Center, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

→ Related: Geser · Sagaan Ubgen · Khan Khoto Baabai · Esege Malaan Tengri · Ongon · Olkhon · Cape Burkhan · Barhan Uula · The Soyot · The Tofalar · The Khamnigan