Olkhon

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The road down the western shore runs close to the water at Khuzhir, and where it passes the twin-peaked crag of white marble that stands out into the lake, drivers who know the place fall quiet. A cave runs clean through the stone, low at the waterline and open on the far side; coins and knotted ribbons lie at its foot. Russians call the rock Shamanka, the Shaman Rock. The Buryat, whose island this is, know it as the seat of the lord who came down out of the sky to own it. The crag is the most famous landmark on all of Lake Baikal, and it is a threshold of a kind — the sharpest point of a holiness that runs the whole length of the island behind it, some seventy-two kilometers of steppe and larch and stone cape laid along the deepest water of the sea.

An island in the sea

Olkhon lies cradled in the deep water off the western shore, held apart from the mainland steppe of the Priolkhonye by a narrow strait, the Maloye More, the “little sea.” It is the largest of Lake Baikal’s islands by a long margin — about 71.5 kilometers, roughly forty-four miles, from its southern tip to the cliffs at Cape Khoboy in the north, and up to some twenty-one kilometers across, enclosing an area near 730 square kilometers, about 280 square miles. Its spine is crowned by Mount Zhima, which reaches 1,276 meters above sea level, some 818 meters above the surface of the lake, and the mountain is itself reckoned a holy peak, one of the island’s own charged places. The whole rises out of a lake that is, by the geologists’ reckoning, the oldest and deepest on earth; the account of that sea belongs to Lake Baikal, and Olkhon is the island set nearest its heart.

What is striking, standing on it, is how many worlds the one island holds. There is open steppe, grazed by cattle and horses; there is Siberian larch forest on the higher and wetter ground; and there is, along the eastern and northern shores, something close to desert — dunes of pale sand walked by wind-bent pines, for the island lies in the rain-shadow of its own ridge and its eastern flank is among the driest ground anywhere on Baikal. The name carries the paradox. Olkhon comes from the Buryat, and the etymology divides between two words that are each, in their way, true of the place: oyhon, “wooded” or “woody,” and olkhan, “dry.” The record simply notes that both words describe the island perfectly (Olkhon Island). A forested, rain-shadowed island — larch on the ridge, sand at the shore — answers to either name.

The northern reach of Olkhon, where the island’s steppe breaks off into cliffs above the deepest water of Lake Baikal — steppe, taiga, and sand held on one spine of stone. Vyacheslav Argenberg, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

People have lived on Olkhon for a very long time. In the middle of the first millennium the island was a center of the Kurumchin, or Kurykan, culture — iron-workers and horse-herders whose settlements ran through roughly the sixth to the tenth centuries and who left hillforts, burials, and rock-drawings across the island and the shore. Their most conspicuous work is the Kurykan wall at Cape Khorgoy, a stone rampart drawn across the neck of a headland, first described in 1879 by the geologist Jan Czerski. Whatever the wall guarded — a refuge, a corral, a sacred enclosure — it marks the island as long-held ground. To the Baikal Buryat, the Mongol-speaking people who are the island’s aboriginal inhabitants and its people still, Olkhon is not a frontier at all but a center: the sacred middle of their world, the seat of its great spirits, and the ground from which their oldest shaman-clans trace their descent.

That the outside world knows any of this it owes to two streams that must be read together. The first is the Priolkhonye Buryats’ own oral tradition — the clan-legends and the long sung poems carried by the uligershin, the epic-singers, and by the boo, the shamans of the Baikal world. The second is outside ethnography: Russian travelers and administrators after the seventeenth-century conquest, then Soviet scholars, cataloging a religion under a state that had set itself against it. Jeremiah Curtin gathered Buryat lore along the southern-Siberian shore at the turn of the twentieth century; the Buryat scholar Tsyben Zhamtsarano worked the same ground from inside the tradition; and later fieldwork, from the anthropology of Caroline Humphrey onward, has read the older material against the living practice. The record that results is not a single canon but a set of tellings, and it is read here at that double distance — the tradition’s own voice first, the collectors’ lens named for what it is.

The sacred center of the Baikal world

Within the Baikal shamanic world Olkhon is not one holy place among many but the hub — the densest gathering of spirit-power on the lake, the dwelling of its chief lords, and the place to which shamans of the whole region have long come to make their offering. Its authority reaches to the sky. Above the middle earth of people stand the tengri, the sky-powers, their number and the line between their benevolent and terrible halves reckoned differently from one telling to the next — the count belongs to Esege Malaan Tengri. Below the tengri are the noyons, the lords, heavenly sons sent down to the middle world to govern its fates. On Olkhon these are the oikony noyod, the thirteen lords of Olkhon — a company of noble spirits revered across the western Buryat lands in the tradition of yellow, Buddhist-influenced shamanism, and honored at the island’s capes.

At the head of the thirteen stands the master of the island himself: Khan Khoto Baabai, also rendered Oikhon-ekhe-Baabai, whose full account is given under Khan Khoto Baabai. The name says much of what he is. Khan is the honorific, the lord; baabai is the Buryat word for father, or grandfather, the elder to whom respect is owed. He is counted a son of the sky, sent down from the tengri of the upper world — in the Olkhon tellings a son of the bright father of the western heavens, Esege Malaan Tengri — and in some accounts the strongest of that father’s sons. He is the ezhin, the owner-spirit, of the whole island, and his seat is the cave that pierces the great crag at Cape Burkhan near Khuzhir, whose fuller story is the story of the rock itself.

From this lord, in the island’s own account, the shaman’s calling comes: the master of Olkhon sent down the eagles who bestowed the gift of shamanizing and took Buryat women to wife, founding the eagle-descended shaman lineages of the island — the full descent-myth, and the eagle as the first shaman’s bird, belong to Khan Khoto Baabai. The comparative scholarship reads the eagle — the white-tailed sea-eagle of the lake — as one of the oldest shared images of the Baikal and Lena world, an ancestor-bird and a bringer of the calling (The Eagle Totem in the Mythological Representations of the Sakha and Buryats). On Olkhon the point is local: the calling comes from the island’s own lord, and the clan the eagle fathered is the clan of this island’s shamans. To be called, in this frame, is to stand within a descent that runs back through the eagle to the sky-son in the cave.

Dunes and wind-bent “dancing” pines at Saraisky Beach near Khuzhir — the dry, rain-shadowed shore that gives the island one of its two names. Vyacheslav Argenberg, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

The twin-peaked crag at Cape Burkhan is the axis of the island’s holiness, its cave held to be the owner’s seat and its approach long hedged by grave taboos — the recorded etiquette of the rock belongs to Cape Burkhan. Its meaning, from within, is the meaning of a lord’s inner chamber: the cave is the most charged point of the owner’s ground, and one does not simply pass an owner’s house without keeping faith with him. The very name of the cape carries the island’s layered devotion. Burkhan is the Mongol-Buryat word for a god, and for a Buddha, taken up for the shamanic rock as Tibetan Buddhism spread among the Buryat and set its own reverence beside the older name, Oikhon-ekhe-Baabai. Two devotions came to rest on the one marble without either striking out the other.

To stand on Olkhon, in this understanding, is to stand where the upper world touches the middle one — the seam at which a son of the tengri came down and took a rock for his palace, and where the eagle carries the sky’s blood into the human line. That is the reason the island is a destination and not only a dwelling. Shamans of the whole Baikal region have long come to its capes to make offering, and the popular record of the sacred shore preserves the same figure: the master of Olkhon who lives in the form of an eagle, honored at the headlands where the offerings are left (A traveler’s guide to Baikal’s sacred sights of the shaman). The island is the gathering-place of the powers, and so of the people who serve them.

Conquest, camp, and return

The documented history of Olkhon runs through conquest, repression, and revival, and the sacred island absorbed each layer without being erased. After the Russian advance into the Baikal region in the seventeenth century the Priolkhonye Buryats came under the tsar, and from the eighteenth century Tibetan Buddhism spread among the Buryat, moving north with the lamas and the datsans and leaving its mark even on the shamanic cape in the Buddhist name Burkhan. The coexistence of the two devotions — the shamans’ boo murgel and the Dharma, sharing the same holy ground rather than one defeating the other — is the Buryat pattern, and Olkhon wears it plainly.

The twentieth century fell hard. Under Soviet power collectivization reordered island life, and the repression of the 1930s bore down on the shamans and lamas across Buryatia, framing the whole ordered religious world of the lake as “backwardness” and “superstition.” That framing was a political act and not a description — the label under which a coherent, living faith was persecuted, named here for what it was and not adopted as the record’s own voice. The fullest telling of that campaign, and of the epic that was itself put on trial, belongs to Geser and to the shamanic center at Cape Burkhan; on the island at large it is enough to say that Olkhon was a dangerous place to keep faith through those decades.

The island carries a scar of the era in its own right. At Peschanaya, on the eastern shore, a Soviet-era Gulag fish-processing plant worked prisoners through the lean years, drawing on the omul and whitefish of the lake. After Stalin’s death the labor system there wound down; the prisoners were released and the works abandoned, and by the 1950s Peschanaya was left to the sand that has been drifting over it since (Olkhon Island). The dunes and the dying pines of that shore stand now above the concrete of a camp — a quiet piece of the century’s history set into one of the island’s driest and strangest landscapes.

From about 1990 came the recovery, and on Olkhon it has been vivid. The shamanic and Buddhist traditions returned openly; the island’s capes drew pilgrims and practitioners again, the serge hitching-posts and the offering-sites marking the headlands as before. The anthropologist Aleksandra Wierucka, working on the island in recent years, finds several living forms of the practice at once — one turned toward the travelers who come to the Shaman Rock, one carried by the shamans’ registered associations that gather from across the region, one kept quietly in the villages — and in all of them the owner of Olkhon is still the owner, and the island still a cult center of shamanic importance reaching well beyond the Baikal shore (Modern forms of Buryat shaman activity on the Olkhon Island). The old holiness is present tense, and it is organized.

The island’s ordinary life has grown up alongside the sacred one. Khuzhir, on the western shore near the Shaman Rock, was made the administrative seat of Olkhonsky District in April 1987; it held about 1,251 residents at the 2010 census, and the island’s whole population, mostly Buryat, runs near 1,744. A tourism economy has settled over the island — the ferry across the Maloye More, the guesthouses of Khuzhir, the tracks out to Cape Khoboy — and the pressure of visitors on a place long protected chiefly by being hard to reach is now among the island’s live concerns. The whole of Olkhon lies within Pribaikalsky National Park, established in 1986 as one of the first national parks of the country, and inside the Lake Baikal property inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996 — a double frame of protection laid over ground the Buryat had held sacred long before either designation.

The scholarship on the island’s spiritual world reaches from Curtin’s early-twentieth-century travels through the critical ethnography of Humphrey and those who followed, and it keeps arriving at the same island the tradition never left. The knowledge that matters most, though, is not the collectors’ but the Buryats’ own, and it is not a thing of the past. The eagles still fish the cliffs; the offerings are still left at the capes; the thirteen lords are still named, and the sky-son is still at home in the cave beneath the marble. Olkhon remains what the tradition has always held it to be — the place where the powers of the lake are gathered thickest, and the ground the shamans still come to.

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