The Sakha

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In January the Lena runs under ice more than a meter thick, and the air over the valley settles toward the coldest temperatures recorded anywhere outside Antarctica. Yet the meadows along the river keep horses and cattle through it, animals that paw down to frozen grass and grow a winter coat against fifty degrees of frost. The people who keep them speak a Turkic language — the northernmost Turkic tongue on earth — and call themselves the Sakha, though the wider world long knew them by the Russian name Yakut. They are a steppe people who walked north into the country of the long winter and stayed, carrying their horses and their cosmos with them.

A Turkic People in the Land of the Long Winter

The ancestors of the Sakha came from the south. Scholars place their formation around the open lands near Lake Baikal, on the grasslands shared by Turkic and Mongolic herders, and trace a migration northward down the river systems toward the middle Lena — pressure from the expanding Mongols is the usual explanation, with the movement gathering between roughly the 13th and the 15th centuries. By the time Russian Cossacks reached the river in the 1620s and 1630s, the Sakha were settled across its basin: a Turkic island in a sea of Tungusic and Paleosiberian neighbors, ringed by the Evenki of the taiga and far removed from the Buryats and other Mongol peoples they had left behind in the south.

What they brought north was a herder’s economy improbable at that latitude. As Britannica records, the Yakut preserved a southern inheritance of horse- and cattle-breeding even as they pushed into subarctic forest; the southern Sakha along the open river valleys raised stock, while those in the far north turned to hunting, fishing, and reindeer in the manner of their taiga neighbors. The horse is the emblem of the people — the stocky, shaggy Yakutian horse that survives the open winter, pawing through snow to graze and weathering frost that would kill a southern breed — and fermented mare’s milk, kumys, is the drink of their high festival. A people who could keep horses and cattle on the edge of the Arctic, in a land where the ground itself is frozen the year round and never thaws below a thin summer crust, are a singular thing among the northern peoples: most of their neighbors lived by the reindeer, the fish, and the hunt, and the Sakha alone carried the herder’s life of the open grassland so far into the forest and the cold. Today the Sakha are by far the largest indigenous people of northeastern Siberia. The 2021 Russian census counted some 469,000 in the Sakha Republic, Yakutia, the vast administrative territory that bears their name and covers a fifth of the Russian Federation’s land; the people number near half a million in all.

A Sakha (Yakut) bride in an ornamented fur coat beside a decorated horse, 1908. Public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).

The Three Worlds, the Bright Aiyy, and the Powers Below

The Sakha cosmos is built in three storeys. There is an upper world of light, a middle world where people live, and a lower world of darkness; the three are not merely stacked but morally ordered, the height a measure of goodness. Above dwell the Aiyy — the word carries the sense of creation and of brightness — the good, generative deities who make and bless. Their head is Ürüng Aar Toyon, the White Lord Creator, a personification of the sky enthroned in the highest of the layered heavens, the maker of the world, of people, of the animals and plants, and the source of the kut, the soul or life-force that he sets in each newborn. Below and about move the abaahy, the malevolent spirits of the lower world and the dark places, who send sickness and misfortune and who may seize the wandering soul of a sleeper or a sick man. The middle world is held in the balance between them.

At the center of this cosmos stands a tree. Aal Luuk Mas, the great tree of life, rises through all three worlds at once, its roots in the lower world and its crown in the upper, its trunk the axis on which the middle world turns. In the heroic poetry its trunk shelters Aan Alakhchyn Khotun, the spirit-mistress of the earth, protector of the people. The tree is the image of the connected cosmos, and it is to a tree — or to carved posts that stand for it — that the people turn at their great festival. The world-tree motif runs across the religions of the steppe and taiga; among the Sakha it took the particular form of Aal Luuk Mas, and the form is theirs.

Between the worlds passes the oyuun, the shaman — and here the Sakha drew a line that gives their religion its distinctive shape. The Sakha shaman is of two kinds, and the kinds are not interchangeable. The white shaman, the aiyy oyuun, also called the algyschyt, the blesser, serves the bright Aiyy of the upper world; his work is benediction and increase — he addresses the good deities, asks fertility and prosperity and protection for the people, and presides at the festival of the sky. His rites are bloodless and turned upward, toward light. The black shaman is the one who deals with the abaahy and the lower world: it is he who descends, who treats with the dark powers, who recovers a soul that the spirits of the deep have taken and who does battle in the places of sickness and death. The vocation is real and is not chosen lightly. It comes as a calling, often through a spirit-sickness that marks a person and will not let them go until they take up the drum; the oyuun is made by the spirits, not by ambition. The chosen one resists, falls ill, dreams of being dismembered and remade, and only on accepting the office recovers — the making of the shaman is itself a passage through the lower world and a return from it, the very journey the black shaman will afterward make on behalf of others. The drum is his horse and his vessel, the costume hung with iron and the figures of helping spirits a map of the cosmos he must cross. The division of light from dark, the upper service from the lower, is the signature of Sakha religion among the shamanic peoples of Siberia — neither the Buryats to the south nor the Evenki of the surrounding forest order their shamans so sharply by the brightness of the world they serve. The soul that the oyuun guards and recovers is itself complex: the tradition reckons the human being to hold more than one kut, several souls bound together for the span of a life and parting at its end — a conception of the soul characteristic of the peoples of the northern forests.

The Yhyakh, the Festival of the Sky

If the white shaman has one supreme office, it is the Yhyakh. The Sakha year is a long dark cold broken by a short brilliant summer, and at the turn into that summer — around the summer solstice, in late June, when at this latitude the sun scarcely sets — the people hold the festival that is at once a new year and a thanksgiving and an act of worship toward the upper deities. The name itself comes from the verb to sprinkle, to make a libation, and the libation is the heart of it. The festival opens at dawn: an elder, dressed in white, addresses the Aiyy spirits for the well-being of the people, sprinkles kumys upon the ground and feeds the fire, and pronounces the algys, the blessing. Then the assembly takes up the osuokai (ohuokhai), the great round dance — a chain of people moving sunwise arm in arm, a lead singer improvising a line that the circle answers, the dance running for hours and the song with it. There are horse races and feats of strength, and the drinking of kumys from carved wooden vessels, and the tying of horsehair and ribbons to posts and trees. The Yhyakh is held in the open under the sky, around a sacred grove or a stand of raised posts, the serge — hitching posts that double as cosmic markers — and a representation of Aal Luuk Mas set up as the world-tree at the festival’s center, the axis around which the new year turns.

A representation of Aal Luuk Mas, the world-tree, raised at the center of a Yhyakh festival ground. Photograph by Betta27, CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The festival’s logic is the logic of the cosmos. The libation of mare’s milk rises as the fire’s smoke rises, an offering carried upward to the Aiyy; the round dance turns with the sun; the white-clad blesser stands where the world-tree stands, at the meeting of the worlds, and speaks for the people to the bright deities above. It is the upper world that the Yhyakh honors — not the abaahy of the deep, who have no part in the day. In a religion that ranks goodness by height, the festival is the people’s annual reach toward the light at the very moment the northern sun is highest and the year is born again.

The opening ceremony of the Yhyakh, where an elder feeds the fire and addresses the Aiyy. Photograph CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The Olonkho, the People’s Cosmos in Verse

The cosmology the Sakha live in their festival they tell in their epic. The Olonkho is the great heroic poetry of the people — the word names both the tradition as a whole and any single epic within it — and it is among the oldest of the Turkic epic arts, a tradition thought to predate the northward migration. The Olonkho is vast: more than a hundred have been recorded, ranging from a few thousand verses to tens of thousands, the longest running past thirty-six thousand lines — a scale that puts it beside the Iliad and the Kalevala. It is performed by a single artist, the olonkhohut, who sings the dialogue of the characters in melody and speaks the connecting narrative in measured recitative, marking each figure by a distinct tone and voice — at once singer, reciter, and master of poetic improvisation, holding an audience through a performance that can last a night and more.

The matter of the Olonkho is the three worlds in motion. The hero is a warrior of the middle world, often a bogatyr sent down or set apart to defend the people; his adversaries are the monstrous abaahy of the lower world, who carry off brides and bring ruin, and the story turns on his combat across the boundary between the worlds and his restoration of the order of the cosmos. The poetry is therefore a treasury of the people’s theology — the layered heavens and the underworld, the Aiyy and the abaahy, Aal Luuk Mas and Aan Alakhchyn Khotun all live in its lines, so that to learn the Olonkho is to learn the shape of the Sakha world. The best-loved of all is Nyurgun Bootur the Swift, reckoned a cornerstone of Sakha identity.

A depiction drawn from the Olonkho, the heroic epic tradition of the Sakha. Photograph CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The Soviet Century and the Revival

The Sakha world met the modern Russian state twice over. Orthodox Christianity reached the Lena with the Cossacks and the missionaries, and by the 1820s many Sakha were counted as converts; in practice the church settled over the older religion without displacing it, baptism and the Aiyy coexisting much as Christianity and the older rites coexisted across the north. The harder rupture came with the Soviet century. From the late 1920s collectivization fell on Yakutia as on the rest of the country, and with it a campaign against religion that took the shaman for an exploiter of a “backward” people. Drums and regalia were seized and burned, shamans were disenfranchised and put on public trial, and the Yhyakh — a gathering of the people around the old deities — was banned outright as the anti-religious drive sharpened in the 1930s. Through the decades of repression much of the classic practice went silent or went hidden, and a long generation grew up without the open festival. The account of these years, told soberly by the geographer Martin Lewis, is one of the Yakut under Soviet rule — persecution endured, not a religion extinguished.

It was not extinguished. With the loosening of the Soviet state the Sakha tradition returned into the open, and quickly. The first Yhyakh in the city of Yakutsk was held in 1990, and the festival has grown since into the central public expression of Sakha culture, drawing tens of thousands to the meadows each midsummer; the round dance and the libation and the white-clad blesser are performed again under the open sky. The same years saw the religion of the Aiyy organized anew. The association Kut-Siur was founded in 1990, and out of that current the Aiyy Faith was constituted as a formal religious organization in 2015 — a modernized, often monotheizing reading of the old upper-world theology, with Ürüng Aar Toyon at its head and its bloodless rites led by white shamans, drawing on the teaching set down in the 1990s by the philologist Lazar Afanasyev. How far such organized forms continue the old religion and how far they reconstruct it is debated; what is not in doubt is that the Aiyy, the Yhyakh, and the Olonkho stand again at the center of a living national culture.

That standing was sealed for the Olonkho on the international stage. In 2005 UNESCO proclaimed the Olonkho a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, and in 2008 it was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity — recognition that came precisely because the twentieth century had brought the tradition near to breaking, with few of the young still memorizing the long sung epics. The designation has fed a revival of its own: an Olonkho theater in Yakutsk, festivals and forums, and a deliberate teaching of the epic to a new generation. The northernmost of the Turkic peoples keep their horses on the frozen meadows of the Lena, raise the world-tree at midsummer, sprinkle the mare’s milk toward the bright deities of the sky, and sing the hero of the middle world against the monsters of the deep — a people who carried a southern cosmos to the edge of the habitable earth and have not let it go.

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