Mythologies of the Yakut (Sakha) Tribe

Yakut or Sakha (Yakut: саха, saxa; plural: сахалар, saxalar) are a Turkic ethnic group native to North Siberia, primarily the Republic of Sakha in the Russian Federation, with some extending to the Amur, Magadan, Sakhalin regions, and the Taymyr and Evenk Districts of the Krasnoyarsk region. They speak the Yakut, which belongs to the Siberian branch of the Turkic languages. According to Alexey Kulakovsky [ru], the Russian word yakut was taken from the Evenki екэ, yekə̄, while Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer claims the Russian word is actually a corruption from the Tungusic form. According to ethnographer Dávid Somfai, the Russian yakut derives from the Buryat yaqud, which is the plural form of the Buryat name for the Yakuts, yaqa. The Yakuts call themselves Sakha, or Urangai Sakha (Yakut: Уран Саха, Uran Sakha) in some old chronicles. All of these are derived from a word related to Turkish yaka (geographical edge, collar) referring to the Yakuts' remote position in Siberia.

The formation of the Yakut people (Sakha) and its culture (language, religion, craftsmanship and agricultural practices) took place in territories far removed from the Middle Prileniya. The dominant concept in Yakut historiography is that of the multi-ethnic origin of the Sakha people. The basin of the Middle Lena attracted various tribes of nomadic herders as a place of permanent settlement for many centuries. In the spacious valleys on the left bank of the Lena (Erkeeni, Tuimaada, Ensieli, etc.), an ecosystem was formed that made it possible to live here all year round and graze cattle. It was here that the cultural core of the Yakut ethnos was formed. At the time when colonizers from the Russian state arrived here in the XVII century, the Yakuts were mainly engaged in cattle breeding (cows, horses), wintering in warm stationary houses and migrating with herds in the warm season. The Sakha people had sufficiently developed metallurgy, which made it possible to equip warriors with iron armor, kylys, long-range bows and spears with metal tips. The surviving heroic epic of the Sakha people tells about the leader Tygyn, the Toyon (head) of the Khangalas tribe who lived on the Tuimaada plain on the left bank of the Lena River (the territory of present-day Yakutsk). Tygyn owned huge herds and commanded an impressive army, thanks to which he gained influence among all Yakut clans. It is believed that due to his efforts to unite Yakut tribes in the XVII century Yakutia was on the verge of creating a unified state, which was prevented by the Moscow invasion.

The Yakut, who prefer to call themselves "Sakha," live in Yakutia, the Sovereign Sakha Republic of the Russian Federation formed in 1992. The Yakut are the farthest-north Turkic people, with a consciousness of having once lived farther south kept alive by legends and confirmed by historical and archaeological research. The Yakut, spread through Yakutia yet concentrated in its center, have become a minority in their own republic. The majority is of Slavic background. Other minorities include the dwindling Yukagir of northern Yakutia, the Even, the Evenk, and the Dolgan, a mixed Yakut-Evenk group. Yakutia is a 3,100,000-square-kilometer territory (over four times the size of Texas) in eastern Siberia (the Soviet Far East). Located at approximately 56 to 71° N and 107 to 152° E, it is bounded by Chukotka to the northeast, Buriatia in the south, and the Evenk region to the west. Its northern coast stretches far above the Arctic Circle, along the East Siberian Sea, and its southern rim includes the Stanovoi Mountains and the Aldan plateau. Its most majestic river, the Lena, flows north along cavernous cliffs, into a long valley, and past the capital, Yakutsk. Other key river systems where major towns have developed include the Aldan, Viliui, and Kolyma. About 700,000 named rivers and streams cross Yakutia, which has some agricultural land but is primarily nonagricultural taiga with vast resources of gold, other minerals, gas, and oil. Tundra rims the north, except for forests along the rivers. Notorious for extremes of cold, long winters, and hot, dry summers, Yakutia has two locations that residents claim to be the "coldest on earth": Verkhoiansk and Oimiakon, where temperatures have dipped to —79° C. More typical are winters of 0° to —40° C and summers of 10° to 30° C.

Yakut /jəˈkuːt/ yə-KOOT, also known as Yakutian, Sakha, Saqa or Saxa (Yakut: саха тыла), is a Turkic language belonging to Siberian Turkic branch and spoken by around 450,000 native speakers, primarily the ethnic Yakuts and one of the official languages of Sakha (Yakutia), a federal republic in the Russian Federation. The Yakut language differs from all other Turkic languages in the presence of a layer of vocabulary of unclear origin (possibly Paleo-Siberian). There is also a large number of words of Mongolian origin related to ancient borrowings, as well as numerous recent borrowings from Russian. Like other Turkic languages and their ancestor Proto-Turkic, Yakut is an agglutinative language and features vowel harmony. Yakut is a member of the Northeastern Common Turkic family of languages, which also includes Shor, Tuvan and Dolgan. Like most Turkic languages, Yakut has vowel harmony, is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. Word order is usually subject–object–verb. Yakut has been influenced by Tungusic and Mongolian languages. Historically, Yakut left the community of Common Turkic speakers relatively early. Due to this, it diverges in many ways from other Turkic languages and mutual intelligibility between Yakut and other Turkic languages is low. Nevertheless, Yakut contains many features which are important for the reconstruction of Proto-Turkic, such as the preservation of long vowels.

Indigenous to the far eastern Siberian republic of Yakutia, the Yakuts are a semi-nomadic people whose traditional way of life has mainly been dictated by the extreme climate in the area where they live. Here’s everything you need to know about one of Russia’s main aboriginal groups. Yakuts also go by the name Sakha – in the same way that their native region, Yakutia, is also known as the Sakha Republic. They have populated Russia’s frozen north for centuries. While urbanisation and Russification have seen a dilution of Yakut culture, many villages scattered throughout the republic remain Yakut strongholds today. Native to the Republic of Yakutia in Siberia’s far east, the Yakuts inhabit some of the coldest places on Earth, which get surprisingly hot in summer. It is also the largest republic in Russia, officially formed in 1922 during the early days of the Soviet Union. Over four times the size of Texas, Yakutia reaches up to Russia’s northern coastline, far above the Arctic Circle, and southwards to the Lake Baikal region and Buryatia and the Aldan Plateau. There are over 700,000 rivers and running bodies of water coursing through the republic’s massive expanse. Yakuts appear in oral histories that date back to the 10th century. It is believed that they are the descendants of the aboriginal people of the Lake Baikal area who migrated north and resettled among Evenk and Yukagir nomads around the Lena Valley. Russians only made contact with them in the 17th century. Cossacks arrived in the region in around 1620, and conflict between them and the Yakuts ensued. By the mid-1600s the Russian empire had absorbed the valley, and by the 1700s Yakutsk was a bustling Russian outpost.

The Yakut, who prefer to call themselves "Sakha," live in Yakutia, the Yakut Republic of the Russian Federation formed in 1992. The Yakut are the farthest-north Turkic people, with a consciousness of having once lived farther south kept alive by legends and confirmed by historical and archaeological research. The Yakut, spread through Yakutia yet concentrated in the center, have become a minority in their own republic. The majority is of Slavic background. Other minorities include the dwindling Yukagir of northern Yakutia, the Even, the Evenk, and the Dolgan, a mixed Yakut-Evenk group. Yakutia is a 3,100,000-square-kilometer territory (over four times the size of Texas), in eastern Siberia (the Soviet Far East). Located at approximately 56 to 71 degree north latitude and 107 to 152 east longitude, it is bounded by Chukotka to the northeast, Buriatia in the south, and the Evenk region to the west. Its northern coast stretches far above the Arctic Circle, along the East Siberian Sea, whereas its southern rim includes the Stanovoi Mountains and the Aldan plateau. Its most majestic river, the Lena, flows north along cavernous cliffs, into a long valley, and past the capital, Yakutsk. Other key river systems, where major towns have developed, include the Aldan, Viliui, and Kolyma. About 700,000 named rivers and streams cross Yakutia, which has some agricultural land, but is primarily nonagricultural taiga, with vast resources of gold, other minerals, gas, and oil. Tundra rims the north, except for forests along the rivers. Notorious for extremes of cold, long winters, and hot, dry summers, Yakutia has two locations that residents claim to be the "coldest on earth": Verkhoiansk and Oimiakon, where temperatures have dipped to -79 degrees Celsius. More typical are winters of 0 to -40 degrees Celsius and summers of 10 to 30 degrees Celsius.

The Yakuts are the second largest indigenous group in Siberia and the northernmost of the Turkish people. Related the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, they speak a Turkic language and live in northern Siberia around the Lena River. They have traditionally been cattle and horse herders who practiced shamanism mixed with animism and Russian Orthodox Christianity. The call themselves the Sakha. There are around 380,000 Yakuts. They make up 33 percent of the Republic of Sakha (formally Yakutia). They tend to live together in Yakut communities, with many of their villages being completely Yakut. Most of the people who live in the Republic of Sakha are Russians or other Slavs. Many Yakuts are now urbanized. Even so Russians dominate the cities. Around 90 percent of Yakuts speak Yakut as their first language. It is a Turkic languages. The tribes near them included the Evenk, which speak a Tungus-Manchurian languages, and the Yukogir, which speak a Paleo-Asian languages. The Yakuts are a Mongoloid people who originated through the combination of local tribes with Turkic tribes that migrated northward before the tenth century. The Yakuts call their homeland "Sakja," which means "Sun." There are many legends and stories that refer to it in their canon of epic tales. Archeological and historical evidence seems to indicate that the ancestors of the Yakut originated in the Lake Baikal area and perhaps were part of the Uighar kingdoms which stretched from southern Siberia into western China. Their ancient literature describes many tensions and battles with other ethic groups. By the 14th century the ancestor of the Yakut migrated northward from Lake Baikal or Kyrgyzstan along the Lena River, where they the fought with and intermarried with the groups that were already there: the Evenk and the Yukagir nomads. In the centuries that followed they had both friendly and unfriendly relations with other Siberians, Chinese, and Mongols. Cossack arrived in Yakut territory in the 1620s. There were skirmishes and hostilities in which the Yakut hero Tygyn distinguished himself. By 1642, the Yakut were paying fur tributes to the tsar. Permanent peace did not occur until after a long siege of a Yakut fort. By 1700 Yakutsk was a busy Russian-controlled commercial and trading center and launching point for incursions into the Far East. By this time the Yakut were cooperating with the Russians and some had converted Orthodox Christianity. The collectivization period under the Soviet took its toll on the Yakut. Many lost their traditional homesteads and were forced to industrial or urban work.

The Yakuts constitute the native population of the Yakut Autonomous republic (Yakutia) which is one of the biggest (according to the territory) republic in Russian Federation. The Russian word “yakut” was taken from Tungus “jeko.” The Yakuts call themselves “sakha” or “urangai sakha” in some old chronicles. By their language, the Yakuts belong to the Turkic-speaking peoples. However, the Yakut language somehow stands apart among other languages in this group. The vocabulary and particularly grammar have many Mongolian loans as well as units of Tungus origin. There are even some language elements of unknown origin. The main territories of the Yakuts are: the Middle Lena River basin and the basins of the Lower Aldan and Vilui rivers. The Yakuts inhabit the Olekma estuary parts and can be found along the Yana, Indigirka, Kolyma, Olenek and Anabaru rivers. Almost all these Yakut territories lie in the east taiga zone that is partially mountainous and partially lowland. The question of the origin of the Yakuts still remains one of the most complicated in the Siberia people study. The Yakuts have been considered to have come from southern parts of Siberia, mainly from Lake Baikal territories. It is most likely that a part of these southern migrants belonged to the Kurykans, a Turkic people inhabiting West Baikal Territories in the ninth-tenth centuries AD. Their northward migration was long and gradual.