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Visiting Galsan Tschinag in his Yurt
Katharina Rout
In 2001, I fell in love with Galsan Tschinag’s work. My first e-mail reached
him two days before the fall of the Twin Towers, his reply came to me two days after. He
called my hope to translate The Blue Sky one day a small sun, shining from the
West, and sent me a large herd of good spirits. Coming from a practicing shaman,
the wish for good spirits meant a great deal.
Two years later, I met Tschinag when he was in Germany on one of his many
reading tours. Immediately he inquired about my family and began sharing the
story of his. He spoke of life, death, family, love, and the heart. Before
dinner, I learned about his horses, after dinner, about how as a shaman he heals
people, even with a life-threatening injury inflicted by a horse. A bit of
Mongolia had arrived in Germany. He takes some Altai soil with him wherever he
goes.
In 2004, my husband and I went to visit Galsan in Mongolia. From the first
moment, we were impressed by the hospitality. His children had been instructed
to guide and take care of us. In Ulaanbaatar, they put us on the plane to Ölgiy,
where we were met by another son who had spent two days coming down from the
Altai to pick us up. From Ölgiy (elevation 1700 meters) we traveled by jeep
towards the distant mountain range. We were near the Russian border, and
skirmishes as the result of political borders that arbitrarily crossed ancient
tribal lands were common. Our jeep was driven by a veterinarian who before 1990
had been employed by the state. Because in the new capitalist economy nomadic
herders could not afford his services, he made a living driving foreign guests
in his jeep and taking medications from the pharmacy in Ölgiy into the
mountains. Many people are in comparable circumstances.
After hours of driving through the steppe and foothills—there are hardly any
roads in Mongolia—we reached a windy mountain pass with a large ovoo, a cairn of
sacrificial stones, that marked the beginning of the traditional land of the
Tuvans and, as the Mongolians say about this part of their country, the roof of
the world. The air smelled of sage, and before us lay an awe-inspiring ocean of
greenish-blue velvety mountain backs, broad valleys left behind by glaciers, and
snow-covered peaks in the distance. ‘Altai,’ Galsan Tschinag has written, comes
from ‘ala,’ multi-coloured, and ‘dag,’ mountain. As the winds drove clouds
across the sky, the mountains seemed to move under the changing patterns of sun
and shadow, and it was easy to understand the Tuvans’ veneration for the Altai.
For the next hours we kept climbing. From time to time, a Kazakh or Tuvan
yurt could be seen in the distance. In a few valleys, herders were making hay
from small patches of green: struggling for every blade of grass. It was getting
cooler; in fact, one of the next mornings, there was a frost on the ground, and
when we returned to Ulaanbaatar before the middle of August, everybody agreed
that fall had arrived.
Towards evening we had arrived in the Tsengelkhayrkhan mountain range.
Towering over three yurts on a ridge at the end of a valley near the Black Lake
was the 4000 meters high sacred mountain. The Tuvans call it Haarakan, Great
Mountain, because awe and respect forbid them to spell out the proper names of
what is divine or dangerous. This was the furthest the jeep could go. To meet
us, Galsan Tschinag had left the neighboring valley and ridden across a
mountain through hours of a lashing rain storm. We saw him from afar astride his
white horse waiting on the ridge. He welcomed us into a yurt especially made for
us—a brand-new, shining white yurt we were invited to take back to North
America. We were offered different kinds of cheese and fried dough, and invited
to drink from the silver bowl that has come down to him from his ancestors—as
has his snuff bottle, his sliver flint and the silver sheath of the dagger he
wears on his silk saffron belt over his blue velvet coat when he is in the
Altai. His son came to play a concert for us on the horsehead fiddle. He had
brought the mail with him from Ölgiy, which included an invitation by the
President of the Republic of Tywa, who hoped Galsan Tschinag would join him for
the celebrations of the republic’s tenth anniversary; he would be offered a
place of honor next to Putin. Clearly, we had arrived at the court of a prince.
And we were honored because translations build bridges—honored by a man who is
a most extraordinary bridge builder himself: As a shaman, he mediates between
his community and the spirit world; as a chieftain, he connects Tuvans with each
other; as a writer, he forges links between the oral tradition and epics of his
people and the literate world outside; as a politician, he negotiates a future
for his minority Tuvans among a sometimes hostile majority of Kazakhs and
Mongolians; as a translator and teacher, he crosses, and enables others to
cross, the linguistic borders of Tuvan, Kazakh, Mongolian, Russian, and German;
and as a host, he opens his small yurt in the Altai, and his large yurt—the
Altai and the steppe itself—to guests from abroad.
The next day, we continued our journey on horseback. Across steep, rocky
terrain and a ridge more than 3000 meters high we rode for hours to reach the
juniper valley, the summer pastures for a number of Tuvan and Kazakh families.
There we watched Galsan Tschinag work as chieftain and shaman, and as host of a
group of Europeans who, like us, had come to the Altai to learn about the
Tuvans. We had barely dismounted when news came that a woman further on in the
mountains suffered from blood poisoning from a badly infected wound. Galsan
Tschinag and a German medical doctor rode off; when they returned, the doctor
was worried for the woman’s life, but the shaman had not even used the
antibiotics we had sent along, and indeed, a couple of days later we saw the
woman, limping, but otherwise well again. Traditional and modern medicine are
not in conflict, though; Galsan Tschinag has donated two jeeps that serve as
ambulances for critically ill patients from the mountains to reach the hospital
in Ölgiy in time.
Every day, Galsan took us to visit Tuvan and Kazakh families in the valley.
Each had prepared a spread, mostly of meat and dairy products, but also of fried
dough and sweets, and each offered us salted, buttery milk-tea and—since it was
the foaling season—both fermented and distilled mare’s milk. In one yurt, a
whole wether had been slaughtered for the occasion. These were celebrations, but
they clearly were also opportunities Galsan Tschinag created to braid together
the Tuvan and Kazakh families who have to share the sparse resources of the
land. He was always given the seat of honor at the North end of the yurt, and
while the guests were offered delicacies such as the fatty tail of a sheep, he
inquired—in Tuvan, Kazakh, or Mongolian—about the well-being of each family and
their animals. As a result of four catastrophic winters and unusually dry
summers, the nomads in the Altai had lost two-thirds of their herds in the
previous decade. Galsan Tschinag’s visits and the European visitors he has
brought into the Altai for the last fifteen summers create employment and income
opportunities. We never left a yurt without him handing over a substantial stack
of tugrik bills, but we also watched him engaging with every adult in the
family; introducing the children to us; stroking, massaging, and caressing the
sick and aged; praising (and translating into German) outstanding events and
achievements; and making everybody feel encouraged and important.
In the process, we heard people’s stories. We learned how mothers on
horseback carry their baby’s wooden cradle when the family moves: on a leather
strap around the neck. More importantly, we learned how a family’s history can
be read from the second, thinner yak leather strap stretched across the cradle.
It allows visitors to avoid asking painful questions and instead find gentle and
empathetic words. For every birth of a boy, a sheep’s right ankle bone is tied
to the strap, for every girl, a left one. For every child that has died, the
bone is removed, but the knot remains.
Bones connect life and death, the material and the spiritual. They are read
by the shaman who provides guidance and support, and who taught us to read in
the book of nature. A rock face, so forbidding from a distance, shows fracture
lines from close up: nothing is forever, everything changes. Birds that breed
their young at a lake near the foot of Haarakan’s glacier grieve when one of the
couple dies. The shaman translated: love is the key to life, and the cause of
suffering. Do as the birds.
The practical education of Tuvan children has needed addressing. They can now
attend school in their own language. Galsan Tschinag founded and continues to
support it, and has been instrumental in gaining additional support from the
Republic of Tywa. Tywa has trained teachers and sent books, and the Austrian
Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (Society for Threatened Indigenous Peoples) has
raised funds to provide a heating system. If families are unable to raise the
fees for their children’s attendance, Galsan Tschinag covers the cost. These
children are the fortunate ones in a country whose once almost 100% literacy
rate has been shrinking ever since the advent of capitalism has left many
herders unable to send their children to school.
Thanks to Galsan Tschinag, Tuvan women, too, are receiving lessons and
material support. Their economic empowerment has become particularly urgent
since 1990 as alcoholism among men has been on the rise. In a cooperative in
nearby Tsengel, women are taught to grow vegetables and to practice their
traditional crafts. We left the Altai with felted Tuvan slippers and embroidered
Kazakh tapestry. A centre for culture and spirituality is about to be built,
thanks to the initiative of Galsan Tschinag, who takes care to support Kazakh
and Mongolian initiatives as well. “I am convinced that our corner could quickly
turn into a Karabakh or Kosovo,” he warns, “if in a country such as ours, with a
colourful mix of peoples and a leadership that glorifies violence and war, the
Tuvan people were to glorify their own and denigrate their neighbors’
cultures.” Bridges have to be built from both sides of a river, though. While
Galsan Tschinag promotes foreign-language learning among the Tuvans, he also
gives one manuscript a year for publication, royalty-free, to a Mongolian
publisher, hoping to sew the seeds of respect for Tuvan culture among his fellow
Mongolians. His stories, he says about all his books, are not his stories alone:
they are the stories of his people.
What such mutual understanding could look like, we sensed the day before we
left the Altai to fly home. Word had gone out into the mountains and the steppe,
and families came riding from all directions. A feast was prepared, and a
specialty served: marmot. Traditional songs were sung, and men performed
throat-singing. And then we danced. Accompanied by a long-song and the horsehead
fiddle, one after the other got up to dance and then to invite the next to dance
in turn. Nobody was left out: regardless of age, sex, class, or race, each was
given his or her moment in the center of the great yurt.
The next morning we started our two-day trip back to Ölgiy. People gathered
to say farewell. Each was blessed by Galsan Tschinag, the shaman, with the
traditional sprinkling of milk. And because my husband and I were the first
North Americans to come to the Tuvan land in the High Altai, we were given
special gifts to take home. The Cold War is ending, people had repeatedly said
to us the days before. When we laid our customary three stones on the ovoo, we
had reason to be grateful indeed.
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