Yakuts Erotic

The Yakuts — who call themselves Sakha — are the northernmost Turkic-speaking people on earth, and that single fact rearranges everything else about them. Their homeland, the Republic of Sakha, covers a swathe of eastern Siberia roughly the size of India, most of it locked under permafrost and crossed by the Lena River. Winters in the interior routinely hit forty below; the village of Oymyakon, in Yakut country, holds the record for the coldest permanently inhabited place on the planet. A pastoral, horse-and-cattle people speaking a Turkic language ended up here, far from the steppe homelands of their linguistic cousins, and they brought their herds with them — Yakut horses are a stocky, shaggy breed bred to dig through snow for forage and stand outdoors at temperatures that would kill a Mongolian pony.

Linguistically, Sakha sits at the far northeastern edge of the Turkic family, isolated for long enough from Kipchak and Oghuz neighbors that it has absorbed a heavy stratum of vocabulary from the surrounding Tungusic peoples — Evenks and Evens — whose reindeer-herding territory the Sakha pushed into and partly displaced. The migration north is usually placed somewhere in the medieval period, with ancestors moving from the Lake Baikal region under pressure from Mongol expansion. They are unusual among Siberian peoples in having maintained a strong demographic presence in their own republic; the Sakha are a majority in many of its districts, and the language is taught, broadcast, and published in.

Religion in Sakha country is officially Russian Orthodox — conversion came with the Russian colonial advance through Siberia in the seventeenth century — but the older layer is closer to the surface than in most Christianized populations. The pre-Christian system, sometimes called Tengrism or Aar Aiyy, organizes the world into upper, middle, and lower realms and recognizes a class of spirit-intermediaries; shamanic practice was suppressed under both the tsars and the Soviets but never fully erased, and there has been a deliberate revival since the 1990s. The summer festival of Yhyakh, held around the solstice, is the calendrical anchor of Sakha public life — a multi-day gathering involving kumis (fermented mare's milk), the round osuokhai dance, and rituals addressed to the sky and the sun. It functions less like a folk festival staged for outsiders and more like a national holiday a people throws for itself.