RUSSIA: The Shors people, Siberia's first metalworkers, are trying to revive their dying culture

Record ID: 758942

  • Title: RUSSIA: The Shors people, Siberia's first metalworkers, are trying to revive their dying culture
  • Date: 14th January 2009
  • Summary: BOY DRESSED IN TRADITIONAL SHOR COSTUME SINGING SHOR FOLK SONG AND WOMAN ACCOMPANYING HIM ON KAI-KOMUS CLOSE UP BOY WOMAN PLAYING KAI-KOMUS
  • Embargoed: 29th January 2009 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: Industry,Lifestyle
  • Reuters ID: LVA92NAW0KUUCFM2FEDXG20JT97C
  • Story Text: When Olga Tannagasheva starts to sing, her gentle voice transforms into a bass-line growl designed to invoke other-worldly spirits.
    Tannagasheva, one of Russia's 14,000 remaining Shors, also wants to communicate with modern Russians, as her ancient culture strives to reassert itself after decades of Soviet repression and enduring economic hardship. She is a part of a Shor cultural group which meets regularly in Novokuznetsk, the region's largest city and industrial centre with a population of over 500,000.
    Performing under the pseudonym Chyltys -- meaning 'star' in the Shor language -- in blue, red and gold silks and a three-pointed hat, Tannagasheva's style of throat-singing is popular with epic performers that draw on shamanist traditions.
    "Whenever I travel, for example recently I've been to Buryatia, people aske me "Who are the Shors?" And I tell them that Shor people are descendants of ancient Turks who live today on the territory of Kemerovo region. And they tell me they thought we came from China," she said after performing a traditional Shor song at the rehearsal of their next New Year celebration which falls on March 21-22.
    The Shor people are descended from various Turkic tribes that migrated to the mountains of southwest Siberia from Central Asia. They had no unified identity until the mid-19th century, when the tribes, skilled horsemen and hunters, amalgamated.
    Nicknamed the Blacksmith Tartars for their talent in fashioning tools from local iron deposits, they were granted their own mountain region -- Gornaya Shoria -- in 1926. Thirteen years later, Soviet leader Josef Stalin erased it from the map.
    "In those days when the autonomous district of the mountain Shors was abolished, it became unpopular to speak the national language and we were told to speak Russian. When I was a little boy and I moved here and went to school, I had to repeat a year twice in the second and third forms, because my Russian was bad and now I have forgotten the Shor language", said Vladimir Kusurgashev, a Shor pensioner and member of the Shor cultural group.
    But the Shor language, outlawed by Stalin, is making a comeback.
    Gennady Kostochakov, a lecturer at the Shor language faculty in Novokuznetsk's teaching academy, has 15 first-year students in his class. About 140 people have graduated from his faculty in the last 20 years.
    "We were speaking Shor at home, my parents tried to teach me little by little, but I didn't do Shor language at school, I learnt it at home only, " said first-year student Natalya Bekrenyova.
    About 11,500 Shors, over 80 percent of the group, live today in the southern part of Kemerovo region, 3,000 km (1,875 miles) from Moscow. The majority of them do not speak their own language.
    The Shors were originally shamanists, although their belief in the spirit world has co-existed with Christianity for centuries after the first Europeans arrived in the region. Today many Shors are Russian Orthodox Christians first and foremost.
    The Shors do not have a republic of their own and so have less autonomy than other Siberian ethnic groups. The neighbouring Altai and Khakassia peoples have their own republics.
    "Once the Shors had some kind of a statehood, maybe not a proper one, but still they had a national district where state institutions were protecting the nation and they carried out policy aimed at protecting Shors.
    But it was all over during the [Stalin] repressions. In 1939 it was abolished and after this there was total Russification, totally, and this had its effect of course. But I think that there was another aspect that affected us - the industrialisation of our region", said Gennady Kostochakov.
    The Shors, also renowned for fishing, settled in valleys along the Tom River and its tributaries, the Mras-Su and Kondoma. Men and women inhabited separate quarters inside the cramped huts they fashioned from birch branches.
    Industrial towns have swallowed up many of the original villages, but 90 small settlements remain where over half the residents are Shors.
    Chuvashka is one. Leonid Aponkin, 70, lives there with his wife, Rufina. The family album of sepia-tinted photographs includes portraits on Red Square and Sochi's Black Sea coast, revealing how the Aponkins assimilated into Soviet society before retiring to their home village. The village they returned to was different from the one they left. Pine and cedar trees still surround the village and they still draw water from the local well. But the industrial development around the village has damaged the environment.
    "The ecology is being destroyed. Just have a look at the moonlike landscape around. The nature was different before, it was intact, now the ecology is destroyed", said Leonid Aponkin in the room of his wooden village house, heated by the stove filled with coal brought in bags from an opencast mine nearby.
    Living in land rich with mineral resources has been good and bad for the Shors. It turned the nomadic tribe of hunters into Siberia's first blacksmiths but colonisation and later industrialisation of the area later led to assimilation of the Shors and decline of their culture.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
  • Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2011. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
  • Usage Terms/Restrictions: Audio restrictions: please see Business Notes for more information.
Register