Briefly about the Nganasans

The Nganasans are the most northern people in Eurasia, descendants of the Neolithic hunters, who lived on Taimyr over 3500 years ago.  Now there are a bit over 800 people left.

During long winters, when the blizzard didn’t allow to leave a chum, they shared folk legends and songs with each other, carved items of deer horn and decorated their clothes with elaborate ornaments. The Nganasans had no writing (foe the first time it was developed only in 1990), as well as documents. Their clothes was their “passport”, each pattern of the clothes had its meaning and was closely connected with mythology.

Traditional philosophy of life of the Nganasans was penetrated with the idea of the  consistent  bearing by the definite mother of this or that class of subjects, beings or phenomena. The basic bearing sources can be psented by the following ones: Mother Earth, Mother Sun and Mother Moon. Mother Earth was regarded as the ancestress of everything existing on the Earth. She gives birth herself, without participation of any masculinity.

The Nganasans language reflects the specifics of the northern lifestyle. So, to define a deer, they had over two tens of words. For example, bakhi is a wild deer, byk – a sled one, a capon, and a bangay is a female, that has had no calf this year yet.

The basis of their nutrition is deer meat. The eat all the parts of the carcass, without excluding the fetus and contents of the stomach taiba. In summer and autumn women ppared meat in advance. The jerked meat tiribi is hanged in long stripes/ribbons on the hangers chiedr – the sledges put  onto each other, – then cut it into small pieces, mix them with fat and once again dry them on the skins spad out. In winter they froze deer blood and chip away, as needed, pieces for cooking broth dyama. Earlier the vessels for fat pserving were an entirely removed calf skin, an esophagus and a deer stomach, a swim bladder and a brown trout skin.

They also consumed the meat of geese, partridges, polar foxes, hares and birds eggs. They eat raw fish (broad whitefish, brown trout, muksun, white salmon), frozen and jerked fish. They cooked jerked fish – yukola (faka) in the same way as deer meat, pserved in in the sacks. In winter they ate raw fish. The Nganasans almost  didn’t eat bread. Unleavened flatbread made of bought flour kiriba were considered to be a delicacy. Among the favourite dishes there were chirima kiriba  – flatbread made of flour with caviar and chirime, dir – fat boiled with caviar.

Earlier the Nganasans used only tea, flour and tobacco of the imported products. Nowadays this list has seriously increased.

Read more interesting facts about the Nganasans here.

Photo: Alexander Khimushin.