How do the Buryats differ from the Yakuts and do they get angry when they are confused?

These Siberian peoples have been living next door to each other for so long, and their representatives are so similar that Buryats and Yakuts are often confused. They themselves treat this philosophically: “We, the Yakuts, outwardly do not differ much from the Buryats”, “Among the Sakhas, 40% have a purely Buryat appearance, and among the Buryats, 40% also look like Sakhas”, “Dear Sakhas, we are with you close!” – users write on forums and social networks.

Scientists also suggest that the Buryats and Yakuts even have a common ancestor – the nomadic Kurykan tribe that lived in Transbaikalia. And yet they are two different ethnic groups with different languages, religions and traditions.

Origin

The Yakuts are one of the most ancient Turkic peoples, whose ancestors lived on the shores of Lake Baikal, but later migrated to the north-east of Siberia and settled along the Lena – according to one version, due to the attacks of the Mongol tribes .

The Buryats are the northernmost of the Mongolian peoples, and by origin they are closer to the Mongols and Kalmyks than to the Yakuts. Since about the 13th century, the Buryats have inhabited the lands to the south and east of Lake Baikal. According to modern studies, the Turkic and Mongolian peoples do not differ too much genetically: specialists from the Institute of Biochemistry and Genetics of the Ufa Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences came to the conclusion that both ethnic groups have the same extended sections of the genome and have common ancestors who inhabited the south of Siberia.

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Language

Despite their genetic closeness, Yakuts and Buryats speak very different languages. Yakut belongs to the Turkic group, although it developed in isolation from related languages and was actively replenished with borrowings from Mongolian and Russian. About a third of the Yakut vocabulary are words of Russian origin that appeared after the entry of Yakutia into Russia, that is, almost 400 years ago.

Buryat is the language of the Mongolian group with a fixed word order in the sentence and a slow pace of speech. Until the 1930s The Buryats used the old Mongolian script and wrote down words not from left to right, but from top to bottom. This graphic system came into use as early as the 13th century and is still in use in Inner Mongolia.

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Religion

Before the exploration of Siberia by the pioneer Cossacks, the Yakuts professed Tengrianism, the medieval religion of the Turkic-Mongolian nomads. They believed in the existence of three worlds connected by a giant tree: deities (Aiyy), in the middle – people and spirits of nature, in the lower – demons. Adherents of this religion revered sacred mountains, rivers and trees, each of which had its own spirit. In the 18th century, local residents were massively baptized into Orthodoxy, but in 2012, the traditional Yakut religion Aiyy was officially registered in Yakutia.

The Republic of Buryatia is one of the main centers of Buddhism in Russia, and until the 16th century, the Buryats practiced shamanism. The heyday of Buddhism in Buryatia falls on the 19th century; local residents owe this religion to the spread of writing, the development of science and art. But at the end of the 20th century, a revival of shamanism began in the republic, and now it remains a traditional religious trend. But there are very few Christians among the Buryats, despite the active work of missionaries in the 18-19 centuries. tonkosti.ru/sized/f550x700/1m/2l/1m2ly48qkykkkc004g08g4sc0.jpg” media=”(max-width: 549px)”>

Arkady Zarubin

What else to read on the topic

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Love potatoes, don’t be afraid of the cold and 6 more rules of life for Siberians

Areas of residence

Most of the Yakuts live in the Republic of Sakha, there are representatives of this people in Taimyr, Sakhalin, in the Magadan Region and the Krasnoyarsk Territory.

Buryats inhabit not only the Republic of Buryatia: large groups live in the Irkutsk region, Mongolia and in the north of China, in Inner Mongolia. ://fs.tonkosti.ru/sized/f550x700/4r/od/4rodwulv1c84g00gkkkw0okww.jpg” media=”(max-width: 549px)”>

Uyban

Traditional housing

For a long time, both Buryats and Yakuts lived in yurts, but already in the 19th century, under the influence of Russians traditions, rich Buryats began to build wooden huts. In such houses they settled in the winter, and in the summer they moved to portable felt yurts.

A log yurt-booth served as a winter dwelling for the Yakuts: vertically placed logs were coated with clay and covered with a sloping gable roof, and a hearth was equipped inside. In May, the Yakuts moved to urasa – high conical huts made of poles, covered with birch bark. They were located near rivers and lakes and were cool in the heat.

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