Sayan Mountains

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sayan Mountains rise across southern Siberia, straddling the border between Russia and northern Mongolia, and they have been shaping human history for at least a thousand years. Long before Russia expanded into the region, this range served as the dividing line between Mongolian and Russian cultures. Today the mountains span the Russian territories of Buryatia, Irkutsk Oblast, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Tuva, and Khakassia. They are the birthplace of one of Siberia's great rivers, and a candidate for the origin of entire language families spoken by millions of people today. What makes a mountain range not just a geographic feature, but a cradle of civilizations? And why did the Soviet Union seal this area off from the outside world in 1944, leaving it protected and isolated for decades? Those are the questions this documentary will follow into the peaks.

• 2. Two Ranges, One System

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  At 92 degrees east longitude, the Upper Yenisei River cuts through the Western Sayan system, splitting it at a dramatic breach. The Western Sayan stretches roughly 650 kilometers in a northeast-southwest direction, flanked by the Shapshal Range of the Eastern Altai to the west and the Abakan Range of the Kuznetsk Alatau to the east. Climbing toward it from the Mongolian plateau, the ascent is gradual. Approaching from the Siberian plains to the north, the slopes are far steeper. The range holds a dozen subsidiary ranges of alpine character, among them the Aradan, Borus, Oy, and Ergak-Targak-Taiga. Its prominent peaks include Kyzlasov Peak at 2,969 meters and Aradansky Peak at 2,456 meters.

  The Eastern Sayan is a different creature entirely. Running 1,000 kilometers in a northwest-southeast direction, it meets the Western Sayan roughly at a right angle. Its northwestern subranges form a system of so-called White Mountains, or Belki, where permanent snow rests on the summits year-round. The central portion contains the Kryzhin Range, which culminates in Grandiozny Peak at 2,982 meters, the highest point in Krasnoyarsk Krai. Further to the southeast, the terrain grows more remote and reaches its full stature at Mount Munku-Sardyk, 3,491 meters high, which stands as the highest point in the entire Sayan system. Rivers flowing down from the Eastern Sayan's ridges carve gorges on their way to lower ground, and waterfalls are common throughout the area. Pik Tofalariya, at 2,939 meters, marks the roof of Irkutsk Oblast within this section.

• 3. The River Born Here

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  Southwest of Tuva, the Sayan peaks and their cool lakes feed a collection of tributaries that eventually merge into the Yenisei River, one of Siberia's defining waterways. From this mountainous origin, the Yenisei flows northward for more than 3,400 kilometers before reaching the Arctic Ocean. That journey from high alpine terrain to polar sea is among the longest river runs in Asia. The Western Sayan system is also pierced at 106 degrees east, at its eastern extremity, where the land drops toward the Selenga-Orkhon Valley depression, another drainage corridor connecting the mountains to distant lowlands.

  The vegetation that clings to these slopes reflects the harshness of the elevation. The flora is sparse across much of the range. In the higher regions, however, forests of larch, pine, juniper, birch, and alder manage to take hold, joined by rhododendrons and species of Berberis and Ribes. Where trees cannot reach, lichens and mosses cover the boulders scattered across the upper slopes. Between the Yenisei breach and Lake Khövsgöl at roughly 100 degrees 30 minutes east, this section of the system also carries the name Yerghik-Taiga.

• 4. When Ice Covered Everything

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  During the Last Glacial Period, the mountains that now show only small cirque glaciers were buried under an entirely different landscape. The Munku-Sardyk massif, standing at 3,492 meters just west of Lake Baikal, fed glaciers that flowed down from its flanks. A completely glaciated granite-gneiss plateau extending over 12,100 square kilometers sat at roughly 2,300 meters above sea level across the East Sayan mountains. Summits in the Tunkinskaya Dolina valley, reaching between 2,600 and 3,110 meters, contributed their own ice to a parent glacier roughly 30 kilometers wide.

  The eastern tongue of that glacier reached all the way down to Lake Baikal, terminating at around 500 meters above sea level. Outlet glaciers from the upper Slujanka valley and through parallel corridors like the Snirsdaja valley flowed north toward Baikal as well. One outlet glacier calved directly into Lake Baikal at approximately 400 meters above sea level. Researchers have calculated that the glacial snowline in these mountains ran between 1,250 and 1,450 meters above sea level during that period. This represents a snowline depression of roughly 1,500 meters compared to today. Under comparable precipitation conditions, that shift implies an average annual temperature during the Last Ice Age somewhere between 7.5 and 9 degrees Celsius colder than the present.

• 5. The Reindeer Herders

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  Scholar Sev'yan I. Vainshtein described Sayan reindeer herding as the oldest known form of this practice anywhere in the world. According to Vainshtein, it originated with the Samoyedic taiga population of the Sayan Mountains at the turn of the first millennium. The domestication of the reindeer in this region established a cultural and economic complex that the ancestors of modern Evenki groups then carried across the taiga, spreading the practice more widely. Those ancestors are understood to have inhabited areas adjacent to the Sayan Mountains, making their involvement in the domestication process highly probable.

  The Evenki tradition of reindeer herding survived into modern times, but not without damage. Russification and Sovietization reshaped the lives of indigenous communities across the region. Many Evenks lost their traditional way of life through these pressures. Two peoples, the Mator and the Kamas, were assimilated altogether. Today, the local indigenous groups who have retained their traditional lifestyle live almost exclusively in the area of the Eastern Sayan mountains.

• 6. A Cradle of Languages

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  Linguist Juha Janhunen and other scholars have placed the homeland of the Uralic language family in the South-Central Siberian region of the Sayan Mountains. The Uralic family includes Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and dozens of other languages spoken across a broad arc from Europe to Siberia. Turkologist Peter Benjamin Golden offers a parallel argument, locating the Proto-Turkic homeland in the southern taiga-steppe zone of the Sayan-Altay region. If both hypotheses are correct, this single mountain system was once the seedbed for two of Eurasia's most geographically widespread language families.

  Not all scholars agree. An alternative placement puts the Proto-Uralic homeland farther west, in the Volga-Kama region, while Proto-Turkic origins are located farther east, near eastern Mongolia along the southern fringe of the Northern Eurasian Greenbelt. The debate remains open. What the arguments share, however, is an acknowledgment that the Sayan region sits at or near the center of some of the most consequential prehistoric population movements on the continent. The Sayan Solar Observatory, built at an altitude of 2,000 meters in these same mountains, brings a different kind of inquiry to the range, pointing its instruments at the sun rather than the deep human past.