Spirits behind a Museum Curtain

Sherkaly is a national settlement in the north of the Oktyabrsky region of the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug. It is located on a high steep bank over the Ob. Its history is long - it is older than four centuries. Even in old times it was considered to be a small settlement (there are fewer than one and a half thousand dwellers). A traveler can be amazed to see a snow-white church - a monument of the beginning of the last century, a modern Palace of Culture, an archaeological monument - the site of an ancient settlement named Sherkaly, and the old wooden mansion of merchants Novitsky…

And suddenly (or, maybe, quite naturally) you see an ethnographic museum located in an ordinary loghouse (called "izba"). Visitors are often astonished by this, so they ask, "Where is the Khanty house ("chum")? Archaeological digs show, however, that beginning with the early Iron Age settlements of the Low and Middle Ob Region sometimes had log houses. Besides, some dwellers of the ancient Sherkaly site were fishermen, who didn't have domestic deer. Therefore, they did not have to move after their herds in search of food or pastures and could afford to have a settled life.

More information on these and other subjects you can find in the printed version of our journal.