A kayaking trip around one of the world's longest and deepest lakes shows a very different, spiritual side to southern Siberia
Take a dip in Lake Baikal and there’s a danger of drowning in statistics – ‘longest’, ‘deepest’, ‘most voluminous’. But little of this has helped me comprehend Baikal over the ten years I’ve been visiting. Can a lake really stretch further than from London to Edinburgh?
Around five years ago, when I first had a chance to get to the Buryatiya Republic on the eastern side of the lake, my conceptual cluelessness became clear to me – Baikal is too big to be ‘one place’. Approached this way, things began to slot into place. The lake’s colossal extent means that there’s no point from which you can see it all, or hope to try.
I was consoled that the ancient Russians didn’t know it well either. Siberia was an Asian land ruled by its own Khans, and only settled by the Russians from the 17th century onwards. Early map-makers were aware, probably from hearsay, that there was a huge expanse of water out there somewhere – but they often assumed it must be a kind of inlet of the Arctic Ocean, and thus placed Baikal in the far north.
In fact, it is located in southern Siberia, on the borders with Mongolia – and was once a battleground for Chingghis Khan (Genghis Khan). I saw the evidence of this earlier this year, when Andrei Sukhnev – Baikal’s ecotourism guru – took me on a kayaking trip on the Selenga River, one of the lake’s hundreds of tributaries.
Instead of using a guidebook, Andrei was navigating our shore forage with The Secret History Of The Mongols – the last written word in 13th-century research. It was all there, and we traced the whole of Chingghis’ last great showdown with his enemies, the Merkit, to the final detail, including the ‘fortresses’ (in reality, natural rock strongholds) atop the mountains from which the Merkit showered down their arrows.
Apart from an isolated white yurt (felt tent) every half-hour, there was no one around but the birds – and the mosquitoes they were feeding on, while the mosquitoes fed on us.
What had the first Russian settlers thought of this titanic, empty landscape when they came – initially as missionaries, but soon as conquerors – in the 17th century? They, too, must have paddled the rivers in the days long before the post-road or the railway.
At the lakeside Posolsky Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery, Father Nikolai had clearly not had a good time with the mosquitoes either. His work was to rebuild the ruined monastery, and he seemed strangely unsuited to the hard physical labour it involved. Three fresh tombstones marked the re-interred graves of his predecessors, who founded the complex in 1685.
“It wasn’t only the Bible, it was education and medicine they brought,” he said, motioning to the men whose bones he had re-buried as though they were old friends. “Of course, when the Tsar had the Buryat emissaries killed in Moscow, these monks were massacred in a reprise attack. But how could we harbour grudges in a God-given paradise like this?"
He gestured broadly at the vast extent of Baikal’s waters beyond the graves. With no electricity, and the lake to bathe in, it really was a paradise on a baking hot summer day – but imagine the fortitude of the monks during the bitter Baikal winters that dropped to -45°C.
As we picnicked on locally smoked omul fish and beer on the stony beach, I reflected that eating this every day for six months of winter must have sowed a little doubt in the minds of even the most devout of missionaries. Indeed, the more ancient local faith of shamanism had actually turned on these seasonal variations, seeing the entire world as a yin-yang battle between bielobog, the spirit of the long, warm summer days, and crnobog, the animus of dark winter nights.
My quest to find the ‘spirit’ of Baikal itself, however, was closing towards its most obvious target – the Buddhist monasteries that had once been found all over the region, half-permitted in the ‘beyond Baikal’ Tsarist Siberia that lay under Cossack control. Their classical Tibetan stupas seem initially incongruous in the middle of Siberia, but Buddhism has been the main faith here for hundreds of years.
About 20km outside Ulan-Ude, the monastery of Ivolginsk Datsan is still an important Buddhist centre. On my visit, I watched a wedding party from Ulan-Ude arrive, a festooned limousine and a convoy of decrepit Ladas in hot pursuit. The happy couple had come to get a blessing from the Lama, before screeching back to the city for their banquet and disco.
No trace of any of Buryatiya’s 47 pre-Soviet monasteries can be found in Ulan-Ude itself. However, the regional capital is a monument to the entirely different dogma of Marxism-Leninism, with the ‘Largest Bust Of Lenin In The World’ dominating its colossal square.
“Replacing religion with culture” was official Soviet policy, and its ‘temple’ sits adjacent to Lenin’s Head – the Opera House, an eccentric Stalin-baroque outburst that rode roughshod over the actual culture of Buryatiya, by introducing its newly collectivised herders and tea-trade camel-caravaneers to La Traviata and Swan Lake.
Nothing could contrast more with this conspicuous grandeur than the delicate traces left by the most secretive sect drawn to Baikal. They were the survivors of an extraordinary story – a 17th-century mass-suicide event that shocked the entire nation. The ‘Old Believers’ were banned as a result and fled into Siberia’s secret wastelands, determined to worship according to the ancient rites to which their modern-day successors still scrupulously adhere.
Everything I heard about the Old Believers prepared me for stern, harsh and unwelcoming people – from their refusal to use modern machinery to their story of self-immolation rather than reform. However, my imagined Old Believers were already failing to shape-up as expected as we rumbled past the brightly, almost gaudily painted clinker-built wooden houses of villages along the road to Tarbagatay.
Women in the most extravagantly clashing shades of purple and orange pulled their children behind them on toboggans, the snowy backdrop only highlighting the outlandish colour of their traditional dress.
Father Andrei had built the village church in Tarbatagay with his own hands. Not though, he added, entirely alone. Although it was clearly newly built, it followed traditional patterns. But this didn’t prepare me for the feast of priceless ancient icons decorating the tiny altar – some dating back to the 14th century. Had they been dragged by the faithful across Siberia? And how had those who guarded them survived the self-immolation, I wondered?
After the service, Father Andrei had still more wonders in store – stacked in an old barn across the road. The accumulated treasure and clutter of a community’s life was piled up on makeshift shelves in an unofficial museum – from icons and vestments to milking-stools and ploughs.
“Everything done by hand, you see – and it all still works. You could use that iron right now if we had some coal!” There was a gleam in his eye, born from overcoming three centuries of rejection, repression and misunderstanding. The idea that organic produce in Western Europe can’t keep pace with demand is clearly some kind of private victory for him.
The Old Believers’ religious ethic of simple food and hard work continues today, but the need for secrecy is over – their warm hospitality and hearty recipes, unchanged in four centuries, reward the tiny number of visitors prepared to make the bumpy ride from Ulan-Ude. The lunch we ate consisted of soups, stews, boiled meats and mashed potatoes – not a single thing had come out of a packet. I tried to offer Father Andrei a donation for his ‘museum’, but he politely folded the money back into my hand.
“Do me this favour instead. Tell people in your country WE ARE HERE, we are alive, and we welcome you.” And how could I say no to a priest?
