Том 8, № 3 (2023)

The article opens a section devoted to the problem of ethnocultural ties of the Turkic peoples. Its author describes four phenomena of the traditional culture of the southern Altai people, which were discovered during an ethnological expedition to the Altai Republic. All of them in one form or another are characteristic of the traditional culture of the Kyrgyz. The paper discusses the game chatyrash, which was revived by the Altaians, lost by the Kyrgyz, but it was mentioned in the Kyrgyz epic “Manas”. The second evidence is the ritual of serving ucha – rump, which is the culmination of serving a meal among the Altai peoples and the Kyrgyz, the most honourable dish. However, Kyrgyz people serve it to a wider circle of relatives. The third one is similar traditional methods of butchering a sheep carcass, names of its bones, the order of serving parts of the animal during a meal, and preference of horsemeat. Finally, the Altai word tagyl, recorded during the expedition, allowed the author to put forward a hypothesis about its similarity with the Kyrgyz San-Tash as a phenomena associated with stones. The author comes to the conclusion about the close ethnogenetic and ethnocultural connection between the southern Altaians and the Kyrgyz, which emerged in the Middle Ages.

The purpose of the study is to compare the vocabulary related to traditional nutrition in the Altai and Kyrgyz languages. It is based on linguistic materials collected by the author among residents of the villages of the Altai Republic: Kaspa, Shyrgaity of the Shebalinsk District; Kyrlyk, Mondur-Sokkon, Kan-Oozy of the Ust-Kansk District; Yabogan, Yelo, Kulady, Bichiktu-Boom, and Kӱpchegen of the Onguday District. Their analysis revealed many lexical and semantic similarities in the Altai and Kyrgyz languages. This is especially noticeable in the names of meat dishes. The coincidences are explained by the identical economic and living conditions of the Altaians and Kyrgyz in the past and present. The formation of the vocabulary of the Altai and Kyrgyz languages took place in a distant era, when their speakers lived in the territory of Altai.

The article analyzes the collecting activities of the Russian Ethnographic Museum employees and amateur local historians of Bessarabia, who have been gathering collections on the Gagauz people ethnography for a century. This fund contains over three hundred material monuments, archival, illustrative and photographic materials on the Gagauz migrants who lived in the territory of Novorossiya (and subsequently in the south of Moldova and in the Odessa Region of Ukraine). Of particular interest is the fact that collecting the materials which characterise the material and spiritual culture of the Gagauz people took place over a long period of time in the same villages. This allows us to trace the dynamics of the development of everyday culture of the Gagauz ethnic group.

Mirrors of princes are a specific genre of Islamic literature dedicated to giving advice to rulers, princes, and ministers. There are few mirrors that are composed in verse. The Kutadgu Bilig is modeled on the Persian Shāhnāme of the poet Firdawsi making the Central Asian heritage of wisdom literature at home in Islamic contexts. The text is written in Qarakhanid Turkish; the form is a didactic poem set as a dialogue between the protagonists. In a Weberian sense the program of advice may be analyzed as rational leadership due to the increasing role of shari’a-based rulership. However, there are other elements of legitimacy in this text blurring the clear distictions made by Weber. Hence, we may identify it as a unique, non-European case of legitimation of rulership.

The Kutadgu Bilig are to be read as an attempt to secure the continuation of the Central Asian tradition in a context dominated by Iranian influences into Central Asia. The protagoists of this work are the king, the vizier, the wise man, and the ascet. All these actors are representing virtues needed for successful rulership. At the same time the roles of all the persons associated with the court are discussed even very personal ones like choosing a wife and raising children.

The article restores the social and economic status of Tatar women based on documents of Orenburg Mokhammedan Religious Assembly (OMRS), state audit documents, acts of civil status, and journalistic materials of the 19th-early 20th centuries. The Menzelinsk Uyezd had class specifics and was a part of the military (canton) administration. The chronology of the article starts from the late 18th century and continues until the mid–1860s, due to the fact that at the time the state authorities approved certain laws on marriage and family life of Muslims of the Russian Empire: they changed the age of marriage and legalised inter-class marriages, the OMRS began to regulate marital disputes and inheritance cases. The author places the main focus on the marriage and family aspect of private life and includes many archival examples related to the Tatar women of the Menzelinsk Uyezd. Tatar women turned to OMRS when they needed a divorce or permission to remarry, etc. Women were independent subjects of Muslim and civil law, but they always acted with the support of their relatives. Images of Tatar women in the first half of the 19th century presented in publicistic works are a bit static. Russian authors described only the look of a Tatar woman, the cost of her clothes, accessories, etc. The Tatar view was focused on the composition of the woman’s family (to whom she was married, how many children she had). The article presents the biographies of three Tatar women from the Menzelinsy Uyezd: Kurypla Imanaeva, Gulbadar Akhtyamova, and Khasiba Arduanova. Each case illustrates the main trends in everyday life in the first half of the 19th century (military service problems, the cholera epidemic, etc.). The everyday objects played an important role in interpersonal relations and conflicts. At the same time, in the second half of the 19th century, the Tatar society had an ideal of not only a hard-working and religious woman, but also an educated woman.

The article is dedicated to the 120-years-old history of the Yamashurma secondary school. The paper discusses the opening of the Russian-Tatar school in the village of Yamashurma, Kazan Uyezd, at the outset of the 20th century, the situation at the school during the war years, the educational system in the Soviet times, the stages of school curriculum, and overall the life and development of the educational institution. The study higlights the role of mullah F. Khamzin in the opening of the school, the work of G. Kulakhmetov, a graduate of the Kazan Tatar Teachers School, who taught here in 1903–1908, and also “teacher Gabdulla” who held the position of the school headmaster in 1911–1932. The study is based on the documents from the State Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan and the book by R.A. Shakirzyanov, Candidate of Technical Sciences, “Yamashurma School is a spring of enlightenment”.

The article presents a review of the collection dedicated to the 65th anniversary of the Decade of Tatar Art and Literature in Moscow. The collection includes articles by researchers presented at an international scientific conference. The authors revealed a wide range of academic problems related to the national culture evolution throughout the twentieth century and the processes of cultural genesis and sociogenesis of national cultures. A separate section of the collection is devoted to the issues of popularisation and preservation of national cultural traditions, their integration into the modern space. The studies devoted to the transformation of the management system in the field of culture are of particular interest are. The source base for a number of articles consisted of archival materials and documents of personal origin, represented by photographs and interviews.