Between the Achit Nuur (Ачит нуур) [1] and the Üüreg Nuur (Үүрэг нуур) [2] (two lakes) we passed the mining town of the Nuurst Xotgor mine (Нүүрст хотгор) [3] and then drove on to a pass, I think you can also see this place on Google Maps [4]. What makes this pass special is not the fact that you find an ovoo (овоо) there, but that this ovoo is standing on a grave. As we walked around the stones marking the perimeter, we could fathom the vastness of the area used for this grave.
You wouldn't be surprised finding a cairn at the height of a mountain pass and such ovoos you'll find in Mongolia all across the country. But you can find ovoos also at other places, which are held to be sacred.According to tengerism ovoos are dedicated to local deities or others gods of a vast pantheon.
Coming to an ovoo (овоо) you are supposed to circle it three times, moving clockwise, ito insure a safe journey [5]. People bring an uneven number of rocks and add these to the pile. People also wrap blue khadags (хадаг) [6] around them. Blue symbolizes the sky or tenger (тэнгэр). You will also find pots, ceramics, wheels, empty liquor bottles, prayer beads, horns of animals like the capricorn, and other items around ovoos.
Beneath this ovoo and covering more area is a grave, most probably dating back to the bronze age. There haven't been any excavations and the place is hard to find anyway, so that it's open to discussion. However, I found an essay on the topic of ovoo on a preexisting grave [7]. These burial mounds are made of earth or stones and are large cone-shaped, they are called kurgan (Mongolian курган, Russian курга́н), which are known also in Germany as Hügelgrab (Mongolian бөөгнөрөл); there are several in the vicinity of my apartment in Cologne (Ostfriedhof [8]). These funeral mounds date back till first or even second millenium BC, but could have been formed as late as during the first millenium AD. So it's quite uncertain, which ethnic group or predecessor of the Mongolian people has left these graves. Cecilia Dal Zovo: „As elsewhere in Mongolia, the entanglement of these cairns within the local monumental tradition is possibly connected with the Buddhist-inspired transformation of sacred geographies (late 16th-17th century) and the cultural and material intensification of the ovoo materiality for political and administrative purposes in the
Qing [清朝] epoch.“ The ovoo has been a later development, but maybe there is a direct connection to past customs and rites. But such questions will have to stay unanswered until more archeological findings might surface and allow a new hypothesis.
Links and Annotations:
[1] https://rheumatologe.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-boss-of-achit-nuur.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achit_Lake
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9C%C3%BCreg_Lake and
https://rheumatologe.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-ceremony-at-lakefront-of-uureg-nuur.html
[3] Нүүрст хотгор is diffent to нуурын хотгор. While the cyrillic letter “у” is “u”, “ү” is only used in Mongolian and comes close the the German umlaut “ü”. Wikipedia gives the coordinates 49°51′12″N 90°53′23″E, so you can check on Google maps mine an mining town. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuurst_Khotgor_coal_mine
[4] 49°57'58.3"N 90°55'05.8"E
[5] https://rheumatologe.blogspot.com/2022/09/mongolia-on-visiting-ovoo.html
[6] Khadag (хадаг) is the Mogolian name for the ritual scarf, formerly made of silk, nowadays mostly made of polyester because of better durability. The Tibetan scarf is white to show the pureness of the giver's heart, whereas the Mongolian is blue as the sky. The origins lie both in lamaism as well as tengerism (a better word for the often used shamanism). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khata
[7] Cecilia Dal Zovo, « Ovoo-cairns and ancient funerary mounds in the Mongolian landscape. Piling up a monumental tradition? », Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines [En ligne], 52 | 2021, mis en ligne le 23 décembre 2021, consulté le 07 février 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/emscat/4925; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/emscat.4925 You may upload the article (French and English).
[8] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostfriedhof_(K%C3%B6ln)
.
No comments:
Post a Comment