A Nogai cottage of sun-dried brick and reeds
Editorial contextSettled by Russian officials only a generation earlier, the Nogais now built their own cottages. The walls are sun-dried brick, whitewashed yearly; the roof is rafters covered with reeds and branches loaded with earth and ashes. Inside are two rooms, and a man with two wives builds a separate room for each.
The Nogai constructs his own cottage with bricks dried in the sun, and whitewashes it regularly once a year within and without. Its dimensions are scarcely more than two or three-and-thirty feet by thirteen. The roof consists of a few rafters on which are laid reeds and branches of trees loaded with earth and ashes.
About Nogais
The Khan's palace: 'an assemblage of wooden houses'
Editorial contextAdèle defends the palace of the Crimean khans against visitors who sneered that it was only a cluster of wooden houses with crude paintings, divans and carpets. She agrees that is what it is made of, but says its charm lies in feeling, not materials. It is a useful witness to how the Tatar capital's palace was actually built: timber, painted walls, fountains and gardens.
" How," said they, " can any one apply the name of palace to that assemblage of wooden houses, daubed with coarse paintings, and furnished only with divans and carpets?" And these people were right in their way.
About Crimean Tatars (the Giray khans)
Keep in mind
The palace had been restored under Tsar Alexander I, as the authors say on p.363, so not everything seen was original.
Terraced Tatar villages with clay roofs
Editorial contextIn the mountain villages of Toklouk, Kooz and Otouz, Xavier found flat-roofed Tatar houses built against the valley sides, so that the roofs formed terraces where people worked and visited each other. The roofs are stout timber covered with a thick bed of clay. At evening whole villages gathered on them.
the terrace tops of their houses, where they regularly carry on their work, and which are formed of stout carpentry covered with a thick bed of clay. Nothing can be more picturesque than the appearance, at evening, of all these terraces rising in gradations one above the other.
About Crimean Tatars (mountain Tatars)
A Buddhist temple of stuccoed brick on the Volga
Editorial contextAt Prince Tumene's island seat, Adèle attended a service in the Kalmyk 'pagoda'. She describes the din of drums, gongs, conch shells and three-metre trumpets, and the building itself: large windows, slender columns of stuccoed brick, a domed gallery and walls hung with painted tapestries of spirits and monsters. This was a settled Kalmyk prince's temple, not a tent.
The temple, lighted by a row of large windows, is adorned with slender columns of stuccoed brick work, the lightness of which reminds one of the graceful Moorish architecture. A gallery runs all round the dome, which is also remarkable for the extreme delicacy of its workmanship.
About Kalmyks (Prince Tumene's people)
'To us he has given wheels'
Editorial contextDescribing the Nogais before their settlement in villages, Xavier says a family could pack wife, children and goods into its felt-covered wagon (araba) within an hour and roll off towards the horizon. He quotes a Nogai saying that sums up the old nomad view of the world: God gave wheels to them and houses and ploughs to others.
Such is the order established by God himself," cried the Nogai, " to us he has given wheels, to other nations fixed dwellings and the plough."
About Nogais
A ten-year-old breaks a wild stallion
Editorial contextAt Prince Tumene's, Kalmyk riders lassoed wild horses from the herd and rode them bareback, clinging to the mane, until they were caught up by other horsemen. Then a boy of about ten did the same on a huge white stallion. Adèle adds that even Kalmyk women practise the sport.
But what was our amazement when we saw a boy of ten years come forward to undertake the same exploit! They selected for him a young white stallion of great size, whose fiery bounds and desperate efforts to break his bonds, indicated a most violent temper.
About Kalmyks
The price of a Nogai bride
Editorial contextAmong the Nogais a groom never saw his bride before the wedding and bargained with her family for her price. Xavier gives the going rates: four or five hundred rubles and a couple of score cows for a handsome girl of good family, less for widows. On the same page he adds that Crimean mountain Tatar and Kalmyk wives cost less and were bought by poorer men.
A handsome girl of good family costs four or five hundred rubles, besides a couple of score of cows and a few other beasts. Young widows are cheaper, and old women are to be had for nothing. The bride's price is paid on the spot by the wooer
About Nogais
Keep in mind
Written from outside and with some disdain; how widely these prices applied is not stated.
Why 'Tartar' is a pun, not a name
Editorial contextIn a footnote to their chapter on the origin of the Tatars, the authors refuse to use the spelling 'Tartar' at all. They say it comes only from a play on words by St Louis, King of France, who in the 1240s punned on Tatar and Tartarus, the classical underworld. This is the famous Tartarus pun, stated plainly by a 19th-century writer.
We have entirely rejected from our discussion the word Tartar, which owes its origin only to a jeu de mots, of which St. Louis was the author.
About Tatars and Mongols
Keep in mind
The St Louis story is traditional (it is told in Matthew Paris's chronicle of the 1240s). The pun was widespread, and the story does not prove where the spelling began.
A people made famous by those who destroyed it
Editorial contextDrawing on the historian D'Ohsson, the authors explain that 'Tatar' was first the name of a real Mongolian tribe, whom Genghis Khan wiped out. Yet the name spread from nation to nation and stuck to Genghis's own armies. By a strange accident, they say, a destroyed people became famous through the conquests of its destroyers.
It is a fact established by the statements of many writers, and by D'Ohson himself, that Genghis Khan annihilated the white Tatars, and thus it has come to pass by a most curious freak of accident, that this extinguished people became celebrated all over the East by the conquests of its very destroyers.
About the Tatar tribe and the Mongols of Genghis Khan
Keep in mind
A summary of 19th-century scholarship, not the authors' own research.
Europeans kept calling the Muslim Turks 'Tatars'
Editorial contextThe authors argue that after the Mongol conquests Europeans went on calling all the Muslim, Turkic-speaking peoples of Kazan, Astrakhan, the Crimea and Turkestan 'Tatars', which caused endless confusion. On the same page they conclude that the name lost all meaning in Asia and survives 'only in the European vocabulary', and that the Tatars of southern Russia are really Turks, Cumans or Pechenegs once ruled by the Mongols.
After the Mongol torrent had subsided, Europeans persisted in giving the appellation of Tatars to all those Mussulman nations originally of Turkish origin, that to this day occupy the territory of Kasan and Astrakhan, the Crimea and the region called Turcomania
About Turkic Muslims of Russia and Central Asia
'Mayst thou never know happiness': where the Nogais got their name
Editorial contextEuropean books said the Nogai horde was named after a Tatar general called Nogai. Xavier collected the Nogais' own traditions, which say nothing of such a general and derive the name from 'neogai', a curse on their hard wandering life. He prefers the Nogai version, arguing that a people so proud of their ancestry would have remembered a founder.
their chronicles allege that the name of the nation is derived from neogai (which may be translated by the phrase, mayst thou never know happiness), and that it was bestowed on them in their old country, on account of their precarious and vagabond life.
About Nogais
Keep in mind
A folk etymology; modern historians generally connect the name with the 13th-century Mongol commander Nogai, the view Xavier rejects.
Breaking into a Kalmyk tomb
Editorial contextAdèle describes how the party tricked their Kalmyk camel-drivers, broke into a satza (a small tomb-shrine for a high priest's ashes) through a window, 'took possession' of it with a silk handkerchief, and carried off two clay statues and some images. She knows the Kalmyks would see it as the worst sacrilege and treats it as a lark. A startling reminder of how European travellers collected 'curiosities'.
Like generous victors we contented ourselves with taking two small statues, and a few images. According to the notions of the Kalmucks, no sacrilege can compare with that of which we were now guilty. Yet no celestial fire reduced us to ashes
About Kalmyks
The white elephant with thirty-three heads
Editorial contextSummarising Kalmyk Buddhist books, the authors describe the world-mountain and its guardian elephant, two leagues long and white as snow, with thirty-three red heads, six trunks each spouting fountains, and a young virgin on every star above them. They note, in a footnote, similar marvels in medieval European cosmography. This is religious myth they report, not something anyone claimed to see.
where dwells an elephant two leagues long, white as snow, and named Gasar Sakitschin Koven (protector of the earth). This fabulous animal has thirty-three red heads, each furnished with six trunks, whence spout forth as many fountains, all surmounted with six stars.
About Kalmyks (Buddhist cosmology)
Keep in mind
A second-hand summary of Kalmyk religious books; the authors do not name the text they used.