The Ancient Myths and Medieval Legends of the Vast Russian Forest

A man rows a canoe along a broad, glassy river. As he approaches the sandy shore, he fires two shots from his rifle. Villagers rush to greet him and his honored guest: a bear. The hunter has already opened the bear’s coat in the forest and removed its shoes and gloves. In other words, he has skinned it. Women and children kiss the animal’s pelt, stroke its staring face, and implore it not to frighten them when they pick berries in the forest. The bear is lowered into a specially prepared house adorned with its favorite tree, a young Siberian pine. Now men sing songs of Torum, the forest’s god and the bear’s father. The soul of Torum’s son must be returned home with due pomp, so that he will not trouble the people who killed him. “Out of wood,” the men sing, “a gallant new man was created.” Like bears, humans depend on the forest for their existence.

The people celebrating this ritual are Khanty who live near the Agan River, in northwestern Siberia. Their ancestors arrived in the region by 500 CE, long before a Slav ever set foot there. The bear’s arrival was captured in Sons of Torum, a 1989 film by an Estonian writer and filmmaker named Lennart Meri. In 1941, at age twelve, Meri had been exiled to the Volga River region after Stalin annexed Estonia. He later became fascinated by Uralic languages like Khanty and Mansi, which are related to Hungarian and, more distantly, to Finnish and Estonian. The members of this far-­flung linguistic family shared more than vocabulary; they were united by a history of domination by Russia. Sons of Torum is an ode to survival and return. Meri became the second president of newly independent Estonia in 1992, bringing the memory of Siberia’s forests to the highest rungs of Estonia’s government. In 2006, he was buried in Tallinn’s Forest Cemetery, where Estonian luminaries rest eternally among the trees.

The Khanty bear ceremony survived encounters first with imperial Russian missionaries and colonizers, then with forced Soviet modernization, collectivization, and executions. Some of the earliest information about Khanty religious traditions comes from Russian priests who sent their reports to the archbishop of Siberia to alert him to the problem of continued paganism. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, ethnographers became fascinated by the bear ceremony. Finnish and Hungarian visitors were particularly attracted by the linguistic link to their own languages. It was mind-­boggling to think that one branch of the same population had ended up in the baroque palaces of Budapest while another had remained hunter-­fisher-­gatherers in the remote northern forests.

The dream of living in absolute freedom in the woods, following a lifestyle not so different from that of hunter-­fisher-­gatherers, recurs again and again in Russian history—­which has a habit of relapsing into the distant past.

The strange kinship had a whiff of alternative history: What would have happened if Hungarians had never adopted agriculture, never become owners of grand estates, never built cities? Well into the twentieth century, the Khanty relied for their survival on their reindeer herds and on the gifts of the forest and rivers: berries and pine nuts, dried and smoked fish, frozen meat, dried birds. Their forest lifeway still resembled societies that existed across northern Eurasia for millennia. Once upon a time, the people living in this area were at the vanguard of human development.

A few hundred kilometers northwest of the river where Meri filmed, a sandy elevated spit overlooks the vast expanse of the West Siberian plain. Whorls of Siberian pine, spruce, and larch cede to brown, squelching swamp. This stretch of forest is the last before the beginning of Arctic tundra to the north. It is traced with wide, slow rivers, still the principal routes of transport for the Khanty and other Indigenous people—­by boat in summer, and in winter, along the ice. White moss, food for reindeer, foams on the ground beneath the trees.

This remote expanse of taiga hardly seems like a cradle of human innovation. Today, it sits squarely in the middle of nowhere. Yet it contains one of the oldest-­known fortified settlements in the world. The Amnya site, named for the nearby river of that name, has astonished the archaeology world and helped overturn assumptions about how societies progress over time, changing from peaceful hunter-­gatherer communities to agrarian societies characterized by private property, social inequality, and warfare.

Radiocarbon dating published in 2023 shows that the fortifications were built eight thousand years ago—­almost five thousand years earlier than researchers had thought such settlements were first established in the region, and many centuries before the appearance of similar forts in Europe. The tiny, wooded citadel is the northernmost Stone Age stronghold anywhere in Eurasia. It survived in part because the area’s forest, too cold and swampy for agriculture, has never been plowed. Up to the present day, the Indigenous people living nearby have refrained from building over the visible house pits. According to their traditional cosmology, digging is dangerous, because it risks disturbing the spirits of the lower world.

This fortified settlement, and numerous similar, more recent promontory forts in the Ob River region, offer a tantalizing riddle for archaeologists. Why did Neolithic people need forts in the first place? What were these fortifications meant to protect, at a time long before trade? And how did Neolithic hunter-­fisher-­gatherers manage to construct this monumental architecture so deep in the northern forest, in a place that even today is seventeen hours by car from the nearest major Russian city?

There is clearly something exceptional about the Ob River basin. The area shows evidence of continuous habitation since the Neolithic period. A former riverbed nearby, abandoned by the larger river-­course and reduced to a dead-­end lake, provides one clue. This area is known even today for its abundant fish. It is home to pike, perch, and whitefish, as well as exotic, fatty northern fish of the salmonid family: tender, silvery muksun, white-­fleshed nelma, and the hucho taimen, which makes for delectable “taiga sushi,” as Henny Piezonka, a German archaeologist studying the Amnya site, described it. With its blue-­green head and luminous, sunset-­colored tail, the taimen is so big that Chinese and Mongolian legends render it as a kind of sea monster. The so-­called river wolf or river tiger is known to prey on rats, ducks, and muskrats, though it usually hunts other fish. It can grow to be up to six feet long and one hundred pounds, and it can live for fifty-­five years. The taimen makes the Amnya site look modern: It has existed for fifty million years.

Archaeologists suspect that the Amnya settlement was built to store and protect the bounty caught in this relict lake, which is a perfect place to fish using a weir, an underwater fence. The Khanty and Selkup, another Indigenous group in the area, still fish using weirs—­as Piezonka put it, “technology perfected eight thousand years ago.” Sons of Torum shows how Khanty men strip pine roots with their knives and teeth, smoothing them until they are supple as leather. The roots are used to bind wooden laths, forming a screen to trap fish in a lake after they swim in during the spring. In the autumn, when it becomes cold enough to preserve them, the fish can be pulled out of the water without the aid of lines or nets.

Such piscine bounty demanded new ways of living. A weir cannot be abandoned for a season. It requires year-­round maintenance, as well as protection from enemies and wild animals such as bears. A weir could make the difference between a well-­fed winter and death by starvation. This explains why nomadic or seminomadic hunter-­gatherers chose to build a fortress on the riverbank and commit to settling down. The strong but flexible roots of the Siberian pine, woven into a weir, bound them to a single place.

The Neolithic hunter-­fisher-­gatherers lived relatively well. Like the Khanty as late as the twentieth century, they hunted forest animals and ate preserved fish in winter; in spring, they turned to migratory birds arriving from the south; in autumn, they caught fish and elk migrating from the other side of the Ural Mountains. The beginning of the Neolithic period was the moment when people began to use ceramic vessels as well as wooden ones, and this area near the Amnya is the first place in the region where pottery has been found. Before ceramics, containers were made of birch bark, which can be used for baking but cannot be held over an open flame. Clay pottery made it possible to simmer, a process essential to making fish oil or fish glue, and to store food safely over long periods. (The local Indigenous people still make fish glue from pike bones.) The taiga’s long stretches of subzero weather, meanwhile, allowed the Neolithic people to freeze meat and oils.

The accumulation of precious food opened new possibilities for social organization. Inequality resulted, as did property rights and collective projects such as the construction of the fort. And there was war. Fish oil and fish meal, easy to store and transport but requiring much labor in its acquisition and preparation, was an appealing target for raiders. The Amnya complex shows evidence of the first stone arrowheads in the region, contemporaneous with the emergence of fortified settlements. Archaeologists suggest that they were used for war rather than hunting. This warfare may have been a product not only of competition for existing resources but also of prehistoric climate change. Around 6200–­6050 BCE, the climate cooled, causing population movements and prompting hunter-­gatherers around northern Eurasia to mark their territory in novel ways; hunter-­gatherers in Russian Karelia, at the border of present-­day Finland, began to use formal cemeteries.

Away from their fortified home, the taiga dwellers built small structures and made offerings, depositing stone arrowheads and pottery decorated with the sculpted heads of birds and animals. The worshippers set the structures alight and then heaped them with soil, pouring out vivid red ochre to close the ceremony. As the ritual was repeated, red hills grew; they contain animal bones, antlers, and human skulls. The hills prefigure the burial mounds of the Scythian warrior-­nomads of Siberia as well as the festive bonfires of the pagan Slavs—­a tradition that continues even today.

The Amnya site’s rustling, wet expanse of trees and swamp has yielded a new understanding of human progress. The establishment of agriculture is still widely considered to be an essential step on the road to social “complexity”: accumulation, private property, social hierarchies, economic inequality, military conquest. The Neolithic Amnya fort shows that warfare and surplus economies can be sustained for millennia without agriculture, and that hunter-­fisher-gatherers, who have often been imagined as primitive and peaceful, may have been more warlike and more sophisticated than scientific tradition had assumed. Even in the 2020s, the Siberian forest murmurs with startling secrets. It is a treasure chest, a hiding place, a fortress. The dream of living in absolute freedom in the woods, following a lifestyle not so different from that of hunter-­fisher-­gatherers, recurs again and again in Russian history—­which has a habit of relapsing into the distant past.

In the prehistoric period, the taiga’s fish determined the course of human civilization. During the medieval era, it was the taiga’s furs that would reshape Eurasian economies and societies. During that period, fortifications around the Ob River served as safe storage points for the precious sable pelts collected by Indigenous hunters—­Khanty, Mansi, Selkup, and Nenets—­who sold them to traders or surrendered them as tribute. The mysterious northern forests of Siberia and northern Russia were renowned throughout medieval Eurasia as the source of furs that were traded as far as China, Italy, and North Africa, coveted by monarchs and aristocrats, traders and warlords. Archaeologists have found Persian Sassanid silver, ornate Byzantine vessels, and Chinese coins at forts in the Ob River basin, which was a spur of the Silk Road.

Fur first became fashionable in the Islamic world. In the tenth century, Arab rulers and European kings wore dresses made of black and red fox fur. The very best fur, the most gorgeous pelts in the purest tints, came from northern European Russia and from northwestern Siberia, which became known to the Islamic world as “the land of darkness.” By the eleventh century, Europe’s monarchs, lords and ladies were draping themselves in sable, ermine, and “vair,” squirrel fur sewn into heraldic patterns. Later, they trimmed their brightly colored woolen clothes in gray and white “minever,” another name for squirrel. The fashion caught on among merchants and craftsmen. In 1327 England restricted fur-­wearing to royalty and people of “high birth with incomes over 100 pounds per annum.” The effort failed, and upwardly mobile English people continued to deck their ambition in animal pelts.

As western Europe hacked down its forests to make way for agriculture, its taste for fur only grew. The most desirable gray-­blue and white winter squirrel pelts, favorites of Henry III and Edward I of England, came from Scandinavia and northern Russia. The Siberian forests, still nearly untouched, were a treasure trove. Fur could be exchanged for silver, fine woolen textiles, salt, and other luxury goods. It could even be a tool of diplomacy, sent to foreign rulers as a gesture of goodwill. For centuries, furs were by far the most valuable commodity coming from the dark northern lands, and one of the most valuable luxury goods circulating in Eurasia. The fur trading network reached as far as Spain, North Africa, China, and India. Once small groups of hunter-­gatherers had fought over fish meal in the taiga; now states and armies across Eurasia competed for fur.

Controlling the fur trade depended on controlling the people who knew best how to trap the elusive sable, ermine, squirrel, and other creatures. But who were these expert hunters? Thanks to the fur trade, the peoples of the northern Eurasian forests were vaguely known as far away as Central Asia and China. The first accounts of the people dwelling on the southern edges of Siberia are from Chinese chronicles rather than Russian ones. The word taiga (the stress comes on the final “a”), synonymous with Siberia’s forests today, is not a Russian word but a Turkic name that comes from these earlier encounters with the forest peoples.

Ethnography began as a means of gathering information essential to trade and war. In the northern forests, fur was the center of every story, the logic that shaped every intercultural interaction.

The forest and its inhabitants sparked the imagination of the era’s travel writers, who did not restrain their fancy. The twelfth-century Muslim traveler Abū Hāmid described one of the Islamic world’s first fur sources: “On the sea is an area of darkness, known under the name Iura.” The people of Iura (a name for the Indigenous people of western Siberia) have no war and no animals for transportation, “only huge trees and forests in which there is a lot of honey, and they have a lot of sables.” The forest provides for all their needs. In the summer the sun does not set for forty days, and in the winter the night lasts for forty days—­a nightmare for Muslims, whose religious practices depend on more regular cycles. Most striking is Abū Hāmid’s description of Iura’s trade:

The merchants say that the land of darkness is not far from them and that the people of Iura go to this land of darkness and enter it with torches and find there a large tree not unlike a large village, and in it is a large animal, which, they say, is a bird. They bring goods with them, and each merchant puts his property down in a separate place, makes his sign on it and goes away. Then after a while they return and find goods that are needed in their country. And each man finds some of those things near his own goods; if he agrees, then he takes them; if not, he gathers his own things and leaves the others and no exchange takes place. And they do not know from whom they are buying these goods.

The single large tree, with its single bird inhabitant, represents the huge, frightening treasure chest of the taiga. It yields its riches only to the initiated, who trade their furs through a string of mysterious middlemen. The process is opaque enough to seem mythical.

The Eastern Slavs, too, imagined the fur-­collecting peoples of the north as creatures from a fairytale. In the Primary Chronicle of 1096, the writer recounts a story told to him by a certain Giuriata Rogovich of Novgorod. According to Rogovich, the Iugra (an alternate version of “Iura”), Indigenous people of northwestern Siberia, described mountains that reached from the heavens to the sea. From the mountains, the Iugra said, could be heard the sound of voices, people cutting their way out of the rock. Though their language was incomprehensible, it was somehow evident that the people in the mountain were asking for more iron. In exchange, they would trade furs to the Iugra. But most of the year, the route to these mysterious mountain dwellers was impassable thanks to forest, snow, and precipices.

Beneath its fabulously improbable surface, this medieval game of telephone likely contains several kernels of truth. Travelers of the period exaggerated all their tales of unfamiliar peoples. But by telling this story, the Iugra may have been discouraging the Slavs from establishing direct contact with their trading partners, or from attempting to extract the forest’s riches themselves. The Iugra had good reason to protect their status as middlemen, which brought profit and safety. For several centuries, they would succeed in preserving their land of darkness from the incursions of Russian colonizers.

The city-­state of Novgorod was an early seat of Slavic power, existing from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. At its peak, it stretched from the Baltics to the Urals. Its capital city was built with the wood of the surrounding forests. Oak, lime, and elm were used for the most valuable structures; the more abundant pine, spruce, and birch served for everything else. Novgorod was a forest transmuted into a society, a kingdom of woodworking. It grew rich from its forests, where precious furs were so abundant that medieval visitors to Novgorod reported silky-­coated animals falling from the sky. The Novgorodians were the first Slavic people to conquer the northern forest west of the Urals. Beginning in the eleventh century, they forced the Komi, natives of northeastern European Russia who are distantly related to the Hungarians, Finns, and Estonians, to bring them fur tribute. Now the native hunters were not traders exchanging pelts for weapons, metals, and other goods, as in the fanciful tales about the Iura/Iugra, but subjects paying tax to Slavic lords.

A fifteenth-­century account of an exploratory trip into Siberia by Novgorodian merchants in search of fur, “On unknown men in the eastern land,” describes the peoples encountered along the way. These sketches are outlandish and clearly fanciful, drawing on a long-­standing tradition of European myths about semihuman tribes. The first group are described as cannibals who serve their own children as a welcome meal for the visiting merchants. But other descriptions can be read as a kind of magical ethnography. One group lives in the sea for a month every year as its people shed their old skins and grow new ones—­perhaps a reference to the practice of wearing fish leather, common among northern peoples, and to seasonal migration.

Another tribe is mouthless. Its mute members eat by putting food under their caps and chewing with their shoulders—­a highly embroidered version of a people who speak a language unintelligible to the merchants or their interpreters. Another group dies for two months every winter, then returns to life. This is simply hibernation: a merging of humans with bears. The historian Janet Martin has pointed out that this story was not pure invention: The locations of the peoples described and the indication of who had sable were accurate. Ethnography began as a means of gathering information essential to trade and war. In the northern forests, fur was the center of every story, the logic that shaped every intercultural interaction.

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Excerpt from The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires. Copyright © 2026 by Sophie Pinkham. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.