Ekhirits Erotic

The Ekhirits are one of the four main tribes of the Buryat people. Their country is the western side of Lake Baikal: Olkhon Island, the edge of the steppe and taiga around Bayandai and Ust-Orda, and the upper Lena near Kachug and Verkholensk. A second branch lives across the lake in the Barguzin valley of Buryatia. Being Ekhirit is a matter of descent. Buryat identity has always come in layers of nation, tribe and clan, and Ekhirit families trace clan membership through the father's line. That membership still counts at the clan offerings held each summer. In legend the Ekhirits are closely paired with the neighboring Bulagats, and the two names are joined in the Ekhirit-Bulagat district east of Irkutsk.

They speak Buryat, a Mongolic language. Their western dialects, shared with the Bulagats, sound noticeably different from the Khori-based literary standard used in Ulan-Ude. Russian now dominates daily life for most people, and fluent Buryat is more and more a language of the older generation.

Religion is where the western Buryats part ways with their eastern cousins. Tibetan Buddhism reshaped Transbaikalia but made much less headway west of the lake, so the older shamanic tradition held on. Under the tsars, Russian authorities added Orthodox baptism on top of it. Offerings of milk and vodka to the spirits of a place survived Soviet suppression and came back into the open after 1991. So did the clan rites called tailgan and the reverence for sites like the rock at Cape Burkhan on Olkhon. The Barguzin Ekhirits live among Buddhist neighbors and lean more toward the lamas.

Russian Cossacks reached the Lena and Baikal in the 17th century, built forts and demanded tribute in furs. Over the following centuries the Ekhirits took up hay-making and farming. Many gave up felt tents for many-sided log yurts and, later, Russian-style houses. In 1937 Moscow cut their districts out of the Buryat-Mongol republic and made them a separate Ust-Orda Buryat district inside Irkutsk Oblast. That split outlasted the Soviet Union, although the Ust-Orda district lost its autonomous status in 2008 and was absorbed fully into the oblast. Western Buryat storytellers also kept alive some of the longest versions of the Geser epic, recited over several nights.