Sagai Erotic

The Sagai are the Khakas of the Abakan River valley, along the stretch that runs from the Uybat River up into the foothills of the Western Sayan. What sets them apart from other Khakas is mostly their speech and history, not a separate sense of nationhood. They speak the Sagai dialect and, like their neighbors, call themselves tadar. The name still means something. In the villages around Askiz and Tashtyp, being Sagai is a real way of placing a family, and their dialect is one of the two that written Khakas was built on. The other is Kachin.

Khakas is a Turkic language of southern Siberia, and its closest relatives are Shor and Chulym, spoken by small neighboring peoples. Russian dominates school, work and government, and many younger Sagai speak it better than the dialect their grandparents spoke. Russian power reached the valley in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when these steppes were still tied to the Yenisei Kyrgyz. Imperial officials called the people there Abakan or Minusinsk Tatars. Reforms in the 1820s gave the Sagai their own steppe duma, a native administrative council, which turned a clan and territorial name into an official category. The name Khakas for the whole people was adopted in the early Soviet years. Later, collectivization moved the last semi-nomadic herders into fixed villages.

Life was built around herds of horses, cattle and sheep moved between winter and summer grounds. Hunting in the taiga and digging wild lily bulbs filled out the year. Society was organized by the seok, the patrilineal clan, a word that literally means bone, and marrying someone from your own seok was forbidden. Most Khakas were baptized into the Orthodox Church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the new faith did not push out the old one. The kham, or shaman, kept working, and families went on making offerings to the spirits of mountains, water and the hearth. Since the 1990s these older practices have become public again, most visibly at Tun Payram, the summer festival of the first ayran.

The Sagai also share in a Khakas oral tradition that deserves more attention. Heroic epics were performed in khai, a deep throat-sung chant, often to the plucked strings of the chatkhan, a long zither, and one epic could take several evenings to finish. Married women's dress was marked by the pogo, a crescent-shaped breastpiece sewn with mother-of-pearl buttons and beads. It is still worn at festivals.