Altay Shamans Say Unearthing of Siberian Mummy Loosed Violence on the World --including War in Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 28 – Shamans in the southern Siberian republic of the Altai are demanding that a Siberian mummy scholars unearthed from the permafrost in 1993 had stood guard at the gates of the underworld and that the body must be reburied or the world will continue to suffer from calamities like the war in Ukraine.

            Many cultures have traditions that disturbing the dead will unleash horrors on those who do so; but the case of what has come to be known as the fate of the “Altai princess” is especially fraught, Leyla Latypova says (themoscowtimes.com/2026/08/28/calls-to-rebury-a-siberian-mummy-unearth-decades-of-distorted-history-a93588).

            When the remains of a fifth century BCE woman were uncovered more than three decades ago, the Russian journalist notes, it was an international sensation and became a tourist attraction. Now, however, shamans in the region are “calling for the mummy to be reburied.”

            They have attracted attention by claining, Latypova writes, that the mummy’s remains had “’stood guard at the gates of the underworld’ and that disturbing them had opened a Pandora’s box of natural disasters and political conflicts, including not least of all the ongoing war in Ukraine.”

            Scholars say that the myth of the Altai princess was developed by the scientists who unearthed her remains and that the idea she was noble and a guard of the underworld are ideas that have attached themselves to her body in the years since. And they point out that she can’t be reburied because of the rapidly melting permafrost.

            At the same time, however, many researchers point out that the removal of the body from the Altai to Novosibirsk for preservation represented a kind of cultural imperialism and that they favor reducing the extent of archaeological expeditions to the Altai because these activities disturb the countryside there.

            Consequently, what might appear to be the kind of story that emerges only during the slow news days of late August has the potential to energize the national movement in the Altai in the future. (On that movement, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/04/another-sign-this-time-in-altai.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-mountainous-altai-where-russians.html.)