May 20, 2022
The Sakha Republic, also known as Yakutia, is the coldest place on Earth outside of Antarctica. A 3-million-km2 expanse of unforgiving taiga and tundra, where winter temperatures can plunge to lethal lows of -67°C, over the ages it has nonetheless been home to scattered groups of hardy peoples.
The largest such group, the Sakha, arrived in the 13th century after a long migration out of Central Asia, and quickly established themselves as the predominant power in the region. This period of kyrgys uyete (the age of battles and massacre), during which time the Sakha found themselves in regular conflict with enemies both external and internal, served as the main impetus for the intensive development of the their traditional wrestling, Khapsagai – a style centred around speed, agility, and balance. Khapsagai became an indispensable part of the martial training of every young Sakha man, and wrestling matches were an inevitable feature of any religious festival or celebratory clan gathering.
In this episode, we look at the deeply embedded presence of Khapsagai in Sakha culture both past and present, its usage by their heroes both real and mythological, and how the style has ably displayed the very same virtues of dextrousness and adaptability it demands of its practitioners, weaving its way through Imperial Russian conquest and Soviet modernisation to be practised in the modern day as far away as the Sahara desert.