Orlik (Bur. Orlig) is a village, the administrative center of the Okinsky district of the Republic of Buryatia and the rural settlement "Orlikskoe". Population - 2555 people. (2010). The village was founded in 1927 as the administrative center of the Okinsky khoshun of the Tunkinsky aimag of the Buryat-Mongolian ASSR. Since 1940 it has been the center of the newly formed Okinsky aimag of the Buryat-Mongolian ASSR.
On the slow deep Russian Oka there is a whole Eagle, and on the
shallow and swift Sayan Oka - only Orlik. This is the name of the
village (2.6 thousand inhabitants), the center of the most deaf, remote
and high-mountainous Okinsky district of Buryatia. The distances from
Orlik to anything are impressive: 150 kilometers to the asphalt road in
Mondy, 360 to the Trans-Siberian Railway in Kultuk, 470 to the nearest
big city of Irkutsk and 710 kilometers to Ulan-Ude. Above the lost world
of Siberian Tibet, as the Okinsky district is sometimes called, Orlik
soars like a metropolitan eagle - there are several shops, two asphalt
streets, a school, a hospital and even an ATM. Also - a hotel and two
camp sites: having reached Orlik in the last part, past the beauties of
the Okinsky tract, we whiled away the days here waiting for the car in
the direction of the Valley of Volcanoes. There are no sights in Orlik,
but such a wilderness cannot but be colorful.
At the entrance to
Orlik meets Geser - the hero of the Tibetan religion Bon, whose fame
spread across the Mongolian steppes and mountains along with Tibetan
Buddhism. On the Oka, Geser somehow took root especially well, probably
replacing some god or hero who did not wait for ethnographers. Which
came from the forgotten paganism of the Soyots - ancient mountain
reindeer herders, who in the 20th century switched to the Buryat
language from Turkic, and in the Middle Ages - to Turkic from Samoyedic.
I talked about the Soyots in more detail in the last part - their
villages Sorok, Bokson and Khurga are located to the south along the
highway. In the regional capital, Soyots make up a fifth of the
population, and it is more popular to be Khongodor here - this is the
name of the Tunkin-Oka Buryat tribe, which is closer to the Kalmyks in
its origin from the Mongolian Kobdo valley.
However, you even
forget about Geser when something more amazing is shown ahead - ASPHALT!
The two solid streets of Orlik are like Tristan da Cunha or Easter
Island - alone for hundreds of kilometers.
Usually, the Okinsky guard, set up in 1728, is considered to be the starting point here - however, much further downstream, at the mouth of either the Sentsy or the Zhambolok. A year earlier, Russia and China agreed on a border, the line of which has remained unchanged since then. However, even the Cossacks were reluctant to serve in the remote mountains, at the outposts performing mainly the role of officials and authorities. The Buryats-Khongodors were attracted to the authorities to wave the saber and catch intruders, and not so much from the neighboring Tunka, but from the Alar steppes behind the mountains, where several Khongodor clans settled in the 17th century. It was from the guards that the expansion of the Buryats on the Oka began, but if in Tunka the Soyots disappeared among them without a trace, everything turned out differently here: the Khongodors had money and power, the Soyots had the ability to survive in the most difficult conditions, and the two peoples stood here back to back between nature and the state. As a result, of course, the Buryat culture suppressed the Soyot culture, but still not without a trace... RSFSR. Later, Selenginsky aimag was ceded to "mainland" Buryatia, and Ekhirit-Bulagatsky and Alarsky became the basis of the Ust-Orda Buryat Autonomous Okrug. The Tunkinsky aimag did not turn into the Tunkinsky-Okinsky or there East Sayan Soyoto-Buryat Autonomous Okrug, but in general it had every chance for this and even managed to acquire an internal division: in 1923, the Soyot khoshuun arose, the inhabitants of which agreed that half of them travel too close for paperwork, and half too far. They searched for a place for a new regional center for a long time, and in 1927 they stopped at the Baga-Khubrag winter hut, where the Komissarov family lived. The name Komissarovka was asked, of course, to be on the map of Soviet Russia, but the Buryats preferred the Orlig stream, which flows into the Oka here - the village became Orlik according to it. In 1940, when it apparently finally became clear that there would be no TOBAO, the Okinsky district was formed. In the same year, Vladimir Obruchev explored something in the surrounding mountains, and therefore, apparently, the last street was named after him, which has now become a transit route through the village.
It is located at an altitude of 1376 meters above
sea level in the Eastern Sayan Mountains, in a narrow intermountain
valley on the right bank of the Oka River, above the confluence of
the Orlik River.
The end point of the republican highway
03K-035 Mondy - Orlik, branches from the federal highway A333 Kultuk
- Mondy - the border with Mongolia.
Distances to:
Ulan-Ude
- 770 km,
Mondy - 153 km,
Kyrena - 235 km,
Slyudyanka - 363
km.