The mountain range Sunduki or Chests is one of the most
mysterious places in Khakassia. It stretches in the Shirinsky and
Ordzhonikidzevsky districts, not far from the village of Iyus.
An
array of five separate outlier mountains, up to 200 m high,
combining burial grounds, rock paintings and special structures,
which, all together, according to some archaeologists, were used by
ancient people to observe the stars, the sun and the moon.
The
ridge stretches for 4.5 kilometers from north to south and consists
of five main fortresses, but it got its name from the northernmost
mountain - Sunduki, on top of which there is a rock in the form of a
cube, similar in shape to a chest. After that, other hills received
serial numbers.
First Sunduk. The most beautiful, interesting
and significant in the ridge in the ritual and astrological sense.
Back in Soviet times, in this area, when plowing a field, a shaman’s
grave was accidentally opened with a tractor. Then a stone was dug
out, on which the constellations of the other hemisphere were
depicted and some stars visible almost through a telescope.
According to Academician V. E. Larichev, who has been studying Sunduki
for about 30 years, it was here that the “world mountain” was
located - an astrological sanctuary, including a priestly temple and
an ancient observatory. Scientists have long known about the
mythical world mountain, supposedly located at the North Pole.
According to legend, this is a kind of primordial land where the
greatest gods lived and where the first people appeared. Each nation
had its own world mountain, or rather, its image. It turns out that
the First Sunduk is a world mountain for this region.
The
second chest is of particular interest to photographers - numerous
stone pyramids are being built on it. The construction of such
pyramids has deep roots: earlier, the Khakass created them as
dwellings of mountain spirits in especially revered places, which
included Sunduki from ancient times. In the area of the second and
third Chests, you can find evidence of this, in the form of several
ancient stone fences of burial grounds.
On the cliffs of the
Fourth Sunduk there are drawings carved more than two thousand years
ago. Petroglyphs are a kind of heroic epic in paintings. They show
not only the difficult earthly path of the hero, but also the other
world, where he ends up after death at the hands of an enemy lurking
in an ambush (the lower part of the stone slab). The exposition of
the Shirinsky Museum of Local Lore can tell you more about their
interpretation. The most mysterious is the White Horse petroglyph.
Scientists suggest that the drawing appeared about 16 thousand years
ago, during the Ice Age. In the image of this Horse, the ancestors
saw the renewed Time.
The Fifth Sunduk is the southernmost of
all. In front of it is a large group of burial grounds. At its foot
is an irrigation canal, one of those that has been preserved since
ancient times (already in the 1st millennium BC, the
Khakass-Minusinsk basin was the center of irrigated agriculture).
People still wonder what it is: an observatory of the ancients,
a cult place, a platform for landing alien spacecraft, or all
together? The entire complex is often referred to as the Temple of
the Sun. There is a legend that the Khakass spirits do not let
everyone into this place, confuse the road or send thunderstorms
with strong winds. If you still manage to get to the Sunduki, do not
forget to tie a strip of cloth to the sacrificial tree (you will see
it right away), this will be your sign of worship to the omnipresent
spirits.
This magical place has another unique feature -
excellent acoustics. If a person speaks quietly, standing on the top
of a slope, listeners at the bottom of the ridge can hear him
perfectly, although the distance between them is 200-300 meters. The
shape of the mountain, resembling a horseshoe, creates a corridor
through which sound travels without losing its volume and
intelligibility. This is possible due to the air flow going from top
to bottom.
Not far from these mysterious mountains, you can
live in numerous camp sites and tent camps located on Lake Bele.
Bases: "Big reach", "ELKO", "Dacha Pavlova", "GOLDEN STAR",
"Chalpan", "Aviator".
From the highway from Shir to the Kommunar mine, it is necessary to
turn right between the villages of Marchelgash and Topanovo - onto the
highway crossing Bely Iyus along a reinforced concrete bridge. Behind
the bridge is the first turn to the right and there is that gravel road
that leads past Sunduki to the railway station.
If you go to Sunduki
from Malaya Syya, you can shorten the path by turning off the Shirinsky
highway outside the village of Troshkino, in front of the pass through
Kyzyl-Khaya, to the left, onto a dirt road that runs along the Iyus and
leads directly to the bridge over the river. In some places the road
comes close to the shore.
Protected are: various variants of phytocenoses, preserved virgin areas of the steppes, historical sites associated with ancient human settlements (rock paintings, cultural and historical complexes, burial mounds, ancient burials, etc.), places where valuable, rare and endemic plants grow (goat leaf , woolly panzerina, large-flowered slipper, dryad, etc.) and the habitat of rare bird species (peregrine falcon, saker falcon, steppe kestrel, burial ground, owl, steppe eagle). The status of protected areas is determined by the decision of the Khakass regional executive committee of July 21, 1988 No. 164.
A great contribution to the study and popularization of the natural monument was made by Vitaly Epifanovich Larichev, the author of numerous scientific and popular science books, in particular on paleoastronomy: interpretation of cultural monuments of ancient people, which, according to the researcher, could embody the idea of their creators about the structure of the universe.