Mörön

The town is younger than most of the sights around it. The Delgermörön valley has been grazed and fought over for millennia: Bronze Age herders raised the deer stones that stand on the steppe nearby, carved with stylised stags and belts of weapons, and the region later lay within the Turkic khaganates and then the Mongol empire. Khövsgöl is rich in such monuments, and the country's deer stone sites were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023.

Mörön itself grew from a monastery. Mörön monastery, founded in 1809–11 on the banks of the Delgermörön, drew a settlement of monks, traders and herding families to the riverside, as monastic centres did across Khalkha Mongolia. It held about two thousand monks in the early 20th century, and was destroyed in 1937 in the purge that closed more than seven hundred monasteries across Mongolia and killed many lamas.

The modern town was laid out in the socialist decades as the capital of Khövsgöl aimag, with a square, a theatre, a hospital, schools and blocks of flats built among the ger yards, an airfield, and state farms and herding collectives in the surrounding districts. The economy was organised around wool, meat, hides and the transport of goods north to Khatgal and the lake. After 1990 the collectives were broken up and herds returned to family hands; a new and much smaller monastery, Danzandarjaa, opened in 1990, the road to the lake was eventually surfaced, and tourism heading for Khövsgöl became a steady part of local income.

Mörön is a provincial capital in a herding aimag, and its culture is that of the countryside brought into town. Families keep animals on the outskirts even while holding salaried jobs, relatives arrive from the districts for schooling, medical care and paperwork, and the week's rhythm turns around the market. Khövsgöl's Naadam in July is the year's high point, with wrestling in the stadium, archery, and long cross-country horse races ridden by children across the steppe outside town; the province's horses and riders have a strong national reputation.

The aimag is ethnically varied for Mongolia. Khalkha make up most of the population, but the province is also home to Darkhad, Uriankhai and Buryat communities, and to the Dukha reindeer herders of the north-western taiga, so dialects, dress and songs differ from district to district. Shamanic practice is more visible here than in most of the country, alongside a revived Buddhism centred on Danzandarjaa monastery.

Everyday manners are those of ger hospitality: milk tea offered at once, snuff bottles exchanged between men of an older generation, the right hand or both hands used to give and receive, and an easy assumption that a visitor will be fed. Ovoo cairns on the passes around the town are circled three times clockwise, with a stone or a small offering added.

About 47,000 people live in Mörön, which makes it the fifth-largest town in Mongolia and by far the biggest settlement in Khövsgöl. Most of them live in ger districts of fenced plots rather than in the small core of flats, and the town spreads widely over the flat valley floor. Work is in provincial administration, the hospital, schools, shops and transport, in the market's trade, and in the wool, cashmere, meat and dairy that come in from the herding districts.

Mornings are the busy part of the day: the market fills, minivans load and leave for the countryside, and the afternoon is quieter. Heating through the long winter comes from coal and wood stoves in the ger districts, and the smoke settles over the town in still, cold weather, a smaller version of the air pollution that affects Ulaanbaatar. Water in much of the town is carried from standpipes.

The pressures are those of rural Mongolia generally: dzud winters that can destroy a family's herd, degraded pasture from growing animal numbers, and the steady movement of young people to Ulaanbaatar for university and work. Tourism heading to Lake Khövsgöl adds summer income through drivers, guides and guesthouses, and the road north has cut the journey to the lake to about two hours.

Mörön eats what Khövsgöl produces: mutton, beef, yak meat and dairy, with flour and rice brought in by truck. Buuz, dumplings of minced meat and fat steamed in tiers, are the standard meal and the festival food at Tsagaan Sar; khuushuur are the same filling flattened and fried; tsuivan is hand-cut noodles steamed above the meat so the flavour rises into them. Guriltai shul, mutton noodle soup, and bantan, a thick flour broth, appear in every canteen.

The white foods are the region's pride. Yak milk makes a heavy öröm, the clotted cream skimmed from the top of boiled milk and eaten with bread and sugar; tarag is the soured milk that stands in for yoghurt; aaruul, milk curd pressed and dried hard, is sold in trays at the market and chewed all year. Eezgii, curd cooked slowly until it toasts and browns, is another dairy staple. Mare's milk fermented into airag is drunk through the summer.

Restaurants in the centre add Russian-influenced dishes that arrived in the socialist decades — beetroot and cabbage salads, fried cutlets, potato with dill — and bakeries sell heavy loaves of white bread. Fish from the lakes and rivers of the province, grayling and lenok, is eaten more here than in most of Mongolia, and in late summer the market fills with blueberries, lingonberries and pine nuts gathered in the northern forests.