Ölgii

The Mongolian Altai has been inhabited for thousands of years, and the valleys around Ölgii hold one of Asia's densest concentrations of rock carvings, Bronze Age deer stones, burial mounds from the Scythian era and stone figures left by the Turks of the 6th to 8th centuries. In later centuries this was the country of the Oirats, the western Mongols, whose Dzungar Khanate was destroyed by the Qing in the 1750s, after which the frontier was watched from garrison towns further south and east.

Kazakh herders of the Abak-Kerei and other groups moved into these mountains from the west during the 19th century, crossing from what is now Kazakhstan and Xinjiang with their herds, and settled the high pastures. Ölgii grew as their market and administrative centre. In 1940 the communist government created Bayan-Ölgii as a Kazakh-majority province with Ölgii as its capital, giving the community its own schools, newspapers and theatre in the Kazakh language — an unusual arrangement in a highly centralised state.

The socialist decades brought collectivised herding, a hospital, a teacher training college and brick and timber buildings among the mud-brick houses. After 1990 the province was shaken by emigration: tens of thousands of Mongolian Kazakhs took up Kazakhstan's invitation to settle there, though a good number later returned. Since then the town has lived on herding, cashmere, cross-border trade with Russia and China, and a growing stream of visitors drawn by the eagle hunters and the mountains, with the Golden Eagle Festival in October now the fixed point of its year.

Ölgii is a Kazakh town in a Mongolian state. Kazakh is heard on the streets far more than Mongolian, signs appear in both languages, and the town has mosques and Kazakh-language schools. Most people are Sunni Muslims, though practice is often relaxed and shaped by herding life. Houses are hung with brightly embroidered felt wall hangings, tüskiiz, made by women of the family, and the two-stringed dombra is the instrument played at gatherings.

The best-known tradition is hunting with golden eagles. Eagles are taken young and trained to hunt foxes and hares from horseback in the winter months, when the foxes show against the snow; an estimated 250 eagle hunters live in the province. The Golden Eagle Festival each October brings around seventy hunters in fox-fur hats and embroidered coats to compete in calling their birds down from the hills and in horsemanship, and winter trips with hunters have become a small industry of their own.

Kazakh and Mongol customs sit side by side. Nauryz in March is the Kazakh spring new year, marked with visits and a grain and meat dish, while Naadam in July brings wrestling, archery and horse racing as everywhere in Mongolia. Hospitality is emphatic: a guest is seated, fed and given tea before any business is discussed, shoes come off at the door, and refusing food outright is impolite. Bride-price negotiations, large weddings and the naming of babies are the social events that fill the town's calendar.

Ölgii had a population of about 50,000 in 2024, the great majority of them Kazakh, with Uriankhai, Dörvöd, Khalkha and Tuvan minorities in the province around it. Most families live in single-storey houses inside fenced yards, often with a ger pitched beside the house in summer; a few Soviet-era blocks stand near the centre. Water is carried from standpipes in much of the town and coal and dung fuel the stoves, which fill the still winter air with smoke.

The province lives from herding sheep, goats, horses, yaks and camels, and cashmere is the main cash earner. Ölgii itself runs on the provincial administration, schools, the hospital, trade and transport, and increasingly on tourism — guides, drivers, guesthouses and the festival. Irrigated plots along the Khovd river grow potatoes and vegetables in a short season. Goods arrive by long road haulage or by air, which makes most things dearer than in the capital.

Life is oriented as much west and north as east: cross-border ties with Kazakhstan, where many relatives now live, and trade with Russia through the crossing beyond Tsagaannuur. Young people leave to study in Ulaanbaatar or Kazakhstan, and some do not come back. Hard winters remain the great threat to the province: a dzud can kill a family's herd in weeks and push them into the town, and the drift of former herders into Ölgii and the capital has grown since the 1990s.

Kazakh cooking sets the table here, and it is heavier on meat and dough than the Mongolian norm. The feast dish is beshbarmak — mutton or horse meat boiled and laid over broad sheets of noodle, with an onion broth poured over and the meat distributed by seniority, traditionally eaten with the hands. Kazy, a rich sausage of horse meat, is sliced for guests, and baursak, small squares of fried dough, are piled on the table at every gathering. Kurt, hard balls of dried salted curd, travel well and are chewed on long rides.

Dairy is constant. Milk tea is poured throughout the day, often with a spoonful of cream or butter, and in summer there is fermented mare's milk and, from the yak herds of the high valleys, thick cream and butter. Horses and sheep are slaughtered in late autumn to lay down meat for the winter, and strips of it are dried as borts for soups in the cold months.

Mongolian dishes are eaten as well, especially by the province's Mongol families and in the town's canteens: buuz, khuushuur, tsuivan and mutton noodle soup. Bread is important in a way it is not further east, and shops sell dense loaves alongside Russian biscuits and sweets brought over the border. Vegetables are scarce and largely limited to potatoes, carrots, onions and cabbage. Alcohol is sold in the town, but many Kazakh households drink little or none of it, and guests do better to accept tea.