The world-famous Hungarian–British archaeologist Aurel Stein was just visiting the Tarim basin on his second major expedition to the Inner Asian section of the Silk Road in 1907, when he became a witness to a rare astronomical phenomenon, a total solar eclipse. He also captured his impressions in his work entitled Ruins of Desert Cathay, also published in Hungarian. At the same moment, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky, a pioneer in color photography, as a member of a Russian scientific expedition was trying to take the world’s first color photograph of a total solar eclipse on a snowcapped hillside in Russian Turkestan (today Uzbekistan), in the middle of a snowstorm. In a special way, the lives of the Hungarian archaeologist and the Russian photographer of the Silk Road were intertwined for a moment. In my paper I take a look at this special moment from an astronomical, geographical, and historical perspective as well.

Árnyék a Selyemúton

Albasty is one of the most commonly known malevolent beings among Turkic peoples from the Altay Mountains via the Caucasus and up as far as the Volga River. This article focuses on Turkic data from the Volga region (Chuvash, Tartar, Bashkir) and the Eurasian Steppe (Kazak, Kyrgyz, Nogay, Uzbek). Various areas can be ascertained on the basis of verbal charms and folk-belief narratives. On the Eurasian Steppe, for example, Albasty was first and foremost a puerperal demon. In this territory, specialists (kuuču) were called in to keep away or oust the demon at birth. Many recorded legends and memorates concern healing methods and the process of becoming a healer. In contrast, epic texts or narratives are rarer,in the Volga region, yet there are certain verbal incantations against the Albasty, which here is rather a push or disease demon.

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Albasty: A Female Demon of Turkic Peoples

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Albasty: A Female Demon of Turkic Peoples