Astrakhan Reserve Museum: Buddhist Collections as a Source for the Study of Kalmyk History and Culture

Introduction. Museum items tend to arouse significant research interest since they make it possible to trace household activities inherent to a certain community, i.e. aspects of life usually overlooked by archival documents. Astrakhan Reserve Museum houses an authentic collection of Buddhist icons examined in the present study. Goals. The paper attempts an analysis of Kalmyk dartsigs (Buddhist icons) as a source for historical and ethnographic research. Materials and methods. The ‘Kalmyk’ Collection of Astrakhan Reserve Museum numbers over 220 items, including 49 dartsigs. The work analyzes 48 icons, since dartsig 49 is attributed to the modern tradition and has no authentic value. The employed research methods are the historical/genetic, statistical, descriptive, anthropological ones, that of comparative analysis and others. The study is based on an interdisciplinary approach instrumental in providing multifaceted insights. Results. The shaping of the ‘Kalmyk’ Collection took place in the prerevolutionary and Soviet periods. The cultural artifacts were collected and donated to the Museum for a number of reasons, the primary one having been that members of Peter the Great Society for the Study of Astrakhan Land were seeking to preserve cultural heritage of peoples to have inhabited the region, lest the latter should be destroyed by the Soviets or lost in the swirl of history. Our comparisons of the current ‘Kalmyk’ Collection and other sources yield a list of certain Buddhist images that have been lost and are still of great scholarly interest. The well preserved thangkas without passe-partouts had been purposely painted and passed to Peter the Great Society, the poorly preserved ones with traces of soot had once been used in homes of Kalmyk commoners, while the larger and fine images are likely to have been attributes of Buddhist temples or estates of wealthy Kalmyks. The analysis of passe-partouts attests to that Kalmyks were actually handling the icons with utmost veneration, which is evident enough in the qualities of textiles the former were sewn from.

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