In 1927, Dimitri Petkov, a farmer in rural Northern Siberia, found something utterly baffling. It was a battered old coin with writing he did not recognize. Stranger still was the image of the hair-covered creature cast on the face. Over the course of a year, Dimitri would find dozens more.
Thinking the coins were the currency of D’yavol (the devil), he took the coins to the the local orthodox priest for ritual destruction. But the priest, Dimitri Raskalnikov was not at all alarmed at the cache of coins – in fact, he was thrilled.
The priest revealed that ten years earlier he had found a mysterious box in his church’s crypt with such shocking contents, he had not shown them to anyone because he couldn’t be sure they were real.
The cache of coins were all the priest needed to prove what he had suspected all along: the twenty battered and time-worn tintype photographs contained in the box were, in fact, real. The coins and the photographs were donated to Chuchuna University, where they underwent conservation and study.
What they reveal is mesmerizing: yetis were not merely mythological creatures, but were once a real and thriving culture in the Tunguska region of Siberia. What’s more, they lived in complex hierarchical structures that included royalty, warriors, holy men, and and an underclass. And although we don’t know what class they occupied, clearly there were also photographers. Evidence suggested that yetis and humans may have had regular interactions and may even have intermarried.
The collection is on view at MONET for the first time outside of Russia as a courtesy of Chuchuna Siberian University.
Yetis once lived in complex hierarchical structures that included noblemen, warriors, shamans, and an untouchable caste.
Why we don’t have Yetis today a topic of heated debate, but consensus among anthropologists is forming that the entire species may have been wiped out by an asteroid in the well-documented “Tunguska Event” that occurred on June 30, 1908 in which 830 square miles of Siberian forest was completely wiped off the map by a five-megaton explosion.
