Article (“BF-Human Relations, etc.”) which I’ve referred to in recent posts, follows herewith. From a Russian source titled – if I have things rightly – SGP. Article dated Aug. 4th 2008. Apologies for possible typos.
“RELATIONS BETWEEN MAN AND ‘WILDMAN’ IN THE CAUCASUS: KHABAZ KARDANOV AND HIS RELATIONSHIP TO AN ALMASTY
During the search for eyewitnesses in the Kabardinian village Sarmakovo in Kabardino-Balkaria, northern Caucasus, in November 2005, a member of the German study group was referred to a possible eyewitness. It was the Kabardinian Hassan Muratovich Kardanov, 72 years old. He is a member of a respected family in the village. During the Soviet time, Kardanov had worked nearly 20 years as the head of the ‘Seisovjet’ (village administration) in Sarmakovo. During the talk with him, he said that he had encounters with the Almasty twice in his life. According to him, his first encounter was ‘after the war near the village Kamijuko’, a village close to Sarmakovo. The second encounter happened at the end of the 50s, in the neighbouring republic Karachaevo-Circassia, about 10 miles from the settlement Ust’ Dzheguta. Kardanov was mowing grass there together with four other men. When it got dark, they raked the cut grass together. Suddenly, a creature similar toa man came toward them, and Kardanov claimed that this was an Almasty. One of the men fainted from fear. The creature apparently had a face like a person, but also had crooked eyes. The entire body was covered with hair, and the hair on his head reached to his chest. He wore a cloth around his hips.
During the talk on this subject, Kardanov explained that his dead cousin, a resident of Sarmakovo, was friends with a female Almasty. In the further talk, it was revealed who he was talking about. Khabaz Kardanov. Boris Porshnev publicized on this Kabardinian and his relationship with an Almasty in his work ‘The Struggle for Troglodytes’ (1968). In 1974 this paper was also published in French in an abridged version. According to Porshnev, in the fall of 1959, a member of the Snowman Commission in Moscow was informed that a Khabaz Kardanov in the village Sarmakovo had contact with a ‘tame’ Almasty. He worked at that time as a herdsman and on the pasture he became friendly with a female Almasty. Later she followed him to his house in Sarmakovo and visited this house again and again. Kahabaz’s uncle saw her in the garden there. Khabaz was apparently willing to allow the possibility of contact in return for money. However, this did not come to be.
Porshnev wrote, that at the time, the existence of a ‘Snowman’ in the Caucasus was hard to fathom, and the Snowman Commission at the Academy of Science in Moscow had problems. The necessary money was not produced. Porshnev: ‘Shortly thereafter, he [ Khabaz Kardanov] left for Siberia and his relatives claimed that he reached this decision, partly because of his wish to leave the Almasty. And therefore one cannot assume that this kind of situation will repeat itself.’ Later, nothing more about this case was published on the Russian side, as far as is known.
Because of Porshnev’s description the members of the German study group working in Sarmakovo, thought that Khabaz Kardanov had left the village forever. But this was obviously not true. According to Hassan Kardanov’s statement, his cousin Khabaz lived his entire life in Sarmakovo. He worked for the wine factory there, which still exists today. His job was, among others, to travel with shipments of wine to Siberia. During these transports, he was sometimes not at home for a few weeks. He died, according to his cousin, in the late 80s in Sarmakovo.
Hassan Kardanov told how Marie-Jeanne Koffmann [ Almas researcher] often visited him when he worked in the village administration: ‘She often came to me and asked me to help her’. He claimed further, that she asked him several times, among other things, to speak to his cousin, that he should show her the Almasty. When asked about Koffmann’s intentions, Kardanov said, ‘She wanted to catch the Almasty’. As a return favour, Koffmann promised Khabaz Kardanov a three-room apartment in Moscow – ‘ryadom Gagarina’ (next to Gagarin). Hassan Kardanov explained that at that time, just as it is today, the dream of many Kabardinian villagers was to live in Moscow, because of the better wages and prestige. However, Khabaz turned this offer down. Hassan Kardanov quoted his cousin with the following words: ‘And even if she [Koffmann] gave me the entire district of Moscow, I wouldn’t give her the Almasty.’ Hassan Kardanov didn’t know anything about a ransom that his cousin demanded for the Almasty in 1959, but he didn’t say that such a claim must be untrue. Hassan was asked if Khabaz also had contact to the Almasty in the 60s and later. He said that there were such rumours of this in the village and referred to Koffmann’s offer to his cousin.
He said further that he met his cousin once in the 60s during the hay harvest near the village. He came back after some time and was amazed that his cousin had finished the harvest in such a short time. He asked him about it. Khabaz said the ‘she’ had helped him. It should be noted that in the Russian TV documentary ‘Madam and the Snowman’ (2005) Koffmann shows a locality on the edge of the village Sarmakovo, where, according to her, the Almasty helped Khabaz Kardanov during the hay harvest. In this connection no year is mentioned. Hassan Kardanov said, that his cousin lived alone in his house, about 300 metres away from Koffmann’s home in the centre of the village Sarmakovo, until his death. During the talks with him, Hassan Kardanov appeared to be a serious, honest man. Although he has reached retirement age, he still works in the administration for pension funds in Zalukoashe, the administration centre of the Zoisk district.
The Khabaz Kardanov case is also dealt with in the present literature about ‘relict hominids’, following Porshnev’s description. It must be noted, that also other Moscow researchers like Igor Burtsev and Dmitri Bayanov took part in Koffmann’s fieldwork in Sarmakovo in the middle of the 60s. However, according to Hassan Kardanov’s descriptions, this case from the early days of Caucasian fieldwork is presented differently as that which Porshnev published in 1968. Keeping his publication in mind, this leads today to a question, which is also significant for other publications. How completely was Porshnev and other authors informed about the fieldwork in the Caucasus?
If one is trying to collect information about Almasty from the locals nowadays, they will hear the tip that in the last three decades there has sometimes been people who had personal relationship with Almasty. Locals claim today that Koffmann was looking for such “contact people” and several times, found them. They say that she attempted to have these contact people show her the Almasty, also in offering them money. It is not known at the present if this worked. Gregory Panchenko, Koffmann’s close co-worker, wrote in his book ‘Catalogue of Monsters’ (2002), that in the 1960s the last generation of Almasty died for whom contact to humans was relatively common.
There are many historical reports in the Caucasus about taming the wild people. Those who collect reports in the central north Caucasus about the subject, always run into the following theme. A person can ‘tame’ an Almasty, when he hides a hair from himself [from context, I presume this means a hair from the ‘Almasty’ who is to be tamed] in his house. Then, the Almasty will serve as a worker for the person who has his hair. However, if the Almasty finds the hair, he can also kill the person who hid it. This belief is probably the most known about Almasty among the local residents today. You can even hear about it from people who believe the Almasty to be a part of local superstition.
The best known example of ‘taming’ is Zana, who is believed to be a ‘relic hominoid’ by the Moscow ‘hominologists’. According to Russian publications, she was caught and tamed in the 19th century in Abkhazia. In ‘The Struggle for Troglodytes’, Porshnev mentions another case where an Almasty had regular contact to a family. This also occurred in the Zoisk district, where the village Sarmakovo is located. Koffmann learned this from the Ukrainian N. Zerikova, who had an encounter with this Almasty in 1956. Alexander Mashkovtsev, a member of the Russian Snowman commission who worjed as the first in Kabardino-Balkaria on the problem in 1960, wrote: ‘...in previous times, one frequently met Almasty. There were even cases where they could be tamed, and they lived a few years with Kabardinian families and did simple work. There were also apparently cases of sexual intercourse between the Almasty and humans.’
According to Koffmann, before the revolution Kabardinians, Circassians, Karachays and other Caucasian nationalities used them (Almasty) often for agricultural works: in the gardens, for cutting wood, for bringing water and others. The farmers fed their unusual helpers and sometimes they gave them old trousers and jackets. The mountain guide Leonid Zamyatin collected eyewitness reports in the Caucasus according to Dmitri Bayanov. He lived in the settlement Tarskoi on the foot of Mt. Elbrus and published in 1966: ‘The residents of Kabardino-Balkaria claim that even 40 to 50 years ago an Almasty lived in almost every house of the mountain villages. The Almasty was given food and that brought the families good luck.’
According to current reports of natives in Kabardino-Balkaria, before the Second World War it was not rare that a single Almasty lived in a local family over many years. In this connection one can hear the following story. The Almasty who lived with the humans received every day his meal. Each time when the family had lunch or dinner, they set out a serving in the courtyard. But when they forgot to do this, and when they later returned home, they realised that he had made a large mess in the house looking for his dinner. These type of stories are widespread in the northern Caucasus even today. Natives further claim that such Almasty sometimes were buried in the same graveyard as the members of his family. In 1999 the German group recorded a report by inhabitants of the village Bylym in Kabardino-Balkaria. They claimed that Marie-Jeanne Koffmann was digging for such a body in a former graveyard on the edge of their village in the Soviet time. Because this is against the local customs she tried to keep it secret and worked only at night, but it became known in the village.
Also in Bylym in 1999, a member of the German study group recorded the report of the Balkarian Mariam Avashokova, 99 years old. She said that an Almasty lived in their house when she was a child. He had his own room in the house, which the children could not enter. The children rarely saw him and were afraid of him. She couldn’t describe the face very well, because it was covered in long hair that hung down. She also didn’t know the gender of the Almasty. Yet she did experience how the Almasty made a large mess in the house when he didn’t get anything to eat. According to her, Almasty lived in the homes of many families in Balkaria during her childhood.
One question in the present field work is if purposeful, repeated contact or a lengthy relationship between humans and Almasty exists today. Since the late 90s there have been significant hints collected that point to the likelihood that there are still such contact people today. This is a main point of current field investigations of the German study group in the Caucasus. “
