Anatol Donkan talks about the house’s guardian spirits (6)

“When you look at this figure, you can see that it apparently took an axe blow. I was told that once, during a hunting trip, some hunters experienced a misfortune. When the owner of the house returned, he wanted to chop up the grandfather figure because it had not foreseen what had happened. And when he struck it with the axe, the other family members said that the grandfather was not to blame for what had occurred during the hunt. So the figure was left in peace and kept in the house. But the scar remained, as a reminder of how this figure had been treated – as if it were a living being.

Even though all of these figures are over a hundred years old, communication with them has never stopped. It didn’t matter whether the people were communists or anyone else – they still set up the figures, perhaps a bit more secretly, but they always brought them out. Even today, Nanai people who work with computers still talk about these spirits.” (Video in progress)

Recorded by Erich Kasten. Viechtach, 2024.