YARTSEVO

In 1605, the Ket Cossacks founded a hut near the mouth of the Sym River, on the site of which the village of Yartsevo was subsequently formed. This small village is notable chiefly because it was one of the first rural settlements in the Yenisei region, founded shortly after the construction of the rural locality of Turukhansk. Following the Cossacks, industrial people and peasants came to the village, they began to engage in agriculture, fishing, hunting and trade with the local Tunguska and Ostyak tribes.

The largest local enterprise from 1930 to 2007 was forestry. It supplied hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of timber to the ports of Igarka and Dudinka, for construction projects in Norilsk. Alas, then it was eliminated. Trees generally play an important role in the life of the village; they are not only harvested here, but also grown. In 1939, a flood washed up a mighty black poplar on the shore above Yartsevo – these trees grow only in the south of Siberia, in the Minusinsk Basin. Some teachers and students then cut poplar shoots and planted them near a school. The trees took root, and on June 21, 1941, from the grown poplars, at the graduation school, schoolchildren cut shoots and planted a whole park. Today, there is a modest obelisk with 300 names of fellow villagers who died in the war. All southern poplars have taken root in the north.

The four remaining representatives of the Yug people on Earth still live in Yartsevo. In total, about 1300 people live in the village, a third of them are Old Believers. Nowadays, as many years ago, the villagers work on logging, keep the homesteading, hunt and fish. Local residents also work in the forestry, in the aviation security, in budgetary institutions and small businesses.

Today, travelling on MS “Maxim Gorky”, you have a chance to get acquainted with Old Believers, people who have honored traditions and their religious way of life for centuries, and visit their local houses. The local residents will show you at least fragments of their archaic life and unique culture, they will even show you how to extract cedar oil from cones in the old-fashioned way.