Our second travel report, for friends of de The sign, on Mongolia: from shamanic cults to the Empire of Genghis Khan, from Buddhist Lamaism to Soviet domination
Few nations in the world can boast as resilient to the swirling river of history as the Mongolia. If anyone, for better or for worse, has some knowledge of the legendary deeds of the great Genghis Khan and of his very extensive although not very durable empire, not everyone knows that the Mongolian lineage had to endure, in the following centuries and practically until the day before yesterday, an uninterrupted chain of domination, massacres, oppression and cultural genocide, now by the Chinese Empire, then by the Lamaist monks and finally, in the twentieth century, by Soviet totalitarianism. Only in the last thirty years can Mongolia finally be considered independent and sovereign. And yet, the proud descendants of the nomads of the steppes still maintain today in their interior a cultural and behavioral stratification of an alien nature, to the point of feeling that the "real Mongolian" can be found only after having broken down the subject like a matryoshka, depriving him first of his Soviet "armor" and then of the Sino-Tibetan one.
One of these "proud descendants of the nomads of the steppes" is Bolod, a Buryat guide who speaks, in addition to the Mongolian and Russian languages, learned at school, numerous Western languages ββlearned by himself: English, French, Italian and Spanish. After having worked for decades, under the Soviet regime, in a food factory, following the fall of the USSR, he dedicated himself to what he had most at heart: Mongolia, its tradition, its history, its people and its natural beauties.
Since 1993 he has founded the Bolod Tours, a travel agency that practically coincides with his person. Despite having a constantly updated website and even a Facebook profile (to keep in touch with people she met thanks to his work), she has never "picked up" customers on the internet: her modus operandi consists in walking, on free days, in Chinggis Square, listen to the discussions of the tourists who hang out under the statues of the great Khans of the Mongol Empire and engage in conversations with them in their respective languages, proposing trips to the northern part of the country as well as to the Altai mountain range in the West, or in the southern Gobi desert.
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