Siberian branch
Shors
A Siberian Turk people of the Mountain Shoria taiga, long renowned for ironworking and for their sung heroic epics.
Tadar, Shor / Şorlar
The Shors live in Mountain Shoria, the forested uplands along the Tom, Mras-Su and Kondoma rivers in the south of Kemerovo Oblast, around Tashtagol. Traditionally they were taiga hunters, fishers and gatherers, with small-scale cultivation.
In 17th-century Russian sources the ancestors of the Shors were called the “Kuznetsk Tatars” — “smiths’ Tatars” — because they smelted iron and made iron goods, which they traded with neighbouring peoples. The Russian fort of Kuznetsk, founded in 1618 on the Tom, took its name from them.
From the 1930s the region became a centre of coal and iron mining, which brought large numbers of newcomers and transformed Shor life. A Mountain Shor national district existed from the mid-1920s until the late 1930s.
- Language
- Shor, a Siberian Turk language with Mras and Kondoma dialects
- Branch
- Siberian
- Homeland
- Mountain Shoria (Gornaya Shoriya) in the south of Kemerovo Oblast, southern Siberia (Russia)
- Also living in
- Neighbouring Khakassia and the Altai Republic
Key dates
1618
The Russian fort of Kuznetsk is founded on the Tom river, in the lands of the “Kuznetsk Tatars”.
Mid-1920s – late 1930s
A Mountain Shor national district exists within the Russian Soviet republic.
1930s
Large-scale coal and iron mining transforms Mountain Shoria.
Heritage
- Heroic epics performed by storytellers (kaichi) with throat singing and the two-stringed qai-qomus
- The historic ironworking tradition that gave Kuznetsk its name
- Detailed hunting and taiga knowledge preserved in the Shor language
Sources
- M. Kolga, I. Tõnurist, L. Vaba and J. Viikberg, The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire (NGO Red Book, Tallinn, 2001), “The Shors”
- D. Funk, “What Does the Storyteller Sing? On Transcribing the Epics of South Siberian Turks”, Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 75 (2019)