Alexander Savelyev

His cautious advice: do not merge the roles of historian and nationalist. 36 years later — has much changed? Only partially, largely due to individual scholars. Systemically, the paradigm remains firmly in place — and this is to a great extent true for other peoples of the Volga–Kama region as well.

1990: Uli Schamiloglu notes that research on the ethnogenesis of the Kazan Tatars largely remains trapped in the paradigm of 19th-century romantic nationalism, while the “Volga Bulgars → Kazan Tatars” continuity functions as a dogma not only in politics, but in scholarship as well.

Our project on documenting Turkic runiform inscriptions has just published its first article in Turkish, devoted to our 2024 fieldwork. A good moment to recall that season: Southern Khakassia, searching for Yenisei Turkic inscriptions at local burial grounds, and life in a wooden yurt.

To sum up, none of the proposed Chinese loans stands up. They provide no evidence for long-term Bulghar residence near China. Early Bulghars must be sought elsewhere.

Finally, Vovin proposed Rus. слон ‘elephant’ ← Chuvash сăлан (~ сăлун) ← Chinese 象. This collapses too: Rus. → Chuvash borrowing is perfectly regular. Chuvash -a- ~ -у- as substitutions of Rus. -o- are well attested, cf. Rus. запон ‘apron’ → Chuvash саппан ~ саппун.

Chuvash çыр- ‘erode (riverbank)’, compared by Vovin to Chinese 溢 ‘overflow’, also has clear Turkic parallels — contrary to his claim.

Instead, çын(ă) has a perfect Turkic etymology (Mudrak 1993), corresponding regularly to Old Turkic jalŋuq ‘person’.

In any case, both alleged Late Middle Chinese loans collapse. Chuvash çын ‘person’ cannot derive from the LMC form of 人: its possessive çынн-и requires earlier çынă, incompatible with Vovin’s ad hoc *ǯin.

This is already absurd: Late Middle Chinese dates to around the turn of the 1st–2nd millennium CE. Were the Chuvash still near China then, arriving on the Volga with the Mongols?

In 2011, A. Vovin tried to prove the presence of early Bulghars in East Asia by proposing a few Chinese loanwords in Chuvash: one Old Chinese (≤1st c. BCE) and two Late Middle Chinese (!).

Thus, “East Asian Bulghars” are an extremely ephemeral construct, and attempts to give them substance usually fail.

As noted by E. Helimski, all peoples securely identified as Bulghar-speaking are localized in Europe, whereas all historically attested Turkic languages of Siberia and Mongolia are Common Turkic.

However, rejecting this fantasy does not imply that the East Asian localization of the early Bulghars is without issue. It relies not on specific Bulghar data, but rather on the assumption that Proto-Turkic was East Asian and the transparent continuity from Proto-Turkic to Proto-Bulghar.

Salmin’s works are scarcely distinguishable from pseudohistory. Yet in 2014 his monograph appeared in English, edited and introduced by Peter Golden — a curious episode in modern Turkology.

Claims exaggerating ancient West Eurasian roots of the Chuvash stem from a broader idea: their ancestors were never in East Asia, with a homeland supposedly in the Caucasus. Today this view is marginal, represented mainly by A. K. Salmin.

What seems clear, however, is that yupa is neither a recent internal formation nor an obvious borrowing. It is likely very old, reflecting Proto-Turkic—or perhaps even deeper—realities.

By contrast, the origin of Chuvash yupa ‘grave post’ remains uncertain. Existing proposals compare it with Narrow Turkic qa:p-a ‘thick, swollen’, o:p-uz ‘mound, uneven ground’, Mongolic obuɣa > oboo ‘ritual stone heap’, yet none is free of semantic or formal difficulties.

Whether such a sacrifice actually took place is another matter (Theophanes was a Byzantine author). But the Khazar term for the rite itself is genuine. This allows us to treat Chuvash śăva ‘cemetery’ as related to Khazar δογ and Old Turkic joγ ‘funeral feast’.

In the 6th century, Menander uses the form δόγια when describing a funerary rite of the Western Turkic Khaganate. In the early 8th century, Theophanes reports that at the δογ held for their tudun, the Khazars sacrificed 300 Byzantine captives together with a tourmarchēs.

One such term is Chuvash śăva ‘cemetery’, which appears to be related to Old Turkic joγ ‘funeral feast, commemoration’.

As is well known, much of the Chuvash terminology related to the afterlife and funerary ritual is borrowed from Arabic and thus Islamic in origin. Against this background, the few clearly pre-Islamic terms are especially valuable.

Yupa grave post. Cemetery of unbaptized Chuvash near my native village of Lachaka. Jan 2026.
I last documented this site about 15 years ago. Since then, the number of yupa has decreased by an order of magnitude; today, only a few remain.

More generally, it is hard to see why the Strahlenberg–Müller theory is any better than E.A. Malov’s 1882 suggestion that the Chuvash worshipped the biblical Golden Calf (Aram. Tōrā ‘bull, ox’), revered by the apostate Israelites of the Old Testament.

Scandinavians did reach the Middle Volga in the Bulghar period, of course. Still, borrowing the name of the supreme deity—in the near absence of other Norse loanwords in Chuvash—remains difficult to imagine.

A.V. Golovnev’s version is more restrained, yet the core idea remains the same: Thor is said to have crossed ethnic boundaries and expanded his sacred domain eastward, into Bjarmaland.

I used to think it surprising that the derivation of Chuvash Tură from Thor never gained much traction. In fact, it did: for example, the ethnologist A.K. Salmin (MAE RAS) explicitly places Tură alongside Thor and other distant parallels.

The idea of a Nordic genealogy for Volga paganisms was further encouraged by the Mari supreme god Jumo, whose similarity to Finnish Jumala Müller quite correctly noted.

In his Description of Three Pagan Peoples, Müller even wrote the Chuvash divine name with Th-, as in Thor. Notably, the same spelling occurs once in Strahlenberg’s Chuvash materials of 1711—again, precisely in this word.

One can vividly imagine the moment of revelation experienced by Gerhard Friedrich Müller, who visited Chuvash lands in 1733, heard Toră, and joyfully concluded that the Chuvash preserved the name of the Norse god Thor.

The phonetic reshaping of earlier Taŋrï has significantly obscured the etymology of Chuvash Tor(ă) ~ Tur(ă) and, in the process, produced a rather curious history of interpretations.