An Old Practice Under a New Title

The underlying religious material here is genuinely old and continuously attested: the veneration of the sky, the powers of earth and water, and a recognizable body of associated ritual practice appear from the Turkic inscriptions of the eighth century onward and persisted afterward in local forms for many centuries across a wide stretch of Central Asia and Siberia. What is new, and considerably more recent, is the name and the organized shape now attached to that older material. Tengrism as the title of a distinct religion, complete with an articulated doctrine, a claimed continuous identity and formal organizations built to represent it, took its current form only in the twentieth century, and it spread rapidly across Central Asia, the Volga region and Mongolia after 1991, in the immediate wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. That timing is not incidental. The movement's growth ran alongside, and very often was actively bound up with, broader movements of national revival across the same territories, as newly independent or newly assertive nations looked for symbols and religious identities that were neither the Islam nor the Orthodox Christianity long associated with foreign or colonial influence, nor the atheism the Soviet period had imposed.