The Oroks at the Edge of the Earth

In the dark and most distant past, before the final conflict ravaged the lands of Northern Europe, leaving them blistered and scorched, a nomadic tribe of hunter-traders set up camp for their annual summer festival, building temporary shelters on the eastern banks of the Khatanga river. As the snow melted across Northern Ukraine, thousands of miles to the East (in the region of Olyshivka, in the Chernihiv Raion, Chernihiv Oblast), the Orok tribe, comprising 234 men, women and children, set off on their annual pilgrimage to their homeland, where they remain until the rivers freeze and life becomes intolerable. Each year, the clan migrates on horseback and reindeer between Ukraine and Russia, surviving off the land and trading with locals in wares of fur and carved wood.

Within the Russian Federation, the indigenous Oroks were legally protected as an ancient nomadic tribe, one of many found in the Siberian Arctic. Trekking to the remote north was the Orok's annual sacred pilgrimage, a significant religious movement of their homeland hailing from deep in the Orok's myth and lore. This place they called ‘Yamal,’ which loosely translates to the ‘edge of the world.’ Here in Yamal, they survive at the limits of human tolerance.

Yamal is so inhospitable that during the Russian Revolution, Stalin built prison camps there, open with no perimeter guards. The Oroks of Yamal are the last remaining peoples to practice nomadic reindeer herding, spending the summer in this inhospitable living in conical teepees known as ‘chums.’ As reindeer herders, the Oroks worship the land and animals, practising shamanism and embedding rituals throughout all aspects of their lives. The Oroks migration is the only migration of its kind on earth, an annual journey of some 2,000km from Ukraine to the Arctic Circle.