Talish is a mountainous region on the border of Azerbaijan and Iran. Legends about forest people - gulabans, who are adjacent to the local population, who call themselves Talysh, are widespread here.
Spirits slaves
The Hyrcanian National Park, opened in 2004, covers forests that have remained virtually untouched for millions of years and survived the Ice Age. Trees that are not found anywhere else in the world remind of those distant times. - chestnut-leaf oak, iron tree, Hyrcanian figs. In the shady forest twilight, there are many ferns, in the lush carpet of which the leg drowns, and the grassy cover disposes to halts.
It's also a wildlife paradise. There are traces of bears, in remote corners, the Caucasian leopard finds refuge, which is a kind of park brand. By the way, it is on the verge of extinction and is listed in the Red Book of Azerbaijan, as well as in the Red Book of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Until the middle of the last century, the Lankaran tiger, leopard, Caucasian maral, brown bear still lived in the Talysh forests. Nowadays, you can find here a striped hyena, stone marten, European roe deer. Hyrcanian Park is planned to be included in the UNESCO World Natural and Cultural Heritage List. Its territory (along with the Zakatala nature reserve) is being considered for the creation of a biosphere reserve in the South Caucasus.
However, it is unlikely that official sources will contain references to gulubans - mysterious representatives of either the local fauna or a side branch of humanity, supposedly living in these parts.
Let's start with the fact that "gulyabani" (or, in Azerbaijani, "gulyabani") means "werewolf" in translation. There are other variations of the name - "walk bany", "biaban-guli", "gulbiyaban". Beliefs about gulabans also exist among other eastern peoples - Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Turks.
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Talysh
In the views of Azerbaijanis and Turks, gullyaban is an evil spirit that lives in the steppe or in the cemetery, as well as in ruins, dungeons, in places of battles and massacres.
In the western regions of Azerbaijan, he was considered a water spirit. According to myths and legends, this entity is similar to a person, only very large and ugly, covered with gray or black hair and with feet turned back. An unpleasant smell comes from it.
At night, the goulaban loves to ride horses, entangling their manes and frightening travelers who are late. Having met with people, the spirit speaks to them in a human voice and offers to fight.
Belief has it that if you catch a ghoul-ban and stick a needle in his neck, he will become a slave of that person (“ghul” means “slave”). A small nuance: all the orders of the owner of the gullyaban, in contrast to the classic genies, will follow the opposite way.
Silent with axes
Mentions of wild, naked and hairy people are often found in the myths and legends of the ancient Mesopotamia, in the History of Herodotus and in many other works of the past.
Thus, the French consul in Crimea Xaverio Glavani in his work "Description of Circassia" (end of the 18th century) tells how once a detachment of highlanders crossing the Caucasian ridge was attacked by "naked people" who bite like dogs.
Forest people figure in the folklore of many peoples of the Caucasus. In some legends, they are endowed with a completely fantastic appearance - for example, they are described with a stone or bone ax supposedly sticking out of the chest. But for the most part they appear before us as quite real “hairy and silent people” with axes in their hands.
Russian ethnographer N. S. Ivanenkov, who published one of these descriptions at the beginning of the 20th century, notes that it corresponds to the appearance of the sculptures of the late Middle Ages found in the upper reaches of the Bolshoi Zelenchuk River. In his opinion, in both cases, the “prototypes” could be the remnants of the feral Christian population of these places, hiding from the persecution of the Muslims who were taking hold here.
Another well-known pre-revolutionary Caucasian scholar, V. F. Miller, writing down one of the legends about the "wild" people, added that the narrator claimed that he personally knew in one village in North Ossetia a girl whose father was almaety (albasty) - this is the name of mythical forestry, widespread in the North Caucasus and Central Asia. people.
Soviet archaeologist and ethnographer L. P. Semenov, writing down the genealogy of the Ingush surname of the Daurbekovs from the village of Gorak in the 1930s, discovered that they had an ancestor named Albast in the eighth generation. And now the Albasta tribe allegedly lives in the mountains of Abkhazia.
Another supposed habitat of wild people, most likely, is located in the extreme south of Azerbaijan, in the area of the Lankaran lowland, to the west of which the Talish Mountains with little-walked forests rise.
According to Herodotus, the forest people of the Caucasus ate the wild fruits of trees and shrubs. Copulation between men and women of these tribes was free, like cattle. According to the testimony of our contemporaries, gulabans live in married couples, they have already formed families. Or maybe we are talking about different nationalities or even different biological species?
Next door to civilization
Many storytellers are convinced that gullyabans are found in the Talysh mountains today. So, in one of the letters to the editorial office of the magazine "Vokrug Sveta", the testimony of a certain Feyzulaev is given:
“My (Lankaran) acquaintances and friends, and there are eyewitnesses among them, do not have a shadow of doubt about the existence in the mountains of humanoid male and female creatures, as well as cubs. I repeat that some have met with them. They are described like this: as tall as a person, taller or shorter, thickly overgrown with hair from dark gray to black.
The face is more human than ape. When they accidentally meet a person, they run away on two legs. They are extremely careful, they are found more often at dusk, at night, less often during the day; in distant mountain villages, they sometimes steal small livestock, poultry, vegetables and fruits at night."
And these are not the words of a downtrodden and superstitious peasant, but of an assistant at the Department of Psychology of the Azerbaijan Medical Institute. The information received from him coincides with the stories of other local residents.
Some of them assured that in the Talysh mountains one can find places for sleeping gulabans, which look like trampled areas of a rounded shape with a diameter of 3-5 meters, covered with dry grass and shreds of wool.
Earlier it was said that gulabans live in reed huts. But lately no one has come across such huts. They seem to have adopted a typically nomadic lifestyle.
But why in Azerbaijan forest people survived only in the Talysh mountains? Most likely, their localization is not at all connected with local ethnic groups. They could come to Azerbaijan from Iran, and then migrate from there to Georgia or Abkhazia.
At the beginning of the last century, in the area of Lankaran and Astara, there was a dirt road over the very coast of the sea, which led towards the border with Iran. It was followed by Russian merchants with goods. Theoretically, the walkers could also use this path.
& quot; The Massacre of Humbaba & quot; - image from the Sumerian tablet. In the Sumerian-Akkadian epic Humbaba is a wild giant from the forest
Where to look for gulabans?
Information about a tribe of wild people in the "South Caspian wilderness", a wooded-mountainous area of the Azerbaijani Caspian Sea, was included in the "Encyclopedia of the Unknown" by V. A. Chernobrova.
In 1914, the shepherd Gabriel Tsiklauri, a native of the village of Natbeuri, Mtskheta district, Tiflis province, got lost in these parts. After long wanderings, he went to a settlement of savages who did not wear any clothes and hunted with spears. After living for two years in the tribe, Gabriel left after the tribe was attacked by unknown people.
Although since then Gabriel has repeatedly made attempts to find this place, he was only able to establish that the specified area is located in subtropical forests near Salyan, possibly closer to the cities of Astara and Lankaran, and local residents confirm that they have heard of the existence of savages.
True, independent searches undertaken in this region by individual researchers in the 1980s did not lead to success, and organizing a serious expedition here is not easy.
Yuri SUPRUNENKO, magazine "Secrets of the XX century" № 40
