Andrey Savvin, the first director of the Churapchinsky Museum, folklorist and researcher, compiled a valuable collection of clay pots. The exhibition includes a variety of utensils that were received into the museum’s collections during his time of work: large and small pots for cooking — “kohyye”, “bochchuuk”, as well as various fragments. Among them, there is a clay vessel with a handle, which served as a bed warmer.
The manuscript collection of the Institute for Humanitarian Research and North Indigenous Peoples Problems of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences includes the material “Pottery Craft of the Yakuts”. The text written by Andrey Savvin is devoted to one of the traditional occupations of the Sakha people — making pottery.
The craft, which Andrey Savvin described in detail in his works, began to reemerge in Churapcha in recent years.
For example, Prokopiy Ekechiamov, a teacher of the applied arts class at the Anatoly Gogolev Children’s School of Arts in Churapcha, makes clay products and teaches this craft to children. He studied Savvin’s materials on his own and made copies of clay utensils from manuscripts, which are on display in the Churapchinsky Museum. Prokopiy Ekechiamov showed his works at republican exhibitions and repeatedly won various contests.
Savvin’s texts on the Yakut pottery craft mention the names of many artisans. One of the important tasks of the museum staff was to collect as much information as possible about the potters, their biography and the places where their descendants lived. As it became known, the craftsmen mainly lived in Khatylinsky and Boltoginsky settlements, but their trail goes cold. Research work is still underway.
The manuscripts of Andrey Savvin focus on describing the skills, actions and rituals of Yakut potters. The researcher studies the stages of processing the extracted clay, methods of molding pots, and gives special attention to the decorative patterns used in Yakut ceramics.
In 2022, the book “Pottery Craft of the Yakuts” was
published in Russian, followed by the English version in 2023.
