Schmidt Éva Archívum logó

ArchiveLog in

I Speak After my Mother's Words, I Speak After my Father's Words

Anastasija Alekseevna Moldanova's Teachings about the Traditional Khanty World
By this time, the great plan
was starting to unfold better and better.
That what we should do
is to make a complex educational material from all of this.

from Éva Schmidt’s journal, June 29, 1991

The collection presented here dates back to near historic times. Hungarian ethnographic researcher and linguist Éva Schmidt met with the Khanty student Anastasija Alekseevna Moldanova in the summer of 1991 in the West Siberian city of Belojarskij. Éva Schmidt moved to Belojarskij from Hungary in early summer, in order to create the first Khanty folklore archive. She was living in a hotel room at this time, her institution only existed on paper, its equipment resting on the floor of the local authority in crates. Anastasija Alekseevna Moldanova was headed home for the summer holidays to her family living on the upper stream of the Kazym River, in the vicinity of Juil’sk from Khanty-Mansijsk, where she was studying at the Teacher Training College. Her travels were troublesome, as traveling was not easy. While she was waiting in Belojarskij, Éva Schmidt collected the material published here from her, then in the fall, when Nastja was traveling back for the new semester, they complemented and processed the texts. Éva Schmidt drew up a complex plan for their publication, but it has not been implemented to this day. This is what we began to rectify after more than 30 years. The collector and the informant are no longer with us, and the chances of the survival of Khanty culture are also continuously diminishing. So let this be a memento of a time when Hungarian research was just launched again after a long time among the Khanty, and meanwhile interest among the Khanty in their own culture also had an unprecedented boost. It is in the spirit of this era that we get a glimpse of the traditional Khanty world through Nastja’s perspective.

Éva Schmidt Archive © 2026

ImpressumPrivacy PolicyHome