Bichis

    According to rumors, long ago a fugitive old woman named Igideï is said to have found refuge in this place. By a great lake she built her house. Was she fleeing from her enemies or from herself? No one remembers or knows anymore, but one thing is certain: here time has no hold over man, and nature lives in perfect harmony with the life of the inhabitants.

Each time you return to this village, you understand that it is a place where time stops. Here, there is no need for a watch: time is like your breath, it breathes and lives with you. You become aware that the world around you, in all its splendor and beauty, freezes, and that only you have the choice, the strength, the magic to shape this world as you wish. This is a place where people create even in the smallest and seemingly insignificant gesture, in every action, where even the gaze of a white horse feels like an essential sign capable of changing you and your life.

Almost every day, Bichis walks six kilometers across his native fields, checking his tuu (traditional woven fish traps made of branches). “All I need is this forest, this lake, my small hut and my cow Khara, nothing more…” Bichis says once again, while eating a third variety of grass and silently asking the spirits of the lake for a little fish for his cat. “It’s been a long time since I had such a catch — here, take some, treat your loved ones…” A Sakha always shares his catch so that the spirits of nature do not turn away from him, and he hands me a sack with a good half of the catch.

The people here are naive and sincere, trusting and open, and tears flow by themselves at the boundless kindness of this place. And you breathe in each moment greedily, every parcel of time, trying to fill yourself with this extraordinary feeling, with this state of serenity and harmony that you once knew, but had long ago forgotten.