Arçura

The Arçura is a forest spirit of the Chuvash of the middle Volga. The Tatars and Bashkirs know the same figure, or one very close to it, as Şüräle.^[1]^[2] It has the shape of a man, is hairy and of changing height, calls travellers by their names, leads them astray in the forest and tickles them to death.^[3] What is known of it comes from dictionaries, folklore collections and ethnography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the Volga–Ural region.^[4]

The sources of the Göktürk khaganates do not name it.^[5] Modern Turkish handbooks nevertheless list it among the spirits of the Turks and set it beside the powers of the Göktürk world.^[6] That placement is a comparison made in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is not a statement of any source from the time of the khaganates.

The sources

The Chuvash and the Volga Tatars are Turkic-speaking peoples of the Volga–Kama and Ural country. Finnic peoples also settled the region, and Islam, Orthodox Christianity and Russian folk belief later shaped its beliefs.^[7] The sources on the forest spirit are correspondingly layered.

Radloff’s dictionary of the Turkic dialects explains Şüräle as a wooden man with three fingers who lives in the forest and attacks people or tickles them to death.^[8] The Kazan Tatar scholar Kayum Nasıyri (1825–1902) described the Şüräle in his book on the beliefs and customs of the Kazan Tatars. He likened it to the Russian leshii and gave it large breasts that it throws over its shoulders.^[9] For the Chuvash form, the principal witnesses are the collections of the Hungarian Turkologist Gyula Mészáros and the Chuvash dictionary of N. I. Ashmarin. The German Turkologist Johannes Benzing drew on both in 1947 for his study of the Tatar poet Gabdulla Tuqay’s poem Şüräle.^[10] The Finno-Ugric and Siberian handbook of 1927 gathers the reports on the forest spirits of the Votyaks, the Cheremis (Mari), the Mordvins, the Chuvash and the Tatars in one place.^[11]

The Chuvash poet Mikhail Fedorov gave a poem the title Arzyuri. In the 1990s the Tatars of Kazan named a park in their capital after the Şüräle.^[12] The figure has therefore passed through literature and a national revival, and the descriptions in circulation today partly come from that path.

Shape and nature

The Chuvash forest spirit wanders as a human being. It is naked and long-haired, has large breasts, and walks with its feet turned the wrong way. It also goes backward, and an animal it mounts begins to run backward.^[13] The handbook gives this figure under the name Obyda. It says that the Chuvash call the evil forest spirit also the Half-human, Ar-sori.^[13] Other reports give the Arçura a body covered with hair, a black face, a large head and long hair, four eyes, two in front and two behind, and three hands and three feet. They liken it to an ape (upäte) or to a tall hairy man, and say it can be male or female.^[14]

The Arçura changes its size. It usually appears as a man, but it can shrink to a blade of grass or grow to the height of a tall tree.^[15] It may take the shape of an old man with a white beard, a catfish, a bird or a goat.^[16] It has no shadow.^[9] In Chuvash reports it owns a garment. Whoever finds it and puts it on becomes invisible, and so may grow rich. The Arçura, however, sends a wind that carries the garment off.^[9]

The Tatar Şüräle carries more marks of an animal: a horn on the forehead, long fingers and a woolly body.^[17] The Tatar tales also make the Şüräle stupid and easy to deceive. They give it a name of mockery, the forest sheep.^[18]

Encounters in the forest

The Arçura belongs to dim hours. It is met in spring and autumn, at sunrise and sunset, when things lose their outline.^[2] The call is the danger. The forest spirits of the region speak human languages, ask for help and call the traveller by name. Whoever follows is led astray and tickled to death.^[19]^[15] It also rides the horses of the village at night. A horse that returns in the morning in a sweat has been ridden by the Arçura.^[20]

The Arçura does not act only as a danger. It keeps the cattle that graze at the edge of the forest from wandering too far in. It protects the animals and the birds of the forest and tells them when to migrate.^[21] Among the Cheremis, however, to see the forest people is a bad sign, since accident, sickness or death often follows.^[22]

Defences

The reports give a long list of defences, and most of them rest on one idea: the spirit is stupid and afraid of the things of the settled world. It fears dogs, whips, salt, fire and the sharp tools in a man’s hand. It does not approach an ash-wood fire or a cross of ash, and the Chuvash carry small crosses of rowan wood against it.^[23] It fears running water. A man who crosses a stream cannot be touched. The spirit often asks a traveller whether he walks toward the source or toward the mouth, since the answer tells it which way to follow.^[20] A man who has lost his way in the forest is told to change the right boot to the left foot and the left boot to the right. This is said to bring him home.^[24]

The Tatar tales add stories of tricks. A young man called Bıltır splits a log, drives a wedge into it and asks the Şüräle to hold the gap open. The wedge is knocked out, and the spirit’s fingers are caught. The man had given his name as Bıltır, which means “last year”. When the spirit cries for help to the other forest spirits, they tell it that no one cries out this year for what Last-year did.^[25] A horse with tar on its back catches the rider.^[20] A spirit that is wounded or killed, by contrast, can multiply, since a single drop of its blood on the ground is said to make thousands of new ones.^[26]

Origin of the spirit

The reports on the origin of the Arçura agree on one point: it was once a person. Among the Chuvash, those who died by murder, by an accident in the forest, by suicide, or without the prayers for the dead are said to turn into Arçuri.^[27]^[16] One report from the Chuvash source has men in an earlier time abandoning the one-eyed, the blind, the lame and the old in the forest. Their souls cry there as they cried at their death.^[28] The Tatar Şüräle is explained differently: it is not a forest witch but a person bewitched by the forest.^[29]

The same thought is found far beyond the Volga. In the Altaic and Siberian area, the masters of forests and water are said to have arisen from the spirits of those lost or drowned there. Buryat tales tell of a hunter who was lost in the forest, died of hunger and became its master.^[30]

Relatives in the region

The Arçura belongs to a group of forest spirits that run across the Volga–Ural country. The Cheremis forest spirit, called Kojla-ia, Targeldeš or Surali, changes its height, appears as a whirlwind or an animal and tickles its victims to death. The Cheremis also use the Tatar name Surali for another evil forest spirit, Ovda. The handbook says that Ovda descended from the Chuvash to the Volga Finns.^[31] The southern Votyaks have a spirit Surali too, naked and hairy with three long fingers, which the handbook takes as a loan from the Tatars. They also have the Half-man, Palesmurt, whom the handbook equates with the Chuvash Ar-sori.^[32] The Mordvins have the Forest mother Vir-ava.^[33] The north-western Bashkirs call the spirit Yarımtıq, and the Kazakhs, according to one report, call it Sorel.^[8]

The Turkish handbooks count the household spirit Biçura of the Tatars beside the Arçura as its counterpart: the one lives in the house, the other in the forest.^[34]

Forest spirits of the Siberian peoples

The forest masters of the Siberian peoples are of another kind. The Buryat forest master is tall and dark. He shouts and weeps in the forest and leads wanderers astray, and yet he gives game to the hunter. The Yakut Bajanai is a rich owner of the game, with the form of an animal. Hunters sacrifice to it. At the beginning of the autumn season, they give part of the first catch to the forest master, and an image of him is carved on a tree.^[35] The handbook states the contrast. Among the European Tatars and the Chuvash, the forest spirit has already received a defined appearance, and it is chiefly an evil being that is seldom worshipped. The forest spirits of the northern Siberian forests, by contrast, receive offerings.^[36]

Names and etymology

ArçuriChuvash
ArzyuriChuvash
Ar-soriChuvash
ArçurayTurkish
ŞüräleTatar

The name appears in many forms: Arçura, Arçuray, Arçuri, Arsuri, Arsüri, Arzurri, Arzyuri, Arçurı, Ar-duri, Ar-sori.^[37] The handbook of 1927 gives Ar zori and Ar-sori, translated Half-human.^[38] The Tatar and Bashkir forms are Şüräle and Yarımtıq. The Cheremis and Votyak form is Surali.^[8]^[39]

The analysis of the name is open. There are four explanations. The first derives the Tatar Şüräle from a Chuvash word for “sharp” and a word for “hand”, so that it means “pointed hand”.^[40] The second divides the Chuvash name into ar, man, and a word for half, and takes it as half-man. The neighbouring Votyak, Mordvin and Bashkir names (Palesmurt, Alid, Yarımtıq) also carry this meaning.^[41] The third takes ar as man or helper and çura as the name of a class of spirits. It relates the name to the Tatar household spirit Biçura and to a family of spirits called çor or çura in Turkic and Mongolian.^[42] The fourth derives the Tatar form from Arabic şerr, harm, and Turkic el, hand, so that Şüräle would mean the evil-handed one.^[8] The most recent study finds the first derivation without historical argument. It rejects the fourth because the Arabic word reached the Volga region only with Islam. It states that neither Arçura nor Şüräle has so far a linguistically founded etymology.^[10]

Reliability

The Arçura documents the belief of the Chuvash and the Volga Tatars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is a forest spirit made of the souls of the dead and of the fear of the forest. Russian and Finno-Ugric neighbours, Islam and Christianity shaped it in the same period.^[36]^[7] It stands in a regional series of forest spirits, and some of its traits are found further east, among the Mongols and in Siberia. No source takes the step from this series to the Göktürks. No inscription and no Chinese account of the khaganates names a forest spirit, and the powers the inscriptions invoke are Heaven, Umay and the sacred Earth-and-Water.^[43] What remains is a spirit of the Volga forests with a Turkic name, and a question that the sources of the khaganates do not answer.

References

^ Holmberg 1927, p. 467–468
^ a b Sulteev 2018, p. 46
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 182–183, 467–468
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 45–47
^ Kül Tegin inscription
^ Yavuz 2025, p. 173–174
^ a b Sulteev 2018, p. 46–47
^ a b c d Sulteev 2018, p. 48
^ a b c Sulteev 2018, p. 59
^ a b Sulteev 2018, p. 47–48
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 181–184, 467–468
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 67–68
^ a b Holmberg 1927, p. 468
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 58–59
^ a b Sulteev 2018, p. 57
^ a b Yavuz 2025, p. 174
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 58
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 62, 67
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 182–183, 468
^ a b c Sulteev 2018, p. 64
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 46, 61
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 183
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 63
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 182–183
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 64–65
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 65–66
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 54–55
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 55
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 55, 67
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 466
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 183–184
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 181–182
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 184
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 52
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 466–467
^ a b Holmberg 1927, p. 467
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 53
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 182, 468
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 181, 184
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 47
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 53, 58
^ Sulteev 2018, p. 50–54
^ Kül Tegin inscription; Tonyukuk inscription

Sources

Literature

Uno Holmberg (Harva), The Mythology of All Races, Volume IV: Finno-Ugric, Siberian (1927)
Uno Harva, Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker (1938)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Rustem Sulteev, Arçura/Şüräle: Mythical Spirits of the Volga-Ural Forests (2018)