Iye is the Turkic word for an owner. In the literature on Turkic religion it names the owner-spirits. These are the beings who are held to possess a mountain, a river, a spring, a forest, a hearth, a house, the game of a district, a pass or a tool, and who have to be asked, thanked and kept content.[1] A Turkish dictionary of mythology defines the word as the general name for beings regarded as the protectors or owners of certain natural objects.[2]

The word is old. In the Kül Tegin inscription of 732 the compound idisiz, “without a master”, is said of land and water. The dictionary of Kashgari glosses idi as master and as a name of God.[3] The beings themselves are described later. Collectors in the Altai, in the Sayan mountains and in Siberia wrote down their names, offerings and prohibitions in the nineteenth century. Field workers in the Altai Republic recorded them again between 2009 and 2022.[4]

Between the Orkhon stones and the first collectors lie more than a thousand years. Whether the owners of the collectors are the owners of the khaganates is an open question. The evidence for it rests on the word and on a few Chinese notices of spirits. Beside Heaven, the inscriptions name Umay and the sacred Earth-and-Water (Iduk Yer-Sub) as powers. Neither is called an owner.[5] The owners belong to the layer of belief that animism describes as the base of shamanism and, through it, of Tengrism and of Turkic mythology.

THE WORD FOR THE OWNER IN THREE LAYERS ORKHON STONES 8th century UYGHUR, KARAKHANID 9th to 14th century FIELD REPORTS 19th to 21st century idimaster, owner, lord idisizwithout a master: land and watermust not be left so (Kül Tegin,said twice) idi + negativea second word, "not at all":yeg idi yok, said of Ötükenidi oksuz, in E2, is readboth ways idimaster; a name of God(Kashgari, 11th century) iyä, igälate spellings of idi in OldUyghur; igä beside idi in aninscription of the 14th century umay iyäsi"owner of the placenta", forBhūtamātā (Golden Light Sūtra) ege, igeChagatai, "owner", as listedin 1879 Altaianee, ie, iye, izi, eezi Tuvaneezi Yakutiççi Volga Tataröjä, iyä, iyäse Chuvashhoza Turkish literatureiye The form stands in the text or the dictionary itself.The form is reported by a study of the texts, not read here.Dotted arrows: the probable line of the word, not shown text by text. Schematic. Buryat edzen and Tungus amaka are Mongolic and Tungusic words for the same idea.
The word for the owner in three layers of the record, from the Orkhon stones to the forms of the field reports. Modern diagram: the arrows mark a probable line of development, and no text links the layers step by step.

The word

Old Turkic idi

Old Turkic idi means master, owner, lord. Kashgari, whose dictionary dates from the eleventh century, glosses it as “master”, gives the question “what does my master say?” as an example and adds that God is also called idi.[6] The noun stands twice in the Kül Tegin inscription, in one formula. Bilge Khan says that the land and water his forefathers had held should not be left idisiz, without a master, and sets the Az people in order for that reason. Of the country of the Kögmen he says the same. There he sets the Az and the Kırgız in order.[7] A land in this idiom is a holding that needs a holder. The khan counts it his task to supply one.[7]

A second idi is not the noun. Before a negative it is a particle meaning “by no means, not at all”, and the Kül Tegin inscription uses it of Ötüken: ötüken yışda yeg idi yok ermiş, “there was nowhere better than the Ötüken forest”.[7] The grammar of Old Turkic lists the particle with examples from the Orkhon stones, among them the Tonyukuk inscription, and from Uyghur texts.[8] The two words are told apart by position and sense. The editor of the Tonyukuk stone reads idi as the intensifier in the line kişi yeme idi yok ertäçi erti: neither tribe nor people nor man would have been left.[9] In the line on the Iron Gate he reads idi yok the same way. The Türk people had never reached the Iron Gate and the mountains called Tinsi Oglı. The line does not say that there had been no master there since the founders.[10] The phrase idi oksuz kök türk near the beginning of the Kül Tegin stone has been read both ways. The majority reading takes it as the intensifier, “wholly free”. The other takes idi as master, “the masterless”.[11] Thomsen gave two renderings of the phrase, “sovereign, master, lord” and “without sovereign and without organisation by arrows”.[12] A third nuance takes oqsuz to mean without the arrow that binds a ruler to his followers, and so without a lord and without subjects.[12]

The sacred Earth-and-Water of the same stone (Iduk Yer-Sub) is a different matter. What counts here is the grammar. Idi is a possession word. In the khan’s mouth a country without an idi is in an unnatural state.[7]

The later forms

In the later texts the word changes shape. Old Uyghur texts spell it iä or igä, once with a gap between the two vowels. The grammar of Old Turkic derives these from idi through iyä, by a late change of the intervocalic d to y. A fourteenth-century inscription has idi and igä side by side as a pair.[13] The spelling is one of the signs by which a text is dated late.[14]

In the Uyghur version of the Golden Light Sutra the compound umay iyäsi, with the name of Umay in it, stands for a Sanskrit name that the Chinese text renders 鬼子母: Bhūtamātā, the protector of the placenta, who venerates the Buddha.[15] The construction is the one of the later su iyesi, owner of the water. The thing owned comes first, then the word for its owner with the possessive suffix.[15] An Uyghur Buddhist text renders the Chinese guishen, ghosts and spirits, as üzüt yäklär. This shows a Chinese category of spirits fitted to Turkic words.[16]

A study of Turkic culture published in 1879 lists Uyghur iti and Chagatai ege or ige as “owner”, used in the first place as an invocation of God. It gives the Altaian form ee as the name of a subordinate spirit, as in the spirit of the mountain, of the forest and of the water.[17] In the Old Uyghur Buddhist texts the pair yer suv, “earth and water”, is a plain word for the world.[18] A comparative grammar of the Turkic languages is cited as giving two Old Turkic variants of the word for owner. The first is igä, “owner, spirit, deity”, with the example jer suv igäsi, “spirit of the universe”. The second is ijä, “owner, lord”, said of God.[19]

Forms in the field reports

The collectors of the nineteenth century wrote the word as they heard it. The Volga Tatars have ä, eä or öjä, the Yakuts icci, the Buryats edzen and the Tungus amaka. All of them mean lord, master of the house, owner.[1] A handbook of 1927 gives for the Tatar dialects ee or oja, for the Chuvash hoza, for the Yakut itshi and for the Buryat edzhi.[20] The Altaians themselves say ie, iye and izi, the Yakuts iççi.[21] The missionary Verbitskii wrote the Altaian form with a long vowel, ээзі. He built compounds on it: су-ээзі, ту-ээзі, таш-ээзі, агаш-ээзі, уй-ээзі, мал-ээзі, эрь-ээзі, the owners of water, mountain, stone, forest, house, cattle and flat land.[22] The Volga Tatars add the possessive suffix to the thing: Su iyäse, Urman iyäse, Cir iyäse.[23] In the Altai Republic the word is today ee, with the plural eeler. A saying holds that nothing exists without an owner, ee jok neme jok.[24]

The origin of the word is not settled. A Turkish thesis of 2025 reports three views. The first derives it from Persian or Indo-European. The second takes the variant in or en, “owner”, as a sign that it has been Turkic from the earliest period. The third derives iye from ene, “mother”, through a variant ine, “god, owner of the sky”, and links it to the figure of the Mythological Mother.[25] According to the thesis, the derivation from idi is the assumption of most researchers. It is the one that rests on texts, since the sound change it needs is described in the grammar of Old Turkic.[26] The same thesis repeats from an encyclopaedic dictionary a list of further forms, eka among the Uzbeks, eke among the Azerbaijanis, is and issi among the Kumyks.[2]

A second word, iduq

Another word sounds like idi and is often named beside it. Kashgari’s iduq means “blessed”. An animal set free because of a vow that lies on its owner is called so. One does not load its back, milk it or shear it.[27] The Altaian forms ızık and iyık and the Yakut ıtık keep the sense of an animal dedicated to the spirits and left alone.[28] A study of 1879 derives the Altaian, Minusinsk and Yakut forms from a stem meaning “to send”. The animal is the one sent out and set aside.[29] The two words are not shown to be related. They meet in the idea that a thing belongs to a power. The owner holds a place, and the dedicated animal is held back for one (Horse Sacrifice).

The oldest evidence

The oldest notice comes from the Chinese account of the Xiongnu. At the great assembly of the fifth month at Longcheng they sacrificed to their ancestors, to Heaven and Earth, and to ghosts and spirits, 鬼神.[30] The Chinese pair covers every kind of spirit and names none. The Hou Han Shu treats the Wuhuan together with the Xianbei. It says that they revered ghosts and spirits and sacrificed to Heaven and Earth, to sun, moon and stars, to mountains and rivers and to dead chiefs of renown. When the rite was over, they burned everything.[31]

For the Göktürks the Zhou Shu, finished in 636, reports a sacrifice at a river in the middle of the fifth month. It also reports a bare mountain four or five hundred li from the khan’s seat. The Göktürks called it 勃登凝黎, and the Chinese glossed the name as the spirit of the earth, 地神.[32] The Sui Shu says of them that they revered ghosts and spirits and trusted spirit-mediums.[33] The origin story of the Zhou Shu has an ancestor born of a wolf. He could call up wind and rain. He took two wives, said to be daughters of the summer spirit and the winter spirit.[32] These are spirits of the seasons, not owners of a place.

In 569 the envoys of Zemarchos saw men who called themselves exorcists drive evil spirits from the baggage with fire, bells and drums.[34] Theophylact, writing in the 620s, says that the Göktürks honour fire to an extraordinary degree, revere air and water and praise the earth.[35] A record of the Tang shows a place of sacrifice that the Göktürks used before a raid. In the third month of 708 Zhang Renyuan built three fortresses on the Yellow River. Before that, the text says, there had stood on the north bank the shrine of Fuyun, 拂雲祠. When the Göktürks were about to invade, they first went to it, poured libations and asked for good fortune. Then they pastured their horses, mustered their troops and waited for the ice to close.[36] The text names no spirit.

The Xin Tang Shu says of the Kirghiz that they sacrificed to spirits only for water and grass, kept no fixed time for the sacrifice and called their shamans 甘, gan.[37] The sentence can mean spirits of water and grass, or spirits that govern them. Either way, it ties the cult to the land that feeds the herds.[37]

The khaganates thus leave the word for an owner, the idea that land and water should have one, a number of Chinese terms for spirits and one named mountain-spirit. They leave no description of an owner of a given place.

The Altaian account

The fullest early account of owners in Turkic words is that of the Altaians of the Altai. The missionary Verbitskii, whose book appeared in 1893, writes that by the general belief of the Altaians two principles rule the world, the good Ülgen and the evil Erlik. He writes that each has a multitude of spirits under him, the pure (aru neme, also ak neme) and the impure (kara neme). Besides these the Altaians honour the sun and the moon and the mountains, lakes and rivers. They make their sacrifices to the spirits that own them, the eezi. The reason they give is a tradition. When Erlik and his servants were overthrown, each of them became the master of whatever he fell on. Each received the power and the right to do man every harm and even to kill him in his own domain.[38]

The same book tells the tradition at length. The hero Mangdy-shire pierced Erlik with iron and threw him down to earth. The servants of Erlik fell after him like hail and rain. One fell into water and became the water-owner, one onto a stone and became the stone-owner, one onto a mountain, one into the forest, one onto a house, one onto the cattle, one onto level ground, and others onto beasts, fish and birds and everything that lives. Whoever fell onto a thing became its master.[22] Erlik then asks Ülgen for a place of his own and is refused, down to the smallest plot, until he asks only for as much ground as his staff can reach. When the staff is driven in and drawn out, a boar comes up with a chain of vermin behind it.[22] Cast down to the underworld, Erlik says that the servants thrown down with him fell on forty-three places, on cliffs and mountains, waters, fire, people, beasts, cattle, forest, iron and field. He says that they remember the places. He will therefore send forty-three kinds of servants, the ötkers, spirits that bring misfortune. Each of them will govern men in its place as the master of the place and oppress them to death.[22]

The tradition makes the owners fallen servants of the lord of the underworld. A Turkish study of the Tatar owners reports the same Altaian story and adds that the Tatars did not keep it.[39] A Turkish thesis repeats it as the first account of how the owners came to be.[40] Other reports class the owners differently. For the Yakuts the owner-spirits belong neither to the good spirits of the sky nor to the evil spirits of the underworld, and are in many cases as harmful to men as the evil ones.[41] The Turkish literature divides them into good owners, ak iye, and evil owners, kara iye. It sees the evil ones as former protectors who turned into demons over time.[42] A study of the Tatar owners says that men believed the owners to be holy spirits and protectors of the places in which they live. Later, through the hands of malicious beings, they grew harmful, so that people began to fear them.[43]

The collector Radloff, who recorded the Altaian cosmos at the same period, calls the beings of the earth, on the pages that describe them, not owners but khans. He names them jer-su, “earth-water”. He applies the word to the whole body of seventeen khans who have their seats on the snow peaks at the sources of the rivers. The chief of them, Jo Kan, lives at the navel of the earth beside the highest of all trees. Talai Kan is the prince of the sea and the protector of the dead. Among the others are Mordo Kan or Abakan Kan, lord of the Abakan and giver of rain, Altai Kan at the sources of the Katun and Kyrgys Kan at the sources of the Yenisei.[44] Man is closest to these gods of jer-su, from whom he receives his benefits directly. He therefore dares to enter into relation with them and to offer sacrifice. To the gods of the highest heaven and to the spirits of darkness he needs the forefathers as intermediaries.[45] At every dangerous pass and every ford of a torrent the traveller thanks the deity of the place by laying a stone on the heap or tying a rag to a sacred tree.[46]

Owners by domain

The reports from the Altai, the Sayan mountains, the Lena and the Volga assign an owner to nearly every kind of place and thing. The Yakuts carry the idea furthest. For them everything has its icci: water, mountains, stones, forest, grasses, shrubs, meadows, vessels and weapons.[47] Things that give a sound or can move have an owner, and so does a knife that wounds easily.[47]

OWNERS BY DOMAIN, AND THEIR NAMES DOMAINALTAIANKARAGASS, YAKUTVOLGA TATAR Mountaintu eezidag äzi (Karagass)taw iyäse Stonetaš eezi–– Forestagaš eezitya icci (Yakut)urman iyäse Watersu eezisug äzi; ü icci (Yakut)su iyäse Fireot eezi, ot äziuot icci (Yakut)– Houseuy eezibalagan icci (yurt)öy iyäse, yort iyäse Cattle, stallmal eezi–ahır iyäse, abzar öjase Land, fielder eezi–cir iyäse, basu iyäse Road, pass–suol icci, ättuk icciyul iyäse A dash: no form given in the reports used. Spellings simplified; Altaian forms after the missionary Verbitskii.Schematic. Each form belongs to the people named; the lists are not complete for any of them.
The owners of nine kinds of place and thing and the names given to them by the Altaians, the Karagass and Yakuts, and the Volga Tatars. Modern table drawn from the reports of the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Mountain and forest

The owner of the forest is in mountain country also the owner of the mountain. The Karagass call him dag äzi. Every forest and every mountain has its own. The Karagass name in their prayers the local owners of the rivers Barbitai, Kän and Khongorok, who are believed to give game.[48] The Yakuts call the forest owner by flattering names, bajanai, “magnate”, or barallak. They hold that every forest and grove has one.[48] Among the Tungus he is a white-haired old man who lords it over the wild animals. His image is cut into a tree stripped of bark, with eyes, nose, mouth and beard.[49] His voice is heard more often than he is seen. He calls, weeps or breaks into laughter. He lures men into the forest until they lose their way.[50]

Hunters keep silent near a mountain because its owner does not bear noise. The Yakuts and the Lamuts pass a mountain without a sound. The Shors do not whistle, sing or quarrel on a hunt. The Altaians ask the women at home to avoid loud talk and laughter.[51] The Yakut owner of the forest likes noise. When a hunter finds an elk dead in a self-acting trap, he leaps and calls out that the owner of the black forest has given them game.[52] The collector who gathered these reports explains the silence by the hearing of the game and by the storms that mountains bring, and the laughter by joy. None of it tells the character of the owner.[53] An account published in 1895 shows a Yakut shaman playing the spirit of the chase. He addressed Baryllakh, “of my rich forest, my lord grandsire”, asked the young hunter his name and left the hut. He knocked and came in laughing and smirking as the spirit, and asked for his darling. He was handed the wooden image and a pillow made from a saddle, which he smelled and caressed. Both were set against the post in the place of honour, with a cup of pudding and butter thrown on the fire. In the morning they were carried into the woods.[54]

The Karagass honour the owner of the mountain three times a year. They count him the chief of their gods, because he brings the fur animals and tends the reindeer. In May they pour tea and fat into the fire for him. In June they make a second offering after the move to the summer camp. In autumn, when hunting begins, each man asks the owner of his own hunting ground for sable, squirrel, fat meat and black bears.[55] Where a Yakut hunter has come home without game, a rough wooden image is made, smeared with the blood of a slaughtered animal and set beside a table of meat, porridge and spirits. The man who conducts the rite must wear a woman’s cap and clothes and hold a bow trap in his hand.[56]

The owner of the forest looks after the forest animals and nothing else. He does not care whether men pick berries and cedar nuts or fell trees. He hides the cattle when the ceremonies of the hunt are not kept.[57] The Buryats say that the owner who calls in the forest and leads men astray is the restless ghost of a man lost there (Burial and the balbal). By contrast, the Tungus and the Yakuts keep the owner and the wandering dead apart.[57]

On the Volga the Tatar legends know the owners of mountains in animal form. On the Yegämeş mountain in Bashkiria, in a lake near the top, two mountain owners lived as a duck and a drake. A young man shot the duck. The drake killed himself on the stones, and a storm broke over the mountain. The lake vanished. Since then, the story ends, the mountain has been without its owner and sinks a little lower every day.[58] The Volga Tatars know the forest owner as the oldest and finest oak, who adds a ring to the trunk of every tree each year. The Siberian Tatars know him as a tall old man with white hair and a long staff who shows the lost the way.[59] In Tuva the mountains, trees and springs have spirit-masters whom the shamans call with the drum, with whistling and with throat-singing. In a healing a grey horse was sacrificed to the lord of the sky and a chestnut one to the spirit of the mountain.[60] The Altaian hymn to the mountain Abakan calls it the pure töz of the singer and names the owner of Abakan and of the Golden Lake.[61] For the sacred mountains of the khaganate sources see Sacred Mountains.

Water

The owner of the water is sug äzi among the Karagass and ü icci among the Yakuts, and every river and lake, the Yakuts say, has its own.[62] When the Karagass begin to fish at the weirs, all the fishermen tie coloured ribbons to a birch on the bank and light a fire beside it. They throw tea, milk, fat and butter into the fire, but no bread and no tobacco, which the owner does not want. No offering goes into the water itself. Nothing foul may be thrown into it. No water may be drawn in a milk vessel or a sooty pot.[63] The Buryat water-owner is held to be the ghost of a drowned man.[63] When the ice breaks in spring the Yakuts throw bread and salt into the water and fire their guns so that the old woman of the river does them no harm. At the start of the spring fishing they have sacrificed a heifer to the water-owner in hope of a catch.[64] In the autumn fishing the white shamans lit torches of wood from a tree struck by lightning, purged the water of uncleanness and asked the owner of the lake for a gift.[65] The handbooks of 1927 and 1938 both judge that parts of the water lore of the Volga Tatars, the Chuvash and, in places, the Yakuts, among it the spirits that walk on land between Christmas and Epiphany, came from the Russians.[66]

The Volga Tatars name three beings for the water. The Water Father is the chief and holds the waters of a district. He lives at the deepest corner of a river, lake or reed bed. He dislikes those who spit into the water or foul it, and he drowns the man who enters its deepest place. The old people therefore say of one who drowned that the Water Father took him. The Water Mother is his wife, a woman with long dark hair and large breasts who combs her hair with a golden comb on the landing stage. The Water Owner is their son, younger, quicker and harder to read.[67] Before entering an unknown water or drawing from a spring, women pluck a hair from the braid and men a hair from the beard, or tear a thread from a shirt or scarf, and let it float away as an offering. The Siberian Tatars bake a whole loaf and set it on the water to please the owner.[68] The owner of a spring is held to be a holy spirit, unlike the Water Father and the Water Mother. He is called the owner of love because he alone witnesses the word given between a girl who comes for water and the young man who follows her. A bride shown the spring after her wedding throws a silver coin into it and asks the owner’s mercy. Rags are tied to the spout.[69] For water in the khaganate sources see Water Cult.

Fire and hearth

Fire has an owner who is hard to tell from the fire itself. The Altai Tatars say ot äzi, “fire spirit”. The Yakuts say uot icci, whose breath is smoke, who eats raw wood and has a sooty bed, glowing coals for a pillow and fine ash for a blanket. The Buryats say gali edzen.[70] Among the Teleuts every hearth has its own fire-mother. The Altai Tatars speak in prayer of the thirty-headed fire-mother and the forty-headed girl-mother, which the collector took to mean the many flames.[71] In the Altaian sacrifice that the missionary Verbitskii describes, the kam, after other invocations, calls the owner of the fire, ot eezi, with the words otus baštu ot enem, kryk bašku kys enem: thirty-headed fire-mother, forty-headed girl-mother.[72] In another account the kam invokes the owner of the fire in the same way as the master of the drum. The owner stands for the power of the family of the man who owns the yurt.[73]

The hearth belongs to the family. A stranger cannot take part in the cult of the house fire, and among the Altai Tatars a daughter loses the right on her marriage into another clan.[74] The Yakuts give the fire the first bite, the first spoonful and the first sip at every meal. They make the same offering when they distil spirits and when they bring a killed forest animal into the house.[75] They hold that the fire understands human speech. They do not stir it with sharp tools, tread on it or put it out with water.[76] In the belief of the Yakuts the fire owner appears in dreams. In a house where he is fed he is stout and well. In a house where the offerings are neglected he is weak and thin.[77] A Yakut story tells of a hungry boy at the hearth who rewards the one guest that gave him a spoonful of porridge by warning him to leave. The house burns down behind the guest. A Buryat story tells of two fire-spirits, one of a poor house, well fed, and one of a rich and miserly house, thin and with one eye put out by a poker. The thin one threatens to burn its master’s house. The house burns down the same night.[78] In some Buryat districts wooden figures of a lord and a lady of the fire are kept in a box beside the hearth.[79]

The collector who gathered these reports notes that the fire-spirit is often female and that the Mongol word ut for fire is a Turkic loan. He takes the fire cult of the Buryats to be in large part a foreign inheritance, Indian in part, and holds it probable that the cult of the Mongols took from the Iranians by way of the Turkic peoples.[80] For fire in the khaganate sources see Fire Worship and Purification by Fire.

House, stall and mill

The Volga Tatars call the house owner öj öjase. They picture him as a long-haired being beside the stove or under the floor, and they give him porridge at least once a year, usually in autumn.[81] The Yakuts speak of the owner of the yurt, balagan iccitä, and of the owner of its four posts. In the past they smeared the posts with kumys and horse blood when they were raised.[82] The Volga Tatars know an owner of the stall, abzar öjase, close kin of the house owner. He braids the manes of the horses he loves and torments the ones he does not. He is to be given a black lamb.[81] The Soyots form a house god from cloth, leather or wood, which gets its share whenever a meal begins.[48] Some Yakuts told the collector that the owner of the house is the same as the Russian domovoj. The notion that he is the oldest dweller of the house is probably Russian.[82]

A Turkish study of the Tatar beliefs lists the owners of a whole household: the owner of the house, who is also called the owner of the foundation, Grandmother or Grandfather of the house; the owner of the stall; the owner of the bath; the owner of the mill; and the owners of the mosque and the graveyard.[83] The house owner is, among the Tatars, the basic spirit among the owners because he lives with men. In the cellar of a Kazan Tatar house he comes out at night. He spins wool, rocks a baby and knocks on the window when a fire or a thief is near. He may braid the hair of a sleeping man, which must not be cut off. The most offensive act is to pour slops or urinate in the cellar.[84] For the Kereshen Tatars the same being, called Kırsut, guards the person more than the house.[85] Among the Siberian Tatars and the Altaians the house owner is a very ugly and evil spirit, and whoever has him in the house tries to sell it soon.[85]

When a family moved, it held a farewell rite for the owner of the old house and invited him to the new one. A man who left his father’s house went at midnight with a piece of bread to the cellar of the parents’ house. He lit three candles, took a little earth and carried it to the foundation of his new home. Nobody was to meet him on the way.[86] The same custom is reported by the collector of the Volga peoples, with the added rule that the rite is repeated if the man meets a person or an animal on his way back.[81] The mill owner is a small old woman or man white with flour, who keeps evil spirits from the flour. The last man to grind leaves a handful of grain in the bin for her.[87] In the Tatar mosque the owner is a joker who hides shoes and opens doors and keeps the building from fire and evil spirits.[88] A mosque owner shows the old category taken into the later faith.

Land and field

In one Tatar belief the owner of the land is an old woman with grey hair who lives in the uruk tree. The trees turn green in summer with the breath of her young, called Eräkä-Ceräkä.[89] The owner of the field is called Owner of the Field and also Mother of the Rye. A woman of the Tatars remembers her own mother greeting the owner of the earth before the reaping with the words: we have come, if God wills, come you too and help. At the break for a meal she asked him to the table. She said that nothing is done without him.[90] When the harvest was in, the reapers struck the ground with the heel and asked for strength. Eggs were rolled and buried for the owner of the earth.[91] The Kereshen Tatars hold a rite called qorman at a river for the consent of the owner of the earth, with a white fish, a hen, a sheep or an ox. They are known to bury the head of the hen in the ground and to eat the rest.[92] The same study reports that Kashgari’s dictionary names a rite for the consent of the earth after the harvest, kefşan, and that Old Uyghur texts have phrases for the food that wins its consent.[93] A false oath was held a sin that the earth cannot bear. “May the earth swallow you” is among the worst curses.[94]

A second being, the owner of the open field, looks much like the owner of the earth. The Tatars picture him as half tree, half man, with long hands and long fingers, living in a lone tree in the middle of the field. He saves a sleeper in a hollow by calling him by name. He turns the wind from the grain when it burns. He draws rain clouds over his own field with his long hands, so that lightning comes when the owners of neighbouring fields quarrel.[95] In the first week of the great heat, which runs from 25 June to 5 August, the Tatars keep a Week of Protection. Nothing may be dug with a pointed tool, no tree felled and no animal slaughtered.[89] Among the Yakuts a childless woman begs the owner of the earth at the foot of a sacred tree, sitting on a grey-white horse hide. She believes the child to have been given by the god and by the spirits of earth and tree.[96] The Teleuts say that from ancient times they have honoured their land and water, jär-su, and their sky. The collector understands the word as a collective name for the local sanctuaries.[97] The chief of the jer-su khans of the Altaian account sits at the navel of the earth.[44]

Roads, passes and cairns

The Yakuts call the owner of a road suol icci and the owner of a pass ättuk icci. They make an offering whenever they cross a high watershed, an isthmus between two waters or a stretch of rapids. They hang it on the branches of the nearest trees: horsehair, scraps of clothing, strips of leather, feathers. Horsehair torn from the mane or tail is the most valued gift. A traveller takes it along even by boat or on reindeer.[98] Where a pass is dangerous, every passer-by adds a stone to the heap, the obo, for otherwise misfortune will meet him.[99] The Altaians, crossing a mountain or a torrent, thank the local spirit by laying a stone on such a heap or tying a ribbon to a holy tree.[100] The Beltirs lay down a stone or a branch or pour out vodka. The Mongols build their obo on roads so that each traveller may leave horsehair and gain the spirit beside the heap as a protector.[99] The missionary Verbitskii saw the Altaians pile stones on every high mountain and stick poles into them with ties of rags and horsehair, in gratitude to the mountain for letting them climb it.[38]

In the Altai Republic the obo stands today on mountain passes and roads where travellers stop, feed the spirits of the place and ask for a good journey. It marks the sacred seat of the owner.[101] The word tagyl, from a Mongolic word for sacrifice, now names the stone altars built for the collective prayers and understood as the dwelling place of the owner or owners of a district.[102] The same study reports that a runic inscription from Talas, read by Malov, is said to mention a cairn of this kind.[101] The Yakuts use a secret language on journeys into unknown country, giving implements and boats nicknames, and sometimes Russian names, so that the owners do not recognize the objects and cannot harm them.[103] The Volga Tatars hold that the road has an owner too. They teach that one should honour the road as one honours father and mother. An old man who rests on the way spits three times and says that his weight shall stay behind, a gift to the owner of the road. The study that reports it judges that the gift belongs rather to the owner of the earth.[88] The study of the Tatar owners also says that the road may mislead those who mean ill, so that they find themselves in a dark forest on a road they walk every day.[104]

Animals and the hunt

The game has owners too. Each species of animal, the handbook of 1927 says, has its master or khan, whom it is not always easy to tell from the animal itself. Sacrifices are made to them: the Tungus to the master of the mammoth, to find mammoth tusks, and to the master of the reindeer.[105] The owner of the game appears in the shape of the animal. A Yakut owner of the forest has been seen as a calf-sized beast with a dog’s muzzle, small moist eyes, long whiskers and cloven hoofs. The Buryats speak of a master-tree whose pith is blood-red, the tree being the body of the owner.[106] The bear is the animal the hunters fear most to offend. They call him Grandfather, Old Man, Master of the Forest. The Yakuts say that he hears everything said of him, even far away. A Yakut who meets a bear kneels and says: Master of the forest, think of your forests, go there, we do not touch you.[107]

Both handbooks report that the owners of forests and waters are often thought to have grown from the spirits of those lost or drowned there. Buryat tales say that a hunter lost in the forest, who died there of hunger, became the forest owner. The oldest dweller of a Yakut house becomes after death its owner.[108] The handbook of 1927 warns against concluding that the owners of natural things are in general the spirits of the dead.[109]

Some scholars trace the same belief back to the khaganates through the Göktürk-age texts. In the omen book called the Irk Bitig (Omens and Divination) an omen tells of the army of a khan on a hunt. A male roe deer enters the enclosure and is caught by hand, and the common soldiers rejoice.[110] A historian of the Turks and Mongols sees the khan’s part in the first catch of a drive as the sign of a belief that the owners of the game must not be angered, since the animals take revenge for their dead as men do.[111] Neither the inscriptions nor the omen book names an owner of game. This interpretation rests on the later Altaian reports.[110]

In the Altai Republic the belief is a living one. The wild animals and birds of a district are held to be the livestock, mal, of the local owner, and a hind that the hunter sees is the owner’s cow. An anthropological study calls this pastoral perspectivism.[112] The hunter receives his game as a gift of the owner when he sings the epic in throat-singing, plays an instrument, tells tales and offers drinks and food.[113] The owner counts the game a man takes in his life. A man who takes too much is held to become the prey of the owner. Three stories recorded in October 2021 and February 2022 tell of a young man who hunted too much, of a man who shot a pregnant doe in the closed season and for the first time kept all the meat, and of four cousins who killed musk deer for their glands and left the carcasses. In each the family takes the deaths as the owner’s punishment.[114] Meat is shared among kin as a rule.[115] In a Tuvan narrative the owner of the taiga, a grey-haired old woman, stops an old man from shooting a nursing female. She gives him her one-eyed bull instead, saying that a man with many children must spare every life.[116] In an Altaian tale a girl, the owner of a mountain, lives for half a month with a hunter as his wife. She teaches him the prayer to the mountains and the way to sprinkle them with the best food.[117]

Tools and crafts

The smiths of the Yakuts and Buryats have a trade held in high regard. Every tool of it that was not bought from the Russians has its owner. Anvil and hammer share one. Tongs and forge have each their own. The chief owner is in the bellows.[118] The Yakut smiths slaughter a brown cow for their patron, who lives in the underworld. They smear the tools with its blood, roast its heart and liver in the forge and hammer them on the anvil until nothing is left.[118] The Buryats of one district honour a smith god with nine sons and a daughter, and pour kumys into the glowing forge.[118] The collector asks whether this smiths’ cult may be of Iranian origin.[47] Things that can sound, a magic drum or a musical instrument, have an owner. The Yakuts speak of one even for the bundle of birch twigs with which they beat themselves in the bath.[20] Hereditary smiths are said to have tools with spirits that can give out sounds by themselves.[119] The Buryats speak of an owner of the stringed instrument who teaches men to play, if a pupil sits through a moonless night at a three-way crossing on a horse skull with silken reins and keeps playing while the skull tries to throw him.[120]

Gifts and rules

The reports agree in what they say the owners want. Food and drink go first: tea, milk, fat and butter thrown on the fire, porridge, cheese, meat, and kumys or spirits.[121] Blood sacrifice stands beside them: a black lamb in the stall, a heifer for the water owner, a brown cow at the forge.[122] The Altaian rite of the present sets out the boiled meat of a white sheep, roasted barley meal, cakes, milk, cheese and clarified butter. The writer sees in the weight of milk the mark of the move from shamanism with its blood sacrifices to Burkhanism, the Altaian form of Buddhism.[123] The owners are given the first portion. The Yakuts hold that the fire shall have the first bite, and the Altaian hunters give the owners the first of food and tea.[124]

What stands for the animal is often hair. Horsehair torn from the mane or tail is the most valued gift at the pass. The ribbons of the Altaians are called after the mane, and the hair is held to stand for the soul of the animal that is sacrificed.[125] The ribbons, jalama, are tied in pairs, each worshipper an even number, on two birches with a cord between them. A ribbon should be no wider than a finger and torn by hand, since a wider one displeases the owner of the Altai.[126] The Altaian gifts to the owners are called üle, “share”, because man shares his goods with them.[123]

Cleanliness is the second rule: nothing foul into the water, no knife, spit or water on the fire, no noise on the mountain.[127] The third is correct speech. A hunter introduces himself to the owner by his clan and by the names of grandfather and father. He thus reminds the owner of the share that is due to him.[128] The peoples of Siberia name the bear by secret names, and the Yakuts use a secret language for the objects of a journey.[129] The seasons follow the year (Sacrifice and the year). The Karagass honour the owner of the mountain three times a year. The Altaians of the present sacrifice twice, in late May and in the middle of autumn. In autumn they thank the spirits and take leave of them until spring. In winter they make no offering.[130]

Iye and the kam

The householder, the hunter and the traveller approach the owners themselves. The shaman is not needed for it. In the Altaian account man dares to address the gods of jer-su himself and needs the forefathers only for the highest heaven and for the spirits of darkness.[45] Harm that comes from malicious spirits is met with shouting, drumming and shooting, not with sacrifice.[81] Where the rite is the shaman’s, the owners have a place in it. In the great sacrifice of the Altaians the kam calls the owner of the fire. The account of the same rite gives him the words of the invocation.[131] The Yakut shaman of the hunting rite plays the owner of the forest himself.[54] In the Altaian hymns the kam addresses the Altai itself and not the owner of the Altai.[132]

The Tuvan classification of shamans by their origin names five kinds: those who descend from shaman ancestors, those whose origin is in the spirits of earth and water, those from heaven, and those from two kinds of evil spirit. The second kind is held to keep the memory of the respect for nature and of the animistic beliefs of the old Turkic peoples.[133] Among the Altaians each clan has, besides the many shared spirits, its own clan spirit, and every family a guardian of the yurt, the baštut khan.[38] The Chinese records of the khaganates put spirits beside spirit-mediums. The Sui Shu says that the Göktürks revered ghosts and spirits and trusted mediums. The Xin Tang Shu says that the Kirghiz sacrificed to the spirits of water and grass and called their mediums gan.[134] On the shaman see Kam.

The Altai today

The cult of the owners lives on in the Altai. Field workers recorded between 2009 and 2015 a rite for the owner-spirits of a district, performed twice a year on a hillside before a stone altar, with two birches and a cord of ribbons. Those who take part have kept to the prohibitions, wear traditional clothes and bring the best of their food.[135] The rite is addressed to the white sky, Ak Ayas, which is the old Tengri, to the high god Üç Kurbustan, and to the owner of the Altai, Altay eezi, here called White Burkan. A prayer recorded at Beshpeltir on 31 May 2015 begins: White sky with moon and sun, owner of the Altai, White Burkan, sun that rises in the morning, moon that rises in the evening.[136] The sacred family mountains of the clans are called ыйык, ıyık, from a word for “sacred” that also means an animal dedicated for sacrifice.[136] A Tuvan and Altaian tradition speaks of an owner of the whole range, Altay eezi in Altaian and Aldai eezi in Tuvan. Each river, mountain and lake has its own owner. By the popular view, however, the whole territory of the Altai mountains belongs to the owner of the Altai. Southern Altaians named him Ezen Eelu or Ülgen.[137] He appears as an old man or woman in white Altaian dress, or as a large white stag, and as a girl or a man to the Tuvans of Xinjiang, sometimes as an unusual animal such as a red-hoofed deer.[137]

The Altaian and Tuvan prayers praise the owner as giver of life and of the souls of children and cattle, of long life and health, and as the keeper of the herds and the people against harm.[138] Many Altaians now use the name Altay Kudai, “Altai god”, for him, and Altay Kudai Ak Burkan as a blend; the older name Altaydıŋ eezi is being replaced.[139] The rite has taken in elements of Lamaism. Borrowed Buddhist objects and terms stand in it today.[140]

One study of the Altaian record argues that the owners of single mountains merged in time into the image of an earthly deity. This deity lived beside the old Yer-su, “earth-water”, of the Old Turkic period, and it gradually replaced it.[141] Some Altaians said that the people of two districts had worshipped a god Jer-su. With the Burkhanists the name became Jaan Kaan Altai, “great khan Altai”.[142]

Later Turkic traditions

The Volga Tatars kept the owners through a thousand years of Islam. A Turkish study says that Islam touched the gods and left the mythological beings as they were, adding only a few new types, the şeytan, the cin and the peri.[143] Of the owners the house owner, the stall owner and the owner of the bath are still believed in. The owners of the field and the mountain are fading.[144] The study says that among the Central Asian Turks owners are rare, and that holy ancestors, ata, baba and pir, and the cin take their place.[89] Among the Kirghiz and Kazakhs the holy trees of the shamanist period and the graves of ancestors and great shamans have become tombs of saints. The women who sacrifice a sheep at a lone tree, a well or a spring do what the Yakut shamanists do at their holy tree. They differ from them only in the name.[145]

For Anatolia the Tatar study names two figures of the Turks of Turkey. The first is the owner of the house, who is known as the house guardian, ev bekçisi, and appears as a snake or as a dark creature with fiery eyes. The second is the owner of the field, who is called the field guardian, tarla bekçisi.[146] A study of the fire and hearth cult in Anatolia argues that the cult came from Central Asia with the migrations. It also finds that the Mongol conquest and the Ilkhanid state, with the religious groups they supported, had the largest share in carrying and spreading it.[147] For the Anatolian owners there are the Tatar study and a single article on the hearth, and both are open to more evidence.

Interpretations of the cult

The concept has a history in the study of the Turkic peoples. A Finnish scholar of the Altaic peoples called the souls hidden in natural things masters of them. The handbook of 1927 takes up the phrase: they stand “in respect of all visible nature, in a position of power resembling that of a master towards his property”.[148] A study of 1879 lists the forms of the word. The collectors of the 1890s give the rites. A study of 1914 puts the Yakut ichchi beside the sky spirits and the evil spirits. The handbook of 1927 gives the masters of nature a chapter. A German monograph of 1938 sets them out by domain.[149] A Turkish history of shamanism takes them over as part of the cult of yer-su.[21] A monograph of 2001 on the Altaian hunt, built on fieldwork since the 1920s, argues that the hunting practice contains facts that go back to the Old Turkic period. An anthropological study of 2007 treats the owners as the owners of the game, in a relation of property and reciprocity.[150]

Scholars explain the owners in several ways. One explanation is that the owners are the souls of things. The earth, a tree or a dwelling has a kut or sür like a man (Soul Words). When it leaves, the field loses its fertility and the house its comfort. The owner is that soul with a person’s shape.[148] A second is that the owners are the dead, the lost man in the forest and the oldest dweller of the house. The handbook of 1927 declines to make this a rule, and the monograph of 1938 notes that some peoples keep the owner and the wandering dead apart.[108] A third is that much of the lore of the Volga Tatars and Yakuts is Russian, with the house owner, the water spirit and the stall owner as the clearest cases.[151] A fourth ranks the owners below Tengri, as helpers who protect and punish.[152] A fifth is that the owners of the Altaian reports preserve the religion of the Old Turkic period, as the ethnographer of the Altaian hunt argues from the hunting practice.[113] A sixth is that respect for the ancestors turned over time into the idea of the protecting spirit, and that the owners arose from it (Ancestor Cult).[25]

The Turkish literature holds that the owners form no rank and that each is limited to its district. The Altaian reports, by contrast, have a ranking, with the owner of the Altai above the owners of mountains.[153] The meaning has also moved. In the oldest texts and in the Altaian speech idi and ee mean owner. In the Turkish literature iye means owner and protecting spirit, and the owners are described as hami ruh, guardian spirits.[154] The weight has moved from the right of the owner to his protection. The Altaian saying that nothing exists without an owner and the stories of punishment keep the older sense of property and the right it gives.[155] A Turkish thesis of 2025 sets the iye beside the Japanese kami and finds both to be sacred nature spirits that guard what they inhabit, an example of the comparative frame.[156]

Iye cult is a modern name. No source of the khaganates uses it, and the collectors did not use one word for the whole class: each people had its own. One account notes that the founders of the great Turkic empires, the Huns and the Göktürks, have no giants in their stories, and that the Oghuz epic has none either. It regards the figures of the folk tales as newcomers from outside.[157]

Names

  • idiOld TurkicKül Tegin inscription
  • iyä, igäOld Uyghur
  • ee, eeziAltaian
  • iççiYakut
  • öjä, iyäTatar
  • edzenMongolian
  • iyeTurkish

Idi is the Old Turkic word, with the sense of master in the Kül Tegin inscription and with the sense of “not at all” before a negative.[7] Iyä and igä are its late spellings.[158] Ee, eezi, iye and izi are the Altaian forms, iççi the Yakut, öjä and iyä the Tatar, and the plural eeler the Altaian plural.[159] Edzen and amaka are the Buryat and Tungus words and are not Turkic.[1] Iduq is a second word, “blessed” and “set free”, and is not shown to be the same.[27] The Chinese guishen, 鬼神, is the category of the Chinese writers.[160] Iye cult, cult of the owners and masters of nature are words of the literature and not of any source.[161]

Reliability

The khaganates leave the word and one phrase. Idisiz, said of land and water, shows an owner as a need of a country, and the khan as the man who fills it.[7] The Chinese notices of spirits, of a bare mountain, of a shrine before a raid and of the spirits of the Kirghiz give the setting. They describe no owner. The Old Uyghur texts show the word in its late form and in a Buddhist use, umay iyäsi.[15]

The owners of the ethnographers are known in detail. They have names, forms, domains, gifts and prohibitions, and in the Altai a living cult. This record describes the Altaians, Yakuts, Tatars and their neighbours of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is one of the fullest records of Turkic religion.[162] How far it can be projected back is the question of the historiography of Tengrism. The word idi gives a probable bridge. The Altaian saying that nothing exists without an owner matches the khan’s claim that land without an owner is in an unnatural state. What the bridge carries is the word, the idea of ownership and the habit of addressing a place as a person. The names of the owners, their domains and their rites belong, on the evidence, to the periods in which they were written down.

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  154. ^ Özcan 2025, p. 37–38
  155. ^ Tyukhteneva 2022, p. 273–276
  156. ^ Özcan 2025, p. 1–2,37–38
  157. ^ Ögel 1995, p. 561
  158. ^ Erdal 2004, p. 122
  159. ^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 41; 386–387; 273; Harva 1938, p. 41; 386–387; 273; Tyukhteneva 2022, p. 41; 386–387; 273
  160. ^ Shiji, juan 110
  161. ^ Harva 1938, p. 386
  162. ^ Harva 1938; Verbitskii 1893; Ojnotkinova 2016; Tyukhteneva 2022

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Related

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Iye.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/religions/iye/

Last revised: 8 November 2026