Balballa

myminifactory

From the late 19th century, four powerful stone figures stood tall in the University Grove - ancient sculptures brought from Altai and Kazakhstan. These statues had been there since they were discovered by professors Vasily Florinsky and Vasily Sapozhnikov at the end of the 19th century. Each sculpture was over a thousand years old, dating back to the 6th century when the First Turkic Kaganate empire ruled from Korea in the east to the Crimea in the west. These stone idols represented people who lived long ago: military nobility, rulers, and wealthy individuals who were worshipped by their descendants. The term "stone woman" was derived from the Turkic word "balbal", which means sculpture. Before Tomsk, these stone sculptures served as tombstones. In the University Grove until the 1980s, there were four statues: three brought from Kazakhstan and one from Altai. The largest of them, from Almaty, depicted a man sitting in a lotus position with a bird in his hands. However, during repair work in 1986, the tractor broke this statue in half. Employees of the Artefact laboratory of interdisciplinary archaeological research won the Third Grant Competition of the University's initiative projects and plan to repair the broken statue and return it to its former place in the grove. Nearby archaeologists will put up a sign explaining the idols. "This is a unique case when such statues are in the courtyard of a university," says Evgeny Vodyasov, an employee of the Artifact laboratory. "In Russia, this is nowhere else. We want to install a stone tablet next to it, with which we will explain what idols are, when they appeared here, and what they depict." Many people simply do not know that these statues are more than a thousand years old, so they don't treat them as carefully as they deserve. The height of the "stone woman" being reconstructed by archaeologists is about 160 centimeters. The idol weighs over 500 kilograms. Work historians plan to spend about a month. By late May or early June, a fourth idol will appear in University Grove, located in the northern part of the grove, near where two more statues already stand. This object was scanned by The Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Research in Archaeology "Artefact" of the National Research Tomsk State University.