The town of «Tepsey»

«Not in the sweet-and-sour subtopian summer camps but on the inclement heights will you gain the speed of thought and initiative ».

N.K. Roerich

Our camp named Tepsey, which we called jestingly «the town of Tepsey», became such an "inclement height" for us. It is situated at the mouth of the river Tuba inside the ring of the mountains Moiseiha, Sosniha and Suhaniha in the pinery with a wonderful microclimate.

Where do gray herons nestle? Do you think they do it anywhere on the swamp? No, they do it on the tops of the pines! Their colony augmented from 2 - 3 couples to 50 - 60 ones in the time of existence of our camp. And where do scoters live? In the same place, in this beautiful oasis of Khakassko-Minusinsky basin. There you can hear a song of oriole and watch fish-hawks hunt.

Our camp has lived in this favoured place for 17 years. There we first saw the petrogliphs, which made us «awake» and give thought to the necessity of preserving them.

There are bare rocks engraved with petrogliphs on the mountains, mentioned above. Those rocks are stone pages on which the history of dead and gone times is written down. Representations of various animals, signs, symbols and people are imprinted on those pages. They are combined fancifully forming the endless stone book telling about the outlook of those times, about the human and his place in the universe, about religious rites of our forefathers and animals of those times.

Unfortunately in our album-catalog we can only present some disjunct pages of these ancient messages to us, far daughter nations of the tribes and folks that used to people this region of the Middle Enisey. These messages do not have the exact addressee they are apostrophized to every human. This is a huge strata of ancient culture, which is still poorly learned and not read up to the end.

Petrogliphs like people do not live for ever: they also get ill and die.The pictures are dimming and fading under the rays of the Sun, the relief of the lines is being flattened and abraded by the river current, ice and sand. Stone flats are friablings and crumbling.

 The situation is even worse with the petrogliphs that are situated in the zone of Krasnoyarsk generating-unit headwaters. The water-level in the headwaters is continuously changing reaching the differential of 15 -17 meters. This is an affliction for the petrogliphs, the planes of which immerge intermittently and do not always emerge again transmitting irreparably into chipping.

During the whole twentieth century the petrogliphs were bemocked by modern savages who did not understand what they were doing. Autographs by new-sprung chroniclers like «Vasya was here» were painted or engraved with a stone over the petrogliphs.

How can we save the beauty of primigenial art? How can we get through the import of obsolescent compositions? The only acceptable way to do it is to save if not the petrogliphs themselves but their copies at least. But what is the way to gain the most informative and close to the original doublets of the petrogliphs? The answer to the question had been sought by the scientists for centuries. And it was found.

V.F. Kapelko, painter from Abakan, and B.N. Pyatkin, archeologist from Kemerovo, designed, approved and developed the method of contact-coping petrogliphs to vellum cloth by way of printmaking. They are the authors of that original technique which is remarkable for its simplicity and does not require spending much money. The copies not only contain authentic scientific information but also they are the great cultural values and perfect exhibits at museum expositions.

The pioneers of this method deceased but their adherents have remained. Our collection contains more than 200 prints copied from the petrogliphs of the rocks of the Middle Enisey. During the school expeditions A.L. Zaika, archeologist and academic of Krasnoyarsk state University, V.F. Kapelko's disciple, and B.A. Ampilogov, his co-worker, teacher of History from the small town of Podgorny, did printmaking. The students from the archeological camp Tepsey were their never-failing assistants. The work with the masterpieces of ancient art did not pass tracklessly for many of them. The impressions gained in adolescence and youth will remain in their memory for long and will be conveyed to their children and grandchildren.

E.S. Anninsky  From the book: "Cave Art of the Middle Yenisey"