Golden Eagle Festival

The Golden Eagle Festival gathers up to eighty berkutchi outside Ölgii on the first weekend of October, on open ground ringed by the snow-edged Altai. Over two days the hunters compete in the skills of their craft: riding out in full kit — embroidered coats, fox-fur hats, the heavy gloved arm — they release their eagles from a ridge or perch and are judged on how fast and surely the bird answers the call and stoops to the glove or to a dragged lure. There are events for speed, for accuracy, and for the eagle's response to its hunter's voice, alongside Kazakh horse games — kokpar, a tug-of-war over a goat carcass, tenge alu, snatching coins from the ground at a gallop — camel racing and archery. The eagles are female (larger and stronger than the males), taken as eaglets, trained patiently over years, hunted with through the winters for fur, and then, by custom, freed to breed in the wild. The festival was begun in the 1990s partly to sustain a tradition that had thinned under decades of state socialism, and it now anchors the cultural identity of the Mongolian Kazakhs and their winter livelihood. It draws hunters down from remote valleys and visitors from around the world, but the skills on show are the working skills of a hunting people, not a performance invented for an audience.