As the saying goes, "One side of the soil nourish one side of the people." Most of Russia is in the cold zone, and the people who live here are not ordinary people. The Nenets, for example, live in the Tyumen region of the Russian Federation. The Nenets lived by raising deer, eating their flesh and drinking their blood.

The Nenets are an indigenous group of people in northern Russia who have lived for thousands of years on the Yamal Peninsula (which means "edge of the world" in the Nenets language), located on the permafrost. Since ancient times, they have lived on deer farming, fishing, and hunting, and their way of life has hardly changed.

The Nenets, with a population of about 44,000, are the largest indigenous ethnic group in Russia, divided into tundra and Forest Nenets ethnic groups with their own dialects (tundra is the majority). Interestingly, in the Nenets language there are about 40 different words for snow.

This is a place with a harsh natural environment. For thousands of years, the Nenets have lived an almost primitive life. Most of the Nenets and Chinese people look similar, some historians speculate that their ancestors are the "mountains and seas" in the Dingyi people, and gradually formed a new ethnic group Nenets.

The Nenets have been associated with deer all their lives and call themselves "children of the deer". The Yamal Peninsula is home to thousands of reindeer herders who live a nomadic lifestyle with about 500,000 animals. Each year, they travel from north to south on what is almost the longest nomadic journey in the world, depending on where the reindeer's best feeding points are.


They migrate on the trail of the animal that sustens them all: the reindeer, which provides them with the basis of all their culture: clothing, housing, food, transport and identity - they are reindeer people.

Deer is the most important source of food for the Nenets, and to this day they continue to eat raw deer meat and drink deer blood. They usually slaughter the reindeer at night, drink the blood directly, and store the meat outdoors or after pickling. Cut into small pieces with a saw or axe and eat with salt.

Every year, the Nenets move reindeer from the Arctic ice fields to the Yamal Peninsula. During the migration, the Nenets face the cold wind, the snow, and the reindeer, and life is extremely difficult.

In the harsh living conditions of the extreme cold zone, eating raw meat and drinking deer blood can not only satisfy hunger and thirst, but also make up for the lack of vegetables and fruits and supplement the vitamins needed by the human body. That's why Nenets didn't get scurvy. In addition to venison, Nenets also eat beef, pork, freshwater fish, and other staples are rice and pasta.

Since ancient times, the Nenets have lived in tepees called "Chumudyad". For them, the "Chum" is not only a house, but also a miniature of the world - the hole at the top symbolizes the connection with the sun and moon, and the tree trunk represents the atmosphere surrounding the earth. In the center of the Cheom is a fireplace for cooking food, and on either side is a sleeping place.

The Nenets choose the place to set up their tents according to the season, focusing on wind protection in winter and ventilation in summer. The construction of the "Chum" requires more than 40 5-7 meter long spruce wood, covered with birch bark in summer and reindeer skin in winter, sometimes more than 70 pieces.

Everything here is pure: the snow, the air, the mind, the innocence, the openness, the goodness of humanity... People here can't live without the tundra, the endless snow, the open world. Although such a life may seem too hard to us, the Nenets have achieved one of the human goals in a unique way: to live in harmony with nature.