“Human life around Lake Baikal dates back to the Palaeolithic period. Many cultures existed and perished around its coasts. The cold water of the lake and its steep shores have absorbed all the vast artefacts produced by humans to sustain their life or to worship the divine.
Human inadequacy to leave an indelible mark on the harsh local landscape is particularly felt when one encounters the most recent man-made structures around the lake. Unlike the many offerings to various water and earth Gods that have been made around the Baikal by the indigenous people throughout the millennia, this last wave of artefacts was built without any regard for the ‘super-natural’, only with the human in mind.
However, few of these structures seem to bear any human-directed function any longer. Even the ones that do are hardly distinguishable from the surrounding environment rendering the difference between artificial and natural hardly distinct. These most recent structures appear to be unintentional offerings to the same forces that were worshiped thousands of years ago. “
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