Chiyalik

Chiyalik is a medieval culture of the Southern Urals of the tenth to fourteenth century, first identified at Chiyalek village on the Sun river. Its forest-steppe was the Magna Hungaria of medieval Latin writers, homeland of the Magyars.

Its carriers were semi-nomadic Ugric tribes, kin of Hungarians who stayed east when the Magyars moved to the Black Sea steppe and the Carpathian Basin. In the 1230s the Hungarian friar Julian reached Volga Bulgaria and found Eastern Hungarians near the Volga and Kama, years before the Mongol conquest.

They wintered in log houses and semi-dugouts, summered in yurts, made round-bottom pottery and fought as light cavalry, graves supplied with arrows, sabres and stirrups. From the middle of the fourteenth century Kipchak Turkic nomads pressed into their lands; the Chiyalik people gradually adopted Islam and were absorbed into the Bashkirs and Volga Tatars.