Far to the east of the lands of the Rus’, some 3,800 years ago, a people who would come to be known as the Sintashka, built a circular city, at once fortress, home and, especially, sacred site, its concentric circles representing their understanding of the worlds, its location sat squarely (or, technically, circularly) atop a place of power. It is Arkaim.
(There is a nice video here, by the way.)
It was girdled by an outer defensive wall 5.5 metres high and 5 metres deep, some 160 metres in diameter and bounded by a two-metre-wide moat. Within it were two inner, concentric circular walls, each backed by buildings, and with four gates aligned with the cardinal points. For its time, it was built with meticulous care and attention to detail, not least the guttering along its wood-paved streets and the fine decoration of its dwellings. Arkaim was the pride of its 500-or-so warlike inhabitants, who would take to the field in its defence in small chariots wielding weapons of bronze and bone-tipped arrows. This was above all a bronze-forging town, though: every dwelling has its own smelting ovens, and the stream of copper from the surrounding mines was constant.
By the time of Mythic Russia, of course, it was just a ruin, whose remnants would only be discovered in 1987, after which it would become a shrine for everyone from Zoroastrians to modern Slavic Pagans. Or was it really just a ruin?
A Ruin of Power. Maybe it is an empry, charred and overgrown ruin now, but its construction and location means that it may still attract those hungry for ritual power. Maybe it is more than just a thin place between the worlds, maybe its three rings somehow represent and access the Otherworlds directly, and to pass from the outer one to the central ‘square’ is to travel seamlessly from the Ideal to the Representational and then Transcendent Worlds?
A Living City. For all that Arkaim is meant to be dead, when travellers arrive, they find it thriving. Too late do they discover that by crossing its moat — for water is the element of change — they have stepped back into the past, to the heyday of the Sintashka. Simply retracing their steps will not taken them home. What will?
A Curse. The Sintashka appear to have lived in Arkaim for just 200 years before they suddenly abandoned it. Quite why, is still unclear. Fresh water was still abundant, the fields still bore crops, there was still copper in the mines, and no fearsome enemy drove them away. Nonetheless, the Sintashka not only abandoned their city, they even tried to burn it down as they left. Then again, every generation would apparently burn the coty, and then rebuild it exactly as before. Maybe, in their hubris, their desire to build a city that would be a tunnel into the Otherworlds, they awakened something they should not? Something that finally forced them to flee, but still lurks, unsleeping and undead, hungry and haunted, trapped in Arkaim’s rings.
Mythic Russia 