Buddhist Icon from the Natural Landmark of Kyzyl-Tei
The purpose of this article is to introduce information on the Buddhist icon discovered by A.D. Grach in the south-eastern part of the rock mass of Kyzyl-Tei (Tuva) in 1953 into academic circulation. The relic itself is now kept in the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The field records of the archaeologist were lost, but we managed to reconstruct the history of the icon’s discovery from other sources - archival materials and museum documentation of the Kunstkamera. It is noted that the finding is related to one of the stories of the saving of the Buddhist relics by individual believers during the period when religion and religious acolytes were suffering reprisals in the region in the 1930s. A.D. Grach learned about the cache from a Tuvan informant and took the discovered icon to Leningrad (St. Petersburg). It has been found out that the Buddhist icon depicts the White Tara in the “vajra pose”. The icon was painted on a primed canvas. The image on the canvas is outlined with a red border. The canvas is placed in a wooden frame with glass front. On the inside of the frame, there are three lines of a prayer in Mongolian, which are transliterated and translated.