Tengri

Tengri is the supreme sky-god of the ancient Turkic and Mongol peoples, the deified 'Eternal Blue Sky' who dispenses sovereignty, victory and fate. Among the Nogai, a Kipchak people Islamized from the fourteenth century onward, his name survives as a word for God and in a dense layer of oaths, curses and blessings that preserve the older Tengrist worldview beneath a Muslim surface. He is imagined less as an anthropomorphic figure than as the boundless heaven itself, paired in belief with the earth-and-water powers below.

Domains

• sky
• fate

Powers

• governs the eternal sky
• decrees human fate

Epithets

• Кӧк Тәңир

Sources

• S. G. Klyashtornyy, 'Tengri', in Mify narodov mira, vol. 2 (Moscow: Sovetskaya entsiklopediya, 1982)
• N. A. Baskakov (ed.), Nogaysko-russkiy slovar' (Moscow, 1963), s.v. Тәңир