Konda is a river in Western Siberia, a tributary of the mighty Ob. Marshy forests surround Konda's shores. This is the Ugra land, a place of some heretofore-unsolved ancient mysteries.

The land has populated by various tribes since ancient times, as far back as the Mesolithic age.

They left behind many tombs, settlements, artifacts and unsolved mysteries. One of them is the legend of the Golden Woman (Zolotaya Baba in Russian; baba is an archaic term for a woman; used today mostly as a slang word, demeaning to women; it also means grandma).

Today the territory of the Ugra land is better known as the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug (District).

The language of Khanty and Mansi belongs to Finno-Ugric family that includes also the languages of Hungarians, Estonians, Saames, Udmurts, and Komis, etc.

In the old documents of the Russian Empire and scientific literature, Khanty people were called as "Ostyaki" and the Mansi people were called as Voguly or Vogulichi.

The term Ob-Ugric has been used in scientific writing to designate the Mansi and the Khanty as one entity. Yugra and Yugoria were Russian terms in the annals of the XI-XV centuries for the territory of the Arctic Urals, Western Siberia and the tribes who lived there.

The Khanty and the Mansi originated from related and yet different cultures.

Religion of the Ob-Ugric people was totemistic (each clan possessed a sacred totem), as well as animistic. Shamans (the tribal priests or "medicine men") supervised religious rites in these sacred places. Horses, reindeer, and other animals were sacrificed under a tree. Spirit effigies were smeared (in the area of their mouths) with blood; that is how they were "fed". Human sacrifices were performed in the ancient times as well.

The Ob-Ugric people were regarded as cannibals by West Europeans who themselves never came in contact with the Siberian tribes until late in the Middle Ages. The fantastic descriptions that appeared in Europe were of unfamiliar tribes, inhabiting the Eastern Ugra lands; they were mostly called the Samoyeds.

However, one early European traveler, a Franciscan Friar named Giovanni del Plano Carpine, who had traveled to the Central Asia and Mongolia in the years 1245-47, (as ? Pope Innocent IV's envoy to Mongolia and Tartary) provided interesting stories about the mysterious aspects of the Ob-Ugric people (he called them Samogeds).

One of Carpine's accounts described a mysterious phenomenon that brings to mind high-tech weapons of the future.

When local populace in an area (probably Ugra, but it is not certain), heard the Tatar (as the Mongols were known in Europe) army approaching, they started to destroy a mountain. The invaders were thwarted, and left for ten years or so. When the Tatars returned, they found ruins. Then they tried to approach the locals, with obvious goals in mind, but failed to do so. The Tatars encountered a cloud-like formation between themselves and the locals, and they were not able to penetrate it. Actually, the Tatars lost their eyesight upon approaching the mountain. The local populace assumed the Tatars were frightened, and initiated an attack. But when they reached the cloud, they, too, were not able to penetrate it to get through.

Russia's conquest and annexation of Western Siberia did not do much to improve the image of the Mansi and Khanty people, who were described as living in the land of darkness, idol worshippers who devour disgusting things and drink blood of animals.

They did make animal sacrifices, drank blood of the freshly killed animals, and ate their raw meat. But certainly they were no monsters, as described in the Alexander the Great accounts and tales of Arab and some European explorers; they neither possessed dog heads on their bodies (except as part of their traditional clothing) nor feet of an ox; nor were they genies.