© Photo By: Pavel Ageychenko

Within many centuries, peoples populated the territory of Pribaikalia, called the lake differently. The Chinese people named it “Khan’-Khay” or “Bey-Khay” (“Northern Sea”) in their ancient scripts. The ancient Turki gave it a name of “Baigaal Dalay” (“Big reservoir”), and as for the Buryats, they named the Baikal – “Baigal-Nuur” that is translated as “Lake Baikal”. It means that the Baikal had already had its name when the Buryats got to know about it. Anyway, the origin of the word “Baikal” keeps on being unrevealed up to our date.

There exist such suppositions as that the name was given to the Lake by the Kurykans – a tribe speaking the Turkic language, and inhabited Pribaikalia in the 6-10 centuries. They possessed a runic writing language of the Turki, and, probably, called it with the Turkic word “Bay-Kul;” that means “rich lake”.

The first Russian discoverers of Siberia took the Evenks’ name “Lamu” to define a new- opened lake. Later, the Cossack detachments headed by Kurbat Ivanov, reached the lake’s shore, and they started calling it as “Baigaal” that belonged to the Buryat language. Eventually, to facilitate the pronunciation of that word, the Russians changed the proper of the Buryats the letter “g” into “k” that eas more characteristic for the Russian language. In such a way appeared the word of “Baikal”.