Two-meter circle depicting game animals was installed near the parking lot at the town TsUM (Central Universal Department Store), not in the children’s playground, as it had been planned before, according to press agency KomiOnline.

The figure, created at the plant in Nizhny Tagil, was installed on December 25. Copy of the calendar is 17 times bigger than the original and weighs 300 kg.

The sculpture represents a circle depicting a bear, a deer, a weasel, a glutton, an elk, an otter, a fox, a squirrel, a marten. Later it is expected to install an information stand with the history of the found, names of the animals and explanations of the hunting cycles.

According to the ethnographists’ data, the ancient hunting calendar is a sun calendar, where the time is counted from the day of vernal equinox. It also reminded to the hunters, which animals could not be hunted during a certain period of time. In the calendar nine game animals were correspondent to nine months of the ancient Komi. Days on the calendar are counted counterclockwise; account is conducted on the outer side of the circle.

*** Bronze calendar of Vanvizdinskaya archaeological culture of the end of the first- beginning of the second millennium A. D. was found in 1975 on the bank of the Vychegda river near the village of Storozhevsk by the local, and was given to Klim Korolev, the supervisor of the archaeological expedition, working in that district.

In 1987 Nikolai Konakov, ethnographist, proposed his variant of deciphering of the symbols of this found as an ancient hunting calendar (which nowadays is considered conventional).

According to theN. Konakovdeciphering, in the sun calendar of the ancient Komi the year started on the day of vernal equinox (it is marked with a special sign on the outer border of the cycle calendar). Account was conducted counterclockwise with the help of diagonal cuts – “weeks”, each of them was correspondent to time period of four days.

In the basis of the year division to the periods (“months”) there lay annual biological rhythms of the game animals: bear period: 22.03 — 27.04, deer period — 28.04 — 02.06, weasel period — 03.06 — 04.07, glutton period — 05.07 — 09.08, elk period — 10.08 — 04.10, otter period — 05.10 — 19.12, fox period — 20.12 — 24.01, squirrel period — 25.01 — 21.02, marten period — 22.02 — 21.03.