The Legend of Shanagata

There is a legend associated with the history of the origin of the name of the Shanagata River.

Once upon a time, on a frosty winter day, a peasant was carrying hay on a sleigh. When crossing the wide Kyzylsu River, the horse began to slip, stumble and could not pull the load. No matter how hard the peasant fought, the horse could not take the sleigh with hay out of the river bed. The exhausted peasant unharnesses his horse, sits on it without a saddle and rides off to the nearest village in the hope of finding help there. When the peasant returns from there with another horse, he sees that the sleigh is deeply frozen in the ice. They say that the peasant was able to free these sleds only in the spring, when the ice melted.

Since then, this river began to be called “Shana Katkan” – literally “frozen sleighs”, and over the years, according to the law of synharmonism, the name was transformed into “Shanagaty”. Over time, the village near this river began to be called that way.