Kyrgyzstan is wrapped up in a dilemma about the country’s only mummy.
Scientists want the 1,500-year-old relic to be exhumed after it was removed from a museum and hastily reburied on the eve of a bitterly fought presidential election — in a move cheered by self-described psychics.
It was put back in the ground where it was discovered in 1956 after a sudden ruling by a state commission.
Culture Minister Tugelbai Kazakov said the mummy had been largely neglected by scientists and the country lacked the funding to keep it in good shape, Agence France-Presse reported.
Kazakov, who made the decisive call to bury the mummy, resigned on Saturday.
Some have said the timing of the reburial indicates the influence of superstitions on politics in the Muslim-majority Central Asian country.
The self-styled psychics, who had warned of a disaster if the mummy stayed vacuum-packed in a state museum, celebrated the decision to bury the mummy.
Self-described medium Zamira Muratbekova claimed she received a message from the spiritual world ordering authorities to rebury the mummy.
“She never died,” Muratbekova told AFP.
“When they first found her she was still alive. She was like a sleeping girl,” she said.
“By reburying her we saved ourselves from bloodletting at the election,” she said, adding that heeding scientists’ calls to dig up the body would be a terrible mistake.
“Before, the spirits spoke to us in terms of suggestions, but now they are giving us orders.”
Kadycha Tashbayeva, the country’s head archaeologist who sat on the commission, also said the decision may have been influenced by the advice of psychics.
“You would think these people are just cultists and marginals. But they talk, and then the state echoes their position,” Tashbayeva told AFP.
Outgoing President Almazbek Atambayev has condemned the reburial — blaming “pseudo-Muslims” who “believe every clairvoyant.”
But a lawmaker in Atambayev’s Social Democratic Party, who is a member of a parliamentary commission that seeks to determine the mummy’s fate, is against exhuming the body.
“Is she Kyrgyz? Is she Muslim? We don’t know anything of this mummy!” Ryskeldi Mombekov said of the relic, whose death almost certainly predates the birth of Islam.
“Re-excavating her again would amount to vandalism,” he said.
Local and international archaeologists have condemned the reburial as a backward step for science.
“Exhume the mummy and put it back in a sealed chamber in the museum immediately,” Victor Mair, a professor in the Chinese language and literature department at the University of Pennsylvania, told AFP.