‘Kyndykan’ is the name given to a 91.86-carat yellow-brown diamond discovered last year in honour of an indigenous folklore heroine who escaped an epidemic that wiped out a nomadic village 200 years ago.
The diamond was discovered in one of the alluvial diamond resources of Diamond of Anabar,a subsidiary of Russian state-owned mining corporation Alrosa, in Yakutia, Russia’s Arctic area, one of the coldest places in the northern hemisphere.
Alrosa’s deputy CEO, Evgeny Agureev, says “We have a long practise of naming newly discovered diamonds. On this time, we chose to name a diamond mined in the Far North after the little Even heroine Kyndykan and a fantastic project that is working to guarantee that the voices of indigenous peoples in the North are heard.”
Kyndykan was a young Even girl who was miraculously rescued by hunters near the Verkhoyansk Mountains, one of Yakutia’s indigenous tribes. She was the sole survivor of a smallpox outbreak that devastated an ancestral community.
The Kyndykan diamond represented “resilience and strength of character, rich history, and age-old customs,” according to Agureev, with the common purpose of “preserving all of this for future generations and telling this tale to the world.”
In September 2021, the corporation stated its support for indigenous peoples’ cultural and historical treasures in Yakutia’s remote terrain, particularly the Kyndykan project.Outside of Australia and Africa, the Anabar river basin has the highest concentration of diamond alluvial deposits, including a 236-carat bright yellow-brown diamond discovered in 2007, which is regarded Russia’s largest natural colour diamond.
Alrosa is one of the world’s largest international mining businesses, with a share of 95 percent of all diamonds produced in Russia and 27 percent of all diamonds extracted worldwide.
