Under the name Otyuken1 a well-known area in Mongolia, which was the political and sacred center of several powerful nomadic empires. News about it has reached our days thanks to Turkic runic inscriptions, works of Chinese historiographers and some other sources. Despite the fact that Otyuken attracts the attention of scientists in one way or another, very little special research has been devoted to it, and there is still a lot of unclear ideas about it. Keywords: Otyuken, Orkhon, Khangai, Khorgo volcano, ancient Turks, Uyghurs, Mongols. In general terms, historians are more or less unanimous about the location of Otyuken. However, we will start our research with an idea that stands somewhat apart. In one of his relatively early works, the well-known ethnologist L. P. Potapov placed Otyuken in the north-eastern part of modern Tuva, where in the upper reaches of the Biy-Khem there is the mountain range of the same name Utygen, one of the peaks of which is almost devoid of vegetation, an inaccessible plateau with an area of approximately 15 x 30 km. The taiga is spread out all around. This mountain, according to L. P. Potapov, could be the ancestral mountain of the ancient Turkic Ashina clan, the description of which in Chinese annals largely coincides with the appearance of the Tuvan mountain. Having advanced into the Mongolian steppes, the khagans did not forget about their sacred peak [Potapov, 1957, pp. 111-117]. However, this assumption does not agree well with the ethnogenetic history of Ashin and does not meet with broad support in scientific circles, but it is by no means useless for penetrating the spiritual world of medieval nomads, and we will return to it later. The famous nomad scholar SI wrote about the Tuvans ' veneration of this mountain range in the upper reaches of the Azas and Khamsara Rivers, which includes several sacred mountains. Weinstein. T. N. Prudnikova's "geological remark" on the published materials of S. I. Vainshtein is interesting:"...T ... Read more