Alexandr participated in the construction of a small prayer house in Chapchachi not far from the village of Chilgir. This place is where Kogshn bagshi, a Buddhist monk, was buried. According to a legend, one day a fire started to come from beneath the ground where the monk had been buried. The local people decided to exhume the body and place it in a wooden sarcophagus. Amazingly, the body never decayed. In the 1930s NKVD operatives and Soviet doctors came to his sarcophagus to examine the body. When one of the doctors pricked the hand of the lama with a knife, it bled, although Kogshn bagshi had been dead for more than 70 years. When the body was transported on a cart to Elista, its hand was still bleeding. Later people tried to find the whereabouts of the body, but to no avail. Alexandr says that Chapchachi is considered to be a sacred place. It has a positive energy and whoever sleeps there has all their problems sorted out the next morning. This place is now fenced. Before, shepherds complained that their cattle that stopped there to rest would die. Old people also say that this place should be kept clean and hence they fenced it later.