The hypothesis of an Arctic location for the Aryan home was put forward in 1903 by B. G. Tilak. His work combined interesting observations and subtle reasoning with assumptions that proved erroneous. I associate the Arctic home of the Aryans not with the country near the North Pole postulated by Tilak, but with the coast of the Barents Sea, warmed by the waters of the Gulf Stream. In the Avesta, the Aryan home is a land where winter lasts ten months and summer only two. This is in harmony with the Avestan tradition of a catastrophic winter (analogous to the Flood), in which only a select few will survive. The Iranian tradition of a catastrophic winter finds a striking parallel in Old Norse literature, and climatological studies attest to severe abrupt cooling periods in Scandinavia between c. 1850 and 1450 BC. Near the end of this epoch, the vibrant Gressbakken culture in Arctic Fennoscandia ceased to exist, and the earliest known texts with the names of Indo-Iranian gods appeared in Mitanni, in Northern Mesopotamia. The memory of the ancestral homeland was preserved within the religious tradition. Other echoes are also found there. The central episode of the celebration of Nowruz — the festival of the «new day», etymologically, «new light» — is associated not with sunrise, but with midday. This is explained by the fact that the sun rises for the first time after the polar night precisely at midday. This conclusion is supported by a consideration of several Nowruz-related legends preserved by al-Biruni. A similar result is obtained when examining the myth of the struggle between Tištrya and Apaoša. One of them appears as a beautiful white horse, the other as a black and ugly one. In Iranian tradition, a white horse symbolizes day, and a black horse symbolizes night. But the great victory of a great person like Tištrya, which required many days, cannot be attributed to the daily cycle of day and night. Apaoša represents not the ordinary night, but the polar night, and Tištrya’s victory over him characteristically occurs at midday. The myth of Indra’s struggle with Vritra, who keeps the world waters captive, could not originally have referred to a deliverance from drought: the waters released by Indra rush like horses to the sea, not falling from the sky. Vritra makes the waters captive by turning them into ice. Translated into the terms of real life, the freezing of the normally unfrozen waters off the coast of the Barents Sea meant the inaccessibility of key food resources for the people dependent on them. One of the sources of inspiration for the mythical image of Vritra was the whale. The Gressbakken people hunted whales with the help of such a sophisticated weapon as a toggling harpoon, which, apparently, was the prototype of the vajra — the weapon of Indra.