Äyrämöiset Erotic

The Äyrämöiset are Finns whose name works like a return address. It points to Äyräpää, an old parish on the Karelian Isthmus. Their ancestors left it and moved south into Ingria, the low, wooded country at the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland where St. Petersburg now stands. The more numerous Savakot, whose forebears came from Savonia, were the other founding branch of the Ingrian Finns. For centuries a villager in Ingria knew exactly which branch they belonged to. The move followed the Treaty of Stolbovo in 1617, when Sweden took Ingria from Russia. Much of the Orthodox population left for Russia, and Lutheran settlers from Sweden's Finnish provinces moved onto the empty land. Peter the Great later won the territory back and built his new capital in the middle of it, but the Finnish villages stayed put: a Lutheran, Finnish-speaking countryside at the gates of the Russian imperial city. The Äyrämöiset differed from their Savakot neighbors in dialect, dress and habit. Their speech grew out of the southeastern Finnish dialects of the Isthmus, while the Savakot brought Savonian features with them. Both groups spoke Finnish, a Finnic language of the Uralic family, in a region they shared with speakers of the closely related Izhorian and Votic languages, and more and more with Russian speakers. The Äyrämöiset were known as the more conservative branch, keeping older costume and customs longer. Lutheran parish life set the rhythm of the year, from confirmation classes to church holidays.

The twentieth century nearly erased them as a separate community. Soviet collectivization in the early 1930s brought deportations of farming families. In the middle of the decade the border districts were cleared of Finns, and by the end of it the Finnish-language schools and Lutheran churches of Ingria had been shut. During the Second World War, Finns in the German-occupied part of Ingria were moved to Finland. Most were returned to the Soviet Union after 1944 and barred from going home, and families ended up scattered from Karelia and Estonia to Siberia and Central Asia. Today the line between Äyrämöiset and Savakot lives on mostly in family memory, folk costume collections and the work of Ingrian cultural societies. Many descendants grew up speaking Russian, and tens of thousands moved to Finland under the return migration that opened in 1990. The revived Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria has reopened congregations across the old territory.