Erzya Erotic

The Erzya are the larger of the two peoples that outsiders have long filed together as Mordvins, and the filing is exactly what they push back against. They call themselves erzyat, speak a language a Moksha neighbor follows only with effort, and wear a costume that is unmistakably their own. Their country is the forest-steppe between the Oka and the Volga: the eastern half of Mordovia, and Erzya villages scattered across the Nizhny Novgorod, Penza, Ulyanovsk, Samara and Orenburg regions, with pockets in Chuvashia, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. Most Erzya live outside the republic that carries their collective name, which is one reason the language is thinning. Russian belongs to the town, the school and the mixed marriage. Erzya is what the grandmother speaks in the village.

Erzya is Uralic, a distant cousin of Finnish and Estonian, with Moksha as its only close relative. The two have been written as separate literary languages since the 1920s, Erzya on the dialect of Kozlovka, and both carry the Mordvinic hallmark of a definite conjugation, where the verb marks not only who acts but what is acted on. Erzya is co-official in Mordovia, and Erzya Language Day on April 16 commemorates the linguist Anatoly Ryabov, shot in 1938.

Orthodoxy arrived by force. Muscovy took the Volga after Kazan fell in 1552, and the mass baptisms of the 1740s provoked the Teryushevo uprising near Nizhny Novgorod. The old faith never quite left. Village prayer meetings called ozks, offerings to Vir-ava of the forest and Ved-ava of the water, and cemetery meals for the dead ran alongside Orthodoxy for two centuries. Since 1999 the Rasken Ozks, an all-Erzya prayer held every three years at Chukaly in northern Mordovia, has given the revival a public ceremony and an elected elder, the Inyazor. Most Erzya remain Orthodox by baptism, and the revival is a serious minority.

History keeps a few Erzya names. Purgaz fought the princes of Vladimir in the 1220s while his Moksha rival Puresh sided with them. Alena of Arzamas, a former nun, led a rebel column in Stepan Razin's revolt and was burned at Temnikov in 1670. The sculptor Stepan Nefyodov took the ethnonym as his surname, Erzia, and carved Argentine hardwoods for two decades before his work came home to Saransk. The women's dress is what everyone else remembers: a white linen panar embroidered in red and black, a chest piece of coins and beads, and the pulay, a fringed, beaded ornament worn at the back of the hips from girlhood and heavy enough to be a burden. Tree beekeeping, a mead called pure and a beet kvass called poza complete the picture of a people who have kept their kitchen and their grammar longer than their gods.