Izhorians Erotic

The Izhorians are the people who gave Ingria its name and then very nearly disappeared from it. They are Finnic and Orthodox, and that second fact is the line that separates them from the Lutheran Ingrian Finns who share the same flat, forested country south of the Gulf of Finland. Their homeland runs between the Narva and the Neva rivers, in what is now Leningrad Oblast, and the villages that still call themselves Izhorian cluster on the Soikkola peninsula and the lower Luga, within sight of the cranes of the Ust-Luga port. On paper a few hundred people remain. Speakers of the language are fewer, mostly old, and mostly women.

Ingrian, the language, sits in the northern Finnic group beside Finnish and Karelian. The Izhorians appear to have split from the Karelians around the eleventh or twelfth century and drifted west into Novgorod's orbit, where they served as a border watch: the chronicle account of the Battle of the Neva in 1240 has an Izhorian elder, Pelgusius, spotting the Swedish fleet and carrying word to Alexander Nevsky. Four dialects are recorded. Soikkola and Lower Luga survive. Hevaha and Oredezh are gone. Lower Luga carries a heavy Votic layer, because Izhorians and Votes shared parishes, faith, and marriages for centuries, and most of the Votes eventually dissolved into them.

Outside Russia the Izhorians are remembered for song. The nineteenth-century collectors who fed the Kalevala found some of the densest rune-singing country anywhere in Ingria, and the greatest single singer they recorded, Larin Paraske, was an Izhorian woman from the north of the region who carried tens of thousands of lines of verse and lament in her head. Women kept the tradition, at weddings, at funerals, and at work. A married woman marked her status with the sappano, a long white cloth worn over the head and falling down the back, above a linen shirt and two hip cloths worn front and rear. The costume now lives only in festival ensembles.

The twentieth century did the damage. A Latin-script literary language and village schools were set up in the early 1930s and shut down within five years in the purges. The German occupation emptied the coast, moving the Finnic population to Finland in 1943. After the armistice Finland returned most of them to the Soviet Union, which scattered them across central Russia and barred them from home for years. Many who did come back registered as Russian. Today the Izhorians are on Russia's list of indigenous small-numbered peoples, and a museum in Vistino, language circles, and a small revival movement are working to keep the name attached to living people rather than to a river.