Karelians Erotic

Karelians are the people whose songs became Finland's national epic and whose faith kept them apart from Finns. They are Baltic Finns, native to Karelia, a country of lakes, granite and spruce that runs from the Karelian Isthmus north of St. Petersburg up to the White Sea, and that has been split between east and west since Sweden and Novgorod drew a line through it in 1323. The border moved often afterward, but the split stuck: Karelians on the Swedish side became Lutheran and, in time, Finnish. Those on the Novgorod side stayed Orthodox, and they are the people this entry describes. Most live today in the Republic of Karelia in northwestern Russia, where they are now a small minority. A separate pocket of Tver Karelians descends from families who fled south after the 1617 Treaty of Stolbovo handed their home parishes to Sweden.

Karelian is a Finnic language of the Uralic family, close enough to Finnish that speakers manage across the border, but distinct in its sounds and its heavy layer of Russian loans. It has three main forms: Karelian Proper, spoken from the White Sea down through the middle of the republic and in the Tver villages; Livvi, or Olonets Karelian, on the northeast shore of Lake Ladoga; and Ludic, toward Lake Onega, which some linguists count as a language of its own. The oldest known text in any Finnic tongue, a thirteenth-century birch-bark charm against lightning found in Novgorod, is usually read as early Karelian. The language is written in Latin script, which is why it remains the only titular language of a Russian republic with no official status there: federal law requires Cyrillic. Finland recognized it as a minority language in 2009, and small immersion nests and language camps run on both sides of the border.

Orthodoxy is the seam that holds Karelian identity together. Village chapels called tsasounas, saint's-day festivals called praasniekkas, and forest burial grounds with small wooden grave houses are Karelian in form even where the rite is Russian. Under this runs an older layer: laments sung by women at weddings and funerals, and the runo verse that Elias Lönnrot collected in White Sea villages like Vuokkiniemi from singers such as Arhippa Perttunen and shaped into the Kalevala. Finnish painters and composers went east in the 1890s chasing the same source, in what is now called Karelianism. The twentieth century was harsher. Stalin's purges of 1937 and 1938 gutted the Karelian and Finnish intelligentsia, and the Winter and Continuation Wars drove more than 400,000 Finnish Karelians west as evacuees. What survives best is domestic: the big log house with family and livestock under one roof, the sauna, and the rye-crusted kalitka, known abroad as the Karelian pasty.