Merya Erotic

The Merya were a Finno-Ugric people who lived between the upper Volga and the Klyazma, in what is now the Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Ivanovo and Vladimir regions of Russia, from at least the sixth century until they were absorbed into the East Slavic population of the Rus' principalities, a process mostly complete by the thirteenth century. No community today descends from them by name, but the rural Russians of the upper Volga carry their ancestry, their lake and river names survive across the region, and a small revival movement has taken up the name.

What set them apart was position. They held the lake country around Nero and Pleshcheyevo, the ground that became Rostov and Pereslavl, and they sat on the portages linking the Volga to the Baltic, in the middle of the fur and silver trade. Scandinavian goods and graves turn up at Timerevo and at Sarskoye Gorodishche, the fortified settlement on the Sara river usually taken as their main center before Rostov eclipsed it. Jordanes lists them in the sixth century among the peoples subject to the Goth Ermanaric. The Primary Chronicle names them beside the Chud, Ves and Krivichi as tributaries of the Varangians, assigns Rostov to them, and marches them in Oleg's armies against Kiev and Constantinople. After that the chronicle stops naming them as a people.

Their language is almost entirely lost. No text in it survives, and linguists reconstruct it from river and lake names and from odd words in Yaroslavl and Kostroma dialects of Russian. They disagree about where it belonged: near the Mari, whose name may be the same word, closer to the Baltic Finnic languages such as Vepsian, or a branch of its own. Belief is better attested, though through hostile witnesses. The Life of Abraham of Rostov describes a stone idol of Veles worshipped in the Chud end of the town, and the chronicle records a famine revolt of 1071 in the Rostov land led by pagan volkhvy. Archaeology fills in daily life: women wore bronze ornaments that rattled as they walked, with pendants shaped like horses and waterfowl, and that horse or duck motif is often the first sign that an excavator has opened a Merya grave. Cremation gave way to inhumation as Slavic settlers arrived and married in.

The Merya have had an afterlife. Over the past two decades an ethnofuturist movement in Yaroslavl, Kostroma and Moscow has adopted the name, and Aleksei Fedorchenko's 2010 film Silent Souls imagined their rites for a wide audience. It is a reconstruction rather than a survival, and most of its members say so.