Mokshas Erotic

The Mokshas are one of the two peoples that outsiders have long lumped together as Mordvins, and the first thing to know about them is that they never used that word for themselves. They are mokshet, named for the Moksha River, a slow tributary of the Oka that winds through the western half of the Republic of Mordovia and on into Penza and Ryazan oblasts. That river valley, with its mixed forest and black-earth fields, is the homeland. Sizable Moksha communities also live in Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Samara and Orenburg oblasts, and in Siberian towns settled during tsarist and Soviet migrations. Moksha is a Uralic language of the Mordvinic branch, sister to Erzya but far enough apart that the two peoples usually fall back on Russian when they meet. It carries some odd features for a European language: voiceless l, r and j sounds that few of its neighbors possess, a definite declension that marks the article on the noun itself, and verb forms that agree with the object as well as the subject. Moksha and Erzya are both official in Mordovia alongside Russian, each with its own Cyrillic standard, but most children now grow up Russian-dominant and the language sits on every endangered-language list.

The Mokshas entered written history through their princes. In the 1230s a ruler named Puresh allied with Vladimir-Suzdal against the Erzya prince Purgaz, and after the Mongol conquest Moksha levies were pressed into Batu's campaigns against Poland and Hungary. The Golden Horde town of Mokhshi, now Narovchat in Penza oblast, was minting coins on Moksha land in the fourteenth century. Moscow's grip closed after Kazan fell in 1552, and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought forced baptism, Russian settlement, and Moksha men in the ranks of the Razin and Pugachev rebellions. Orthodoxy is the religion of record, but it settled on top of an older faith rather than replacing it. The high god Shkai, the water mother Ved-ava, the forest mother Vir-ava and a whole household of other mothers survived in village prayers, sacred groves, and the ozks feasts where a community sacrificed and ate together. A small native-faith movement has tried to formalize this since the 1990s. Women's dress remains the visual signature: a white linen shirt stiff with red and black embroidery, worn short over trousers, belted with a heavy pendant girdle and layered with beads, coins and cowrie shells that once traveled up the Volga trade routes. Today you will see it at the summer festival Akshä Kelu, the White Birch, and on stage, not in the fields.