Muromians Erotic

The Muromians were a Finnic people of the middle Oka, in what is now Vladimir Oblast and the neighboring edge of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast in Russia. They appear in the archaeological record around the sixth or seventh century and are gone as a distinct people by the twelfth, absorbed into the East Slavic settlers who became the Russians of the Murom district. The city of Murom still carries their name, and through the city so does the epic hero Ilya Muromets. That is roughly the whole of their afterlife in popular memory. Everything else comes out of the ground.

What made them a group was a stretch of river. They held the Oka valley below the Meshchera and above the Mordvins, with the Meryans to their north, farming the floodplain, keeping cattle and horses, fishing, and trapping fur. The fur plugged them into a wider world. Their graves hold Islamic silver dirhams, glass and carnelian beads, and ornaments traded in from far outside the valley, evidence that the Volga route ran through their land and that they took a cut. The Primary Chronicle counts them among the tribute-paying peoples who had "their own language" and places Murom among the earliest towns of Rus'. That is nearly the only written word about them. The language itself is unattested, known from a scatter of place names and from the reasonable assumption that it sat between Mordvinic and the equally lost Meryan.

The cemeteries are what scholars actually know. The largest, at Podbolotye outside Murom, was dug in 1910 and reopened a century later. It shows a people who buried their dead fully dressed and equipped, sometimes cremated and sometimes not, and who laid horses in the ground beside their men. Women went into the earth in a costume found nowhere else: a frontal band of bronze spirals woven onto leather, temple rings, chest ornaments layered with clattering bronze pendants, and small horse-shaped charms. Men were buried with axes, spears, and belt fittings. The horse runs through all of it, in the pendants, the harness, and the burials, and it marks a people who prized their herds on the Oka meadows.

Their religion was the animism of the Volga forest, and it held out. Murom was among the last towns of Rus' to accept Christianity; church tradition credits the twelfth-century prince Konstantin with converting it and remembers the townspeople resisting him. By then the chronicles had stopped naming the Muromians at all. Slavs moved into the valley, intermarried, and took over the burial grounds, and the bronze headbands stop appearing within a few generations. No one wiped the Muromians out. They became Russians, and their name became a town.