Vepsians Erotic

The Vepsians are the people the medieval Rus' chronicles called the Ves', named among the tribes that, as the story goes, invited the Varangian prince Rurik to rule in 862, and they are still where the chroniclers put them: in the forests between Lake Onega and Lake Ladoga in northwestern Russia. Their territory was once far larger. The Ves' sat on the fur route south to Volga Bulgaria, and Arab geographers wrote of the Wisu, a northern people who sent pelts down to the Bulgars on the Volga. Russian settlement and Orthodox parishes absorbed most of them over the following centuries. What survived did so in the least accessible places, and today only a few thousand people still call themselves Veps, most of them older and rural.

Their language belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic family, alongside Karelian, Finnish and Estonian, and it is the odd member of that group. It has no consonant gradation, the alternation that shapes nearly every Finnish and Karelian noun, and vowel harmony has mostly worn away. It also carries a thick layer of Russian loans. A written standard in Latin script was built in the early 1930s, shut down in the purges of 1937, and rebuilt after 1989. The newspaper Kodima has published in Veps from Petrozavodsk since 1993, and the language is taught at the university there, but UNESCO lists it as severely endangered.

There are three branches. The Northern Veps live on the southwestern shore of Lake Onega in the Republic of Karelia, around the village of Sheltozero, and are the group outsiders most often meet. The Central Veps live along the Oyat River in Leningrad and Vologda oblasts. The Southern Veps, the smallest branch, live around Boksitogorsk. The Northern Veps are stone people: the crimson Shoksha quartzite their masons quarried went into the sarcophagus of Napoleon in Paris and into Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square.

Vepsians have been Orthodox for centuries, and the church calendar structures village life. Underneath it, the forest still has a master, the mecižand, who is asked politely for the return of lost cattle, and the bathhouse has its own rules and its own spirit. Funerals are accompanied by laments improvised by women, and the dead are fed at the grave on memorial days. The revival since the late 1980s has modest landmarks: an ethnographic museum in Sheltozero, a Veps National Volost in Karelia that lasted a decade from 1994, the summer festival Elon pu, the Tree of Life, in the Central Veps village of Vinnitsy, and in 2006 a place on Russia's list of indigenous small-numbered peoples of the North, which carries legal protections.