Votes Erotic

The Votes are the people Novgorod named a province after, and who then nearly vanished from the map. They call themselves vaďďalaizõd. Russian chronicles wrote them down as Vod' in the eleventh century, and the Novgorod Republic named the northwestern fifth of its territory, the Vodskaya pyatina, for them. Today the Votic homeland has shrunk to a few villages on the lower Luga river and the Gulf of Finland shore, in the Kingisepp district of Leningrad Oblast, a short drive from the Estonian border at Narva. The 2020 Russian census counted 99 people who called themselves Votian.

Votic is a Finnic language of the Uralic family, and among the Finnic languages it sits closest to Estonian, closer than it does to Finnish. Its neighbors for centuries were Izhorian and Ingrian Finnish, both Finnic too, and Russian, the language of church, school and town since Novgorod's day. The eastern dialect, once spoken around Koporye, is gone. A stranded branch called Krevin went to Latvia in the 1440s, when the Livonian Order carried off Votic captives and settled them near Bauska; it lasted four centuries there before folding into Latvian. What remains is the western dialect in Jõgõperä, Liivcülä and Luuditsa, spoken by a few elderly people and studied by a somewhat larger circle of learners in the villages and Saint Petersburg. A Latin-script orthography, a village museum in Luuditsa that burned in 2006 and was rebuilt, and an annual festival carry the revival.

The Votes have been Orthodox since the Novgorod period, and that faith is much of what separates them from the Ingrian Finns, who arrived as Lutherans under Swedish rule after 1617. Orthodoxy settled on top of older practice: sacred groves and stones, offerings at springs, and a calendar of saints' days that doubled as the old seasonal feasts. Early ethnographers recorded one custom that startled them: married Votic women shaved their heads and kept them covered ever after. Women's dress was otherwise the white linen of the eastern Finnic world, a sleeveless overdress heavy with ornament, which marked a Votic wedding from a Russian one at a glance.

The twentieth century did most of the damage. Collectivization, the German evacuation of Ingrian villagers to Finland in 1943, their forced return to the Soviet interior, and a ban on resettling their home villages until the mid-1950s scattered a people who had numbered about five thousand in 1848. In 2008 Russia added the Votes to its register of Indigenous small-numbered peoples, which brings legal recognition but not new speakers. Most people of Votic descent today speak Russian, and being Votian is now a choice more than a habit.