Mari, Cheremis — an ancient people of Finno-Ugric origin who settled north of the middle Volga, in the interfluve of the Vyatka and Unzha rivers. Mari, mariy: the name of the Mari people, whose etymology is understood as "person," "man," "husband." "Cheremis" is the Old Russian name for the Mari.
Today the Mari live in a compact area in the Mari El, where according to the 2002 census they made up 42.88% of the republic's population, as well as in Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Udmurtia, the Nizhny Novgorod Region, Kirov, Sverdlovsk and other northern regions of central Russia.
The essence of the phenomenon
Where the statehood of the Mari is concerned, a situation long prevailed similar to the setup of the Checheno-Ingush Republic in Soviet times. Because of the rivalry between the Kazan and Moscow tsardoms, ethnographic groups strongly distinct from one another split off from the single Mari ethnos — some researchers even consider them two separate peoples:
- Hill Mari (Kyrykmary), who in the standoff between Kazan and Moscow sided with Moscow (their folklore's favorite hero is Prince Akpars, who led Mari detachments in the army of Ivan the Terrible). They live in the area around the town of Kozmodemyansk.
- Meadow Mari (Olyk Mari), who fought on the side of the Tatars against Ivan the Terrible; their resistance continued for another 50 years after the fall of Kazan (their favorite folklore hero is Prince Boltush, who led the struggle against the Russians). Most of the Republic of Mari El is settled by the Meadow Mari.
As a result, from the 16th century part of the Mari moved into Trans-Kama Bashkir lands, giving rise to the formation of a separate ethnographic group, the Eastern Mari.
History of the Mari
The Mari people first made contact with civilization mainly through the Volga Bulgars, who had settled in the area convenient for trade at the confluence of the Volga and the Kama. This is why Turkic influence is quite noticeable in Mari culture and language. Ivan the Terrible's capture of Kazan and the shift of the center of Volga trade to the territory of what is now the Nizhny Novgorod Region in turn exposed the Mari to the culture of Muscovy, the nascent Russian culture. The Mari began to use the Cyrillic alphabet. Relations between Moscow and the Mari people were marred by forced Christianization, as a result of which — as with other Christianized peoples of the Volga region — Orthodoxy was adopted only quite superficially.
A peculiarity of Mari history is that, because the interfluve of the Unzha and Vyatka is not especially rich in resources and holds no strategic position, the Mari people, unlike the Erzya, never had serious armed conflicts with tsarist power. The colonization of Mari lands was earlier carried out by Novgorod the Great, which lies in a climatic zone similar to that of Povetluzhye near Nizhny Novgorod:
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The Grand Prince sent [troops] to make war on the Cheremis... Prince Semyon Romanovich and with him the boyars' sons, his own retinue, and having gathered they all set out from Galich on St. Nicholas's Day, December 6, through pathless forests, and the winter was very severe. That same winter, on January 6, on the Feast of the Epiphany, the Grand Prince's host entered the land of the Cheremis, and wrought much evil upon that land — they cut down the people, took others captive, burned still others, and cut down all the horses and every beast that could not be taken with them; and they took all their goods and ravaged their land...
And the slaughter of human beings was great, and the barbarian land was drenched with blood; the marshes and thickets and lakes and rivers were paved over with Cheremis bones Khersonsky, p. 279 [1]
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The Mari in the Nizhny Novgorod Region
The nature and landscape of the modern Nizhny Novgorod Region north of the Volga, especially Povetluzhye, is one of the principal areas where Mari national identity was formed.
During the Mongol campaigns, and later during the forced Christianization carried out by the authorities of Muscovy in the southern part of what is now the Nizhny Novgorod Region, the northern lands began to fill with refugees, most of whom in their own self-perception belonged to the Erzya people. From the blending of Mari and Erzya, in its main part, arose the present-day population of these districts, which by the 17th century had taken on a Russian self-identity — with the exception of the most remote districts, such as Tonshayevsky, where the original Mari self-identity has survived.
Mari jokes
- A traditional recipe from Mari Cuisine. Fill half a pot with water. Add 3–4 tablespoons. Boil for 40 minutes, stirring. Add 2 cups, leave on low heat without letting it boil. Add another 2 teaspoons. Throw in a pinch. Stir, set out in the cold. After 38 minutes, serve with horseradish.
- Due to a technical fault, the beer vending machine works in semi-automatic mode: it accepts coins, but does not dispense beer.
- Lunch tastes much better if you skip breakfast.