Teryukhane — an ethnographic group of the Mordva of Teryushevskaya volost in Nizhny Novgorod Uyezd, who lived on the lands of what is now Dalnekonstantinovsky District and partly Kstovsky and Bogorodsky. The native language of the Teryukhane was Erzya, but they abandoned it earlier than any other group of Mordva, while preserving their distinctive dress, ritual practices, and a separate identity. The distinguishing mark of Teryukhane costume was a headdress woven from cowrie shells — something unknown in any Erzya or Moksha village of the governorate.[1][2][3]
Name
The group's name is a scholarly coinage: it was introduced by researchers from the second half of the 19th century onward, while the people themselves simply called themselves Mordva. It derives from the selo Bolshoye Teryushevo — the administrative center of the volost — and the village's name is traced back to the pre-Christian male given name Teryay, Teryukhay, Teryush.[3]
Sources disagree on the origins of the Teryukhane. Pavel Melnikov-Pechersky, who first described them in his "Sketches of the Mordva" (1867), regarded them as a distinct tribe, close to the Erzya but not Erzya proper. Publications from Mordovia and reference literature classify them as Russified Mordva-Erzya.[1][3]
The micro-ethnonym persisted into the 1980s: neighbors referred to the inhabitants of Migallikha, Olgino, Siukha, Armanikha, Kuzhadon, Maloye Teryushevo, Makrasha, and Baksheevo as Mordva, and in Olgino people used the term for themselves.[4]
Some regard the Teryukhane as Erdzyadы, but judging by the remnants of their language, their customs, and their religious cult, one cannot but recognize them as a distinct tribe[1]
Where they lived and how many there were
Teryushevskaya Volost lay in the upper reaches of the Seryozha River, along the Ozyorka stream and its tributaries. Its villages included Bolshoye and Maloye Teryushevo, Makrasha, Bolshoye and Maloye Seskino, Sarley, Pomra, Margusha, Tatarskoye, Bortsovo, Migallikha, Siukha, Shonikha, Armanikha, Vinny Maydan, Olgino, Berezniki, Kazhlеyka, Lapshikha, and Inyutino.[3][5]
The count of settlements varies across sources. Melnikov in 1867 counted forty settlements and approximately thirteen thousand souls of both sexes; the consolidated "Lists of Populated Places" based on 1859 data gives, for Nizhny Novgorod Uyezd, 41 settlements, 4,133 households, and 25,317 inhabitants, while Mordovian publications based on the same data give 43 settlements.[1][3][5]
| Year | What was counted | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1859 | 41 settlements, 4,133 households, 25,317 inhabitants | "Lists of Populated Places" of Nizhny Novgorod Governorate |
| 1867 | 40 settlements, approximately 13,000 souls of both sexes | P. I. Melnikov-Pechersky |
| 1882 | in Bolshoye and Maloye Teryushevo, half the inhabitants wore Mordva dress; in Makrasha, all did | P. D. Druzhkin |
| 1927–1928 | 25 populated localities in three volosts of the uyezd | M. T. Markelov and S. P. Tolstov |
| 1957 | no Teryukhan settlements remained; traditional dress still worn by elderly women of Bolshoye and Maloye Seskin and Makrasha | V. N. Belitser |
| 2002 | 15 people identified themselves as Teryukhans | population census |
How the language was lost
The Erzya language disappeared among the Teryukhans earlier than among the rest of the Mordva: by the mid-eighteenth century, at the time of the volost's baptism, it was barely known, though ethnic self-awareness persisted. Melnikov wrote in 1867 that here the Mordva had "almost entirely forgotten their language."[1]
The language survived longest in ritual — and already without comprehension. Women passed the sacrificial song pozmoro from generation to generation without understanding the words; the priests themselves, the vozati, did not understand the formula they recited either.[1][6]
By 1957 only scattered words in the local dialect and a lilting manner of speech remained. The last elder who knew both the language and the rites died around the turn of the 1970s, according to the Nizhny Novgorod researcher Nikolay Morokhin. Today the older generation uses individual Erzya words, describing them as local dialect, and says "dress up as a Mordva woman" when speaking of the traditional costume.[7][2]
Even my way of speaking is like that. I'm kind of Russian, and yet somehow our roots used to be different[7]
Russification
Russification did not happen on its own. In the late seventeenth century the government settled Russian peasants in Mordva villages and Mordva in Russian ones, and, as Melnikov observed, "this method was used principally in the places where the Teryukhans lived."[1]
In 1690 the entire Teryushevskaya volost, together with the Russian Lyskovskaya volost, was granted to Archil, King of Imereti. Over twenty-three years his administrators resettled a great many Russians from the Lyskovskaya volost into the Teryushevskaya and even more Mordva in the opposite direction; mixed marriages completed the process. According to another account, the volost was granted by Peter I in 1700 — to Archil as well — and by the 1740s it had passed to Tsarevich Bakar Vakhtangovich.[1][8]
By the end of the nineteenth century Russification was nearly complete. The peasant-archaeologist Pyotr Druzhkin, working here in 1882, found half the inhabitants of Bolshoye and Maloye Teryushevo still wearing Mordva dress, and in Makrasha — everyone.[7]
Faith and prayer grounds
The Teryukhans built no churches of their own: prayers — ozks, later called molyan in Russian — were held in the open air. They distinguished the volost molyan, the village molyan, the field molyan, the domestic molyan, and the cemetery molyan. The rituals were overseen by elected officials: the pravt, the volost elder who kept the sacred vessels, and the vozatya, the chief priest, with twelve assistants.[6]
The Teryukhans had five volost-level prayer groves, each dedicated to a different deity. At one of them, near Maloye Seskino, in the early nineteenth century Alekseyev Kuzma, known as Kuzka-god, performed sacrifices and preached.[6]
Even when remaining in the old faith, the Teryukhans blended the names of their deities with Christian ones in their prayers. The volost was baptized in the mid-eighteenth century: on 18 May 1743, Bishop Dimitry (Sechenov) ordered the Mordovian cemetery near the selo of Sarley to be burned, and the response was the Teryushevo Uprising, led by Nesmayan Vasilyev, a resident of the village of Bolshoye Seskino.[6][8]
| Location | Deity to whom sacrifices were offered |
|---|---|
| half a verst from the selo of Siukhi, in the forest by the Mianga River | Nishki-Pasu |
| in a field near the village of Inyutino, by the Maydanka stream | Svet-Vereshki-Velen-Pasu |
| near the village of Berezniki, in a grove by the Pichesi River | Ange-Patyay and her four daughters |
| in the forest near the village of Maloye Seskino (also known as Chertovka) | Voltsy-Pasu |
| in the field of the Tatarskaya village, by the Kirmeti River | Nazarom-Pasu |
Costume
The costume outlasted the language by more than a century. A tunic-style shirt was embroidered in red around the neckline and belted with a narrow woven sash known as "v doski." Over it was worn a shushpan — a long, open-front garment of white homespun linen embroidered with small epaulette-like patches with triangles at the shoulders, around the neck, and above the slit; old shushpans are distinguished by the restrained colors of their embroidery, worked in homespun and home-dyed woolen thread called zhitsa.[7][2]
The shushpan's cuffs were embroidered separately and stored separately; they were an obligatory gift from the bride-to-be and were made in quantity, while a shushpan with cuffs of particularly dense, "carpet-like" embroidery was passed down through generations. A single clasp held the edges of the shushpan together — the sustug: an open oval base of copper alloy fitted with a movable pin, twisted wire, and chains hung with pendants, beads, and engraved medallions.[7][2]
The headdress was a crown in the form of a ring of cowrie shells braided into four rows, with long temple pendants, a thick tassel on the right side of the face, and a woolen fringe. Ethnographers of the 1920s found it remarkable as having no parallel among neighboring peoples: the closest resemblances are the headdresses of Chuvash and Besermyan women. For a detailed account of the costume's construction, see the article Erzya Costume.[2][5]
It was worn for a long time. From the 1920s onward, young women switched to Russian dress, but elderly women of Makrasha, Maloye Seskin, and Maloye Teryushevo continued to wear the shushpan to weddings, christenings, funerals, and church services right up to the 1970s, and were buried in it even later. The war hastened its disappearance: the embroidered sleeves of shushpans were sewn into school satchels for first-graders.[7][2]
That was when we started first grade. And my mother made me a bag — she took off the sleeves, that embroidery from the shushpan, and made the handles[7]
Who studied them
The first to take notice of the Teryukhans was Melnikov-Pechersky: his "Sketches of the Mordva" appeared in Russky Vestnik in 1867. In September 1882, the peasant-archaeologist Pyotr Druzhkin excavated three burial mounds at the urochishche Knyazya near Maly Teryushevo and described the costume traditions in use.[1][7]
In 1927–1928, an expedition from the Central Museum of Ethnology worked in the volost — Mikhail Markelov and Sergey Tolstov; their article "On the History of Teryukhan Folk Culture" was published in the journal Etnografiya in 1928, while the collected folklore records and a large body of costume photographs are held at the Russian Ethnographic Museum. In 1957, Vera Belitser from the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences visited the area.[7]
In 1978–1980, Nizhny Novgorod researcher Ilya Mininzon traveled through twenty-eight villages of Dalnekonstantinovsky District, gathering surnames with clan nicknames, microtoponyms, and microethonyms. In 1993, the district was surveyed under the direction of Nikolay Morokhin.[4]
Since 2015, the Dalnekonstantinovsky Local History Museum and the Lobachevsky University Museum have been working on the Teryukhans together: archaeologist Evgeniy Chetvertakov, local historian Dmitry Karabelnikov, and head of the traditional culture center Olga Galtseva. Their conference is the "Dalnekonstantinovsky Readings"; their collected volume is Nizhny Novgorod Mordva: History and Culture, published in Dalnee Konstantinovo in 2017.[7][2][5]
Antiquities
The Sarleysky burial ground of the 12th–14th and 17th–18th centuries was discovered by chance in 1925, and over the following two years was excavated by Boris Zhukov and Evgeniya Goryunova; it is a federally significant monument of the Teryukhan Mordva. The Staroselsky burial ground has been under study since 2015: it contains several hundred burials from the 13th–16th centuries, ranging from commoners to nobility.[2][8]
Near Bolshoye Teryushevo, in the urochishche known as Korabl, a 14th-century Mordovian settlement has been excavated, yielding a buckle, knives, a fire striker, and a bronze bracelet; in the 15th–16th centuries the inhabitants moved to a site known as the wasteland of Staroye Teryushevo, which by the 17th century had been settled by Russians. Near Pomra, a paired burial of a man and a woman was uncovered, both oriented head to the northwest, with fragments of a copper cauldron at their feet.[2]
In 2014, an expedition from the Lobachevsky University museum worked near Pomra at the site of the abandoned settlement of Staraya Pomra, finding a silver 14th-century Golden Horde coin, fragments of hand-molded pottery, bronze sulgam clasps, a clay spindle whorl, an arrowhead, and a quiver hook. In 2015, surveys were conducted at Bolshoye Teryushevo, Margusha, Tatarskoye, Makrasha, and Maloye Seskyno, and in 2017 an exhibition titled "The Teryukhan Mordva: Evidence of the Past" was presented.[2]
What remains
Fifteen people identified themselves as Teryukhans in the 2002 census.[3]
Parts of traditional dress are still kept in households in Bolshoye Teryushevo, Makrasha, and Maloye Seskyno, and old dishes have survived as well. Collections of Teryukhan objects are held at the Dalnekonstantinovsky District Museum of Local History — including shushpan tunics, some with swastika ornamentation on the sleeves, belts, bast shoes, and carved linden-wood chests called pari — and at the Lobachevsky University museum.[7][2]
A particular contribution to this collection was made by Mikhail Zhukov (1913–1997), teacher and headmaster of the school in the selo of Bolshoye Teryushevo: for half a century he collected Teryukhan folklore and everyday objects, and donated the collection to the district museum. His library held a rare 1898 novella by P. M. Krasovsky, "Kuzka — A Mordovian God." In late July 2019, a folklore and ethnographic expedition from the museum-preserve passed through these villages.[9]
We are native, of course Mordva, and the Chertovskoye people — they are Mordva too[7]
References
Sources
- opentextnn.ru — Open Text — P. I. Melnikov-Pechersky. Essays on the Mordva, introduction ("Russkiy Vestnik", 1867) (archive)
- museum.unn.ru — Lobachevsky University Museum — Exhibition "Mordva-Teryukhane: Evidence of the Past", 30 June 2017 (archive)
- izvmor.ru — Izvestiya Mordovii — A Single Ethnos: Who Are the Teryukhane and Karatai, and Where Do They Live, 7 July 2021 (archive)
- opentextnn.ru — Open Text — I. L. Mininzon. Onomastics of the Teryukhane (field surveys of 1978–1980) (archive)
- rodnayazemlia.ru — Rodnaya Zemlya — O. Galtseva, E. Chetvertakov. In Search of a Vanished Tribe, 16 October 2015 (archive)
- opentextnn.ru — Open Text — P. I. Melnikov-Pechersky. Essays on the Mordva, Essay IV: Mordva Places of Worship (Keremeti) (archive)
- opentextnn.ru — Open Text (archive)
- cyberleninka.ru — Archaeology of the Eurasian Steppes — K. N. Vtyurina. Pagan Traditions of the Mordva-Teryukhane in the Context of a Christian World, 2020
- ngiamz.ru — Nizhny Novgorod Museum-Reserve — A. V. Sorokina. Ethnography Sector: M. V. Zhukov and the Expedition to Dalnekonstantinovsky District, 29 July – 2 August 2019 (archive)