Mari Erotic

The Mari are one of the last peoples of Europe whose pre-Christian religion never fully went underground. They live mostly along the middle Volga, in the republic of Mari El and the surrounding oblasts, in a landscape of mixed forest and river meadow that has shaped both their economy and their cosmology. Their language belongs to the Uralic family — distant cousins to Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, much closer kin to the neighboring Mordvin and Udmurt tongues — and it splits along geography into Meadow Mari spoken on the low east bank of the Volga, Hill Mari on the higher west bank, and Eastern Mari among communities that migrated further east into Bashkortostan during the Russian colonization of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The two main literary standards, Meadow and Hill, are close enough to be mutually intelligible with effort but far enough apart that each maintains its own newspapers, schoolbooks and orthography.

Officially the Mari are Eastern Orthodox; nominal Christianization came in waves under Ivan IV and his successors after the fall of Kazan in 1552, and the Russian state pushed harder from the eighteenth century onward. What survived alongside the church, and in many villages survived more vigorously than the church, is a polytheistic tradition organized around sacred groves — stands of old trees set apart from cultivation, where priests called karts conduct seasonal sacrifices of geese, sheep or horses to a hierarchy of deities under the sky god Yumo. Anthropologists working in the region in the late Soviet and post-Soviet decades have documented hundreds of these groves still in active use. Many Mari describe themselves as both Orthodox and adherents of the old faith without seeing a contradiction, and a formally registered traditional religion now coexists with the church in Mari El. The Eastern Mari diaspora, more isolated from Russian ecclesiastical pressure, often kept the old observances most intact.

Daily Mari culture leans toward the agrarian and the textile-rich: embroidery in deep reds and blacks on white linen, silver coin ornaments worn on women's headdresses, and a vocal tradition in which lyric songs and laments carry an unusually heavy share of the cultural memory. Beekeeping, once central enough to figure in ritual, remains widespread. The community is small — under half a million speakers by recent counts, with the language under steady pressure from Russian — but the Mari have been notably stubborn about staying themselves.