Karelia, Russia – Republic of Karelia Geography & Key Facts

Karelia is the federal subject of Russia located in its northwest, with an area of about 180,520 km 2. It is bordered by Finland in the west and borders the white sea in the northeast. It has its political and economical capital in Petrozavodsk which is located on the west of Lake Onega. The region is sparsely populated and it is well known for pristine forests and huge wetlands as well as thousands of lakes and rivers. The indigenous Finno-Ugric people coexist with the majority of Russians and create a culture based on folklore, nature, and collective past.

History

The Karelian ethnic group developed as a result of a blend of newcomers in western Finland and native population in the Early Middle Ages, probably due to the in-migration. Man was archaeologically shown as being denser in the early Karelian settlement on the western bank of the Lake Ladoga and the Karelian Isthmus in AD 600800 or there was constant inhabitation in South Karelia, particularly in Lappee. North Karelia had little and the only evidence was found in the eighth century. An archaeological boom between AD 800 and 1050 suggests that there was very swift growth in population.

Karelia was hotly contested in the 13th century, during the Swedish Novgorodian Wars. In the Treaty of Nöteborg this region was divided in 1323 between Sweden and Novgorod Sweden acquired South Karelia and the southeastern part of the Karelian Isthmus, the capital of the district being at Viipuri (Viborg); Novgorod took the north, comprising North Karelia and the Ladoga Karelia, and the chief seat of the region was Kakisalmi. Russian compromised larger areas of Karelia to Sweden in 1617 latest research of the Treaty of Stolbovo led to a pan-Karelian emigration towards the east on the Russian side and contributed to a number of direct ancestors developing and giving birth to Tver Karelian descendants.

More of Karelian was ceded to Russia in 1721 (Treaty of Nystad) and 1743 (Treaty of Abo). In 1809 Russia annexed Finland and incorporated these parts of Finland to the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1812. Finland emerged as an independent state in 1917, or the borders of the state were marked by the treaty of Tartu in 1920 with Soviet Russia.

Between 1918-1921 Finnish partisans attempted to free East Karelia by the use of Aunus expedition and also by means of sponsoring the short-lived Republic of Uhtua. This was nothing and upon the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922, the same was renamed as the Karelian ASSR of 1923.

In 1939, the USSR attacked Finland and the Winter War started. The 1940 Treaty of Moscow forced Finland to cede nearly all of the Finnish Karelia which, in turn, · permanently displaced some more than 400,000 Karelians to the rest of Finland. Later, Finland recaptured those territories quickly, and occupied East Karelia during the Continuation War (1941-1944), but it was again driven back in 1944. Fourth largest city of Finland, Viipuri and other strategic areas were annexed and interior Finland got isolated on waterways and fisheries. All the population of these lands was moved and the current population consists of the post-war Soviet resettlers and their offspring.

By 1941 Karelia was established as a full Soviet republic (Karelo-Finnish SSR), yet in 1956 it was reduced to an autonomous republic within the Russian SFSR, the sole change in rank among any of the Soviet republics. After the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, it turned into the Republic of Karelia.

Following WWII, the portion of the Viipuri Province that was retained in Finland changed to Kymi Province in 1945. It was subdivided into the current South Karelia region and Kymenlaakso region in 1997.

Culture

It was inhabited by its indigenous people Karelians, Finns, Vepsians, who have maintained certain features of language, music, art, and spirituality. Folk culture is core to identity and the Kalevala epic, the collection of ancient oral poetry of the Karelians, remains one of the defining works of literature of not just Karelia but also of Finnish and even Finno-Ugric identity in general. Rune singing, in archaic meters to the accompaniment of the kantele (a traditional plucked string instrument) has survived as a transmitter of this tradition in the cultural institutions and other activities in the community.

Having existed long before the advent of Christianity, the nature-based rituals and the worship of ancestors became gradually mixed with the beliefs of Eastern Orthodox. These are village holidays on saint days, funeral traditions including mourning songs and the ongoing cult of forest, lakes and natural spirits. Wooden buildings become an emblem of culture, and the Kizhi Pogost, a complex of wooden churches and a bell tower made without a single nail is taken as an evidence of the culture of religious creation and construction. There are petroglyphs along Lake Onega and the White Sea which illustrate that the expression of the culture has been thousands years old, showing a hunt, daily life, and some early cosmology. Despite the changing society, there is still a continuation of handicrafts like birch bark weaving, embroidery, woodcarving as well as blacksmithing and many more that are incorporated by family successions through the rural settings.

Most of its foods are based on local ingredients: fish, mushrooms, wild berries, and rye are common. Such festive fare as the traditional hot pot stew of root vegetables and meat has become daily fare.

Russian Orthodoxy dominates religious life although remnants of the more ancient forms of belief exist, especially in those communities living far away and among the Old Believers. Art and performance are encouraged through museums, festivals, and folk ensembles whose main elements in the capital of Petrozavodsk are located. The everyday celebrations like those of the Kalevala keep the past and the present connected to each other.

Language

A rich finno-ugric background defines the current language situation in the Republic of Karelia, and much of it goes hand in hand with the status of Russian in the region, as well as the presence of Vepsian there and adjacent to the titular idiom. The republic has three major dialects of titular tongue North Karelian, Livvi, and Ludic with the peculiar phonetic and lexical characteristics. North Karelian, which is present in the north and the middle territory, is closest to the eastern Finnish and somewhat more comprehensible mutually with Finnish, but it has many borrowings of the Russian language. Livvi Karelian, being predominant in the South of the lake Ladoga and Petrozavodsk areas is more influenced by the Vepsian. Ludic (also called Ludic Karelian or Lyudi), spoken by very few people (a few hundred) along the south western coast of lake Onega, is an intermediate one between the language and Veps, both in grammar and vocabulary.

The titular language, although being symbolically used, is not an official state language in the republic the same as Russian. In Russia the total population of the native speaker population was about 9,000 as of the 2021 census out of a total of approximately 14,000 capable of speaking it to an extent. In the republic, ethnic Karelians represented only a large minority of only about 26 per cent of all Karelians using it as their mother-tongue. This language drift shows a gradual loss since the year 2002. The schools in the republic provide the language as an elective course and there are normally only two to three hours of classes a week and part of the classes cover cultural and historical background.

The language is occasionally used in the media and at community events in public life. One of the puppet theatre companies that works with children in Petrozavodsk gives their plays in the language to propagate its usage among the young generation. In the meantime, the minority of the Vepsian-speaking territories has its own newspaper, published in Vepsian (and usually also in Russian). Vepsian itself is also threatened as there are also a Grand total of a few thousand speakers, not many in education, but some national schools in the republic teach it.

Geography

It extends, in northwestern Russia, between Finland and the White Sea to the northeast, It is bordered by Murmansk Oblast to the north, on the east side by Arkhangelsk Oblast, to the southeast by Vologda Oblast, on the south by Leningrad Oblast and along a 723 km border with Finland on the west.

Where water prevails, more than 60,000 lakes occupy 10-11% of the land area including reservoirs, and fresh water. There are two large European lakes, Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega, based within the area, and tens of thousands of smaller lakes such as Nyukozero, Pyaozero, Segozero, Syamozero, Topozero, and Vygozero dotted across. It has approximately 27,000 rivers, among the largest ones being the Vodla, Kem, Kovda, Shuya, Suna, and Vyg rivers-some of them even have waterfalls of principal value such as the Kivach.

The tallest is Nuorunen (a peak reaching some 576 m in the mountains of Maanselka in Paanajarvi National Park). The area includes national parks of Vodlozero, Kalevala and Paanajarvi, and includes undisturbed shores of lakes, tundra and forests and petroglyph locations on White Sea and Lake Onega shores.

Climate: situated in the Atlantic continental zone, long winter, cold (the average January temperature approximately -8 C), short mild summer . The annual precipitation is 500-700mm. There are plenty of natural resources: there are over 800 million m3 of timber that forest stores, and over 50 different kinds of minerals (such as iron ore, diamonds, vanadium and molybdenum) are extracted from more than 400 deposits.

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