Geese-swans

The inhabitants of these places are pagans. They call themselves Mari. In ancient Russian chronicles there are tribes of Mari and Meri who left their rich cities for the forests so as not to renounce their gods and not to accept Christianity.

This year, Russia celebrates a thousand years since the death of Prince Vladimir, who ruled in ancient Kyiv, and who, under the influence of his grandmother, adopted Christianity from Byzantium and baptized his people and neighboring tribes with the cross and water, and those who disagreed with fire and sword. It is natural for Orthodox Christians to celebrate the date of death of a local baptizer, glorified as a saint, since death for them is a transition to eternal life, union with Christ. But for pagan peoples, living according to the laws bequeathed to their ancestors long before Christianity, this is only a thousand years compared to the eternity of the forest and their ancestors, with whose spirits they live in harmony. And yet this thousand years is a deep furrow cutting through the space of their existence, in which time is relative. It marks the beginning of another history from which the pagans had to leave, a history written by those who seriously claimed that Rus' was Orthodox and had no place in it for the old gods, whose prayer places were in every forest, in every village across the country, which originally spoke many languages, worshiped different and in different ways, and eventually became multinational. The remaining pagans mostly live in villages so as not to stray far from nature — their spiritual world. And those who moved to the cities in the 20th century suffer from their remoteness and return home for a visit. They come to the village “to visit their grandparents”, physical and mythical, and to participate in the holidays of the pagan calendar.

Tatiana Plotnikova is a photographer who expands the boundaries of how Russians see and know themselves. In Soviet times, they were presented with the idea that all the people of the country were one Soviet people; the diversity of national traditions was preserved at the level of external attributes — songs, dances, beautiful old costumes that no one wore in everyday life. Those who tried to understand the deep meanings behind the external forms were tolerated if they were university scientists. The rest were persecuted — especially those who not only studied, but knew the tradition and lived in it. But you can expel people from big cities, depriving them of access to the benefits of modern civilization — but expelling them from a village, already lost in a dense forest, living without major changes for the last three centuries, is much more difficult. In Soviet times, pagans were persecuted, like Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, but they continued to live in their own way. As, incidentally, in past centuries in Tsarist Russia: according to the official version, the country was Orthodox, and in each century new glorified saints appeared, who went into the deep forests to convert pagans to Christianity… but the pagans still remained.

They can be found over a vast territory: from Karelia on the border with Finland, in the upper reaches and on the eastern bank of the Volga — and further east, to Siberia. They are in the Muslim Republic of Tatarstan and in the settlements that formed in the middle of the century around the large Christian monasteries on the banks of the great Russian rivers. But today the spiritual centers of the pagans are mainly in the forests on the territory of the autonomous republic of Mari. More believers gather there for holidays; the very name of the republic carries the memory of the ancient Mari and Meri.

Irina Chmyreva 2015