The Kryashen

A Kryashen woman crosses herself in front of an icon at the Tikhvinskaya Church in central Kazan, Russia.

Scratch a Russian, the old proverb* has it, and you find a Tatar.

And the reverse is also true, the poet Lev Gumilev opined.

Cultural identities often oversimplify far more complex realities. In fact, the differences within a cultural group can be as stark as those it has with the rest of the world.

In few places is this truth as evident as in Kazan.

Commonly presented as a city of contrasts, the capital of the autonomous Republic of Tatarstan (population 3.8 million) straddles the Volga River and is home to roughly equal populations of Tatars and Russians. In fact, the harmony between the two peoples – Sunni Muslims and Orthodox Christians – figures large in Tatarstan’s self-image as a model of cultural and ethnic tolerance and diversity.

Walking Kazan’s streets in search of contrasts, one finds many shades of grey. Following a side street from the Central Market, an enormous Russian Orthodox cross welcomes visitors to the garden of a church. The mirrored cross reflects a pious babushka attendant on one side and the minaret of the nearby Soltan Mosque on the other. This place of worship – the bright blue Tikhvinskaya Church – is surprisingly unorthodox. The interior is tiled, cool and echoing. Gold and red icons dot the whitewashed walls. Used as a warehouse during the Soviet period, the church, first built in 1646, is again a thriving house of worship. On July 15, 2014, Tikhvinskaya celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of its reconsecration.

Yet there is something different here. A clue can be found in the text on the icons. “Alla Anasi” (Mother of God) reads the Cyrillic script on one, above an image of the Virgin Mary and infant Christ. “Khodai,” an ancient Persian word for the Divine, appears on others.

The language is Tatar, which is strange, because of course conventional wisdom tells us that Tatars are Muslim and Russians are Orthodox Christians.

In fact, the parishioners of Tikhvinskaya Russian Orthodox Church speak to God in Tatar, for they are Kryashens.

The Kryashen, who officially numbered some 34,822 in the 2010 Russian census, are an ethno-religious group whose identity divides both scholarly opinion and the Kryashen community itself. Most Kryashen – 29,962 by the same census – live in Tatarstan (just over 2000 in Kazan), with other communities across neighboring Bashkortostan and Udmurtia. Their Turkic language is – or bears many similarities to – Tatar, while their cultural practices have been strongly influenced by their Russian Orthodox faith.

It is generally believed that the Kryashen are descendants of Tatars who converted to Orthodoxy following Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of Kazan in 1552. Many Muslim Tatars believe that the conversion was forced upon them. Indeed, the fact that the word “Kryashen” sounds similar to the Russian adjective “baptized” (kreshchyony) only complicates matters.

Members of the Kryashen ensemble, Tyganailar, pose for a portrait at the social club in the village of Eriksa.

Polina Petrovna Chebisheva poses in traditional Kryashen dress in the village of Kuluschi.

Prior to the Russian census of 2002, the Kryashen had last been recorded as a separate people only in 1926 (when they numbered 101,400), and the decision to do so again was controversial. Tatar nationalists, for their part, suspected that the official recognition of any Kryashen group was a creative way of reducing the ethnic Tatar share of the Republic’s population – to the advantage of ethnic Russians. Another view was that the Kryashen were instead a “sub-group” of the Tatar people (the official view throughout the Soviet period). A sub-group, as the historian Maxim Glukhov wrote, that was one of many jewels on the Tatar national necklace, each with its own beauty. Yet such high praise did not always heal wounds. In the early 1990s, the Kryashen made a bold claim: not only did they constitute a separate people, but they had always been a separate people.

Kazan was an important Russian center of commerce and education for the Volga Region for over 400 years – since the time of its absorption into the empire in the sixteenth century. Yet as the Soviet Union disintegrated, Tatarstan eagerly advanced a program for autonomy, culminating in a controversial and vague Declaration of Sovereignty in 1990. Kazan soon developed an ambitious new skyline pierced by the blue and white minarets of the immense Qol Sharif Mosque, inside the Kazan kremlin. The architectural juxtaposition is not without significance, for while the kremlin became the seat of Russian imperial power in the city, the mosque (completed in 2005) is named in honor of the statesman and imam Qol Sharif, one of the leaders of the city’s defense against the Muscovite siege of 1552.

Nearby, the Annunciation Cathedral, completed in 1562, celebrates Tsar Ivan’s conquest of the Khanate, while the Söyembikä Tower, named for a Tatar national hero and regent who ruled during the 1552 siege, demonstrates the limits of imperial power. Legend has it that Ivan wanted to marry Söyembikä, and she agreed on the condition he build her a seven-tiered tower in Kazan. When Ivan hastily built the tower, Söyembikä climbed to the top, looked out over her beloved city and was so overwhelmed by emotion for her subjects and city that she threw herself off the tower rather than marry the conquering tsar.

Father Pavel Pavlov, priest at Tikhvinskaya Church, is adamant that the Kryashen are a separate people in their customs, language, and heritage. And the role of Orthodoxy, he stresses, is paramount. The Kryashen are far more than simply “baptized Tatars,” he insists, his hands kneading the side of the church’s immense marble font. What about other peoples in the Volga Region, he asks – the Mari, Mordvins or Chuvash? “All these other nations must have been baptized at some point, as they were not always Christian,” he says.

Some Kryashen hold fast to the phrase “we came from the Tatars, but never reached the Russians.” Others offer a wide range of theories – that the Kryashen trace their origins to Finno-Ugric tribes related to the Mari and Mordvins, or that they are the descendants of the conquered Khanate’s aristocracy who were compelled to convert to Christianity. For his part, the scholar Maxim Glukhov traced the origins of the Kryashen to Tatars who converted to Nestorian – not Russian Orthodox – Christianity in the tenth century.

Beauty contestants line up to go on stage during Petrov Den in the Mamadishsky region.

A dual-language bible, Church Slavonic and Kryashen.

Villagers in the Kryashen village of Lyaki.

The common thread in these theories is a need to refute the idea that the Kryashen are simply Tatars who succumbed to the Muscovite invaders and, whether under duress or through opportunism, accepted the Orthodox faith. Russian Orthodoxy is instead a crucial part of what it means to be a Kryashen – to be cherished and celebrated. Father Pavlov would naturally agree. A young man who feels that he is a Kryashen but not a Christian, Pavlov says, who does not attend church, is Kryashen only according to the census, “but not in his heart. And not to me.”

Indeed, the church is the main focal point for Kazan’s Kryashen community. Yet there are secular touchpoints as well: an active Kryashen Cultural Center and a newspaper, Tuganaylar, based in Tatarstan’s second city of Naberezhnye Chelny.

Some 150 kilometers southwest of Kazan, in Tatarstan’s Sarmanovsky Region, are a string of Kryashen villages (total Kryashen population in the region: 343). The largest is Lyaki – the kind of place where if you threw a stone in any direction it would be hard not to hit a relative. In short, it is like any other modest Russian village – dirt roads, a small school, log houses with ornately carved window frames. The small post office doubles as a nightclub, and from its hill, an Orthodox church surveys the surrounding landscape.

Word spread quickly that foreign visitors were in town, and a musical ensemble soon appeared, dutifully dressed in full Kryashen costumes. As the weather turned and the skies darkened, the locals joined in a circle to dance and sing songs of life, love, and community. One ensemble member identified herself as a Tatar, though she had a Kryashen husband and a passion for Kryashen traditional music. Mixed marriages, she added, are relatively common between Kryashen and Tatars, religious differences notwithstanding.

Lyaki has a full-time priest – a Kazan native educated in a seminary outside Moscow, but who learned to conduct services in the Kryashen language. There are only five or six priests for all the area’s Kryashen churches, so people come to this small church in Lyaki from all over Tatarstan and beyond to have their children baptized, or to be baptized themselves. Churches without a priest generally remain empty until one can arrive to conduct services. Some villages show conviction and initiative: the babushki will informally lead a congregation in Sunday prayers.

Ethnic groups across Russia’s Volga Region, particularly the Udmurt, Mari and Mordvins, have been reasserting pagan traditions. Many of these are practiced in a syncretic form, with adherents attending both Orthodox Christian and pagan prayers.

Indeed, many Christian festivals have pagan roots, and for the Kryashen the holiday of Troitsa, celebrated 50 days after Easter, is the festival of the birch tree. Two of the iconic trees are “sacrificed” in the hope of rain, a good harvest, and a healthy life. It is a festival that local Orthodox clergy discourage, but turn a blind eye to – some Kryashen believe that ignoring custom would be an insult to their ancestors.

On a blisteringly hot day in early June, residents of Ulten-Buta, in the Almetevsky region some 400 kilometers from Kazan, gather at the edge of the forest. In a ritual three days prior, the village’s babushki chose the sacrificial birch tree and marked it with a white ribbon. The faithful then return to the chosen tree, praying and genuflecting before it. Two brothers from the village (with both parents still alive, as tradition demands) then fell the tree and one of its neighbors. As the two trees are carried to a glade, the faithful make their wishes and hang scarves from its branches before dancing and feasting. A spicy soup is served, along with bread, tea, and homemade alcohol. Spirits of all kinds are potent here on this day.

Later, the trees and the faithful are returned to the edge of the village by pickup truck, and a procession begins. Locals offer food and a splash of water from a bucket or hose. Revelers smack each other with handfuls of birch branches. “Happy Holiday!” they bellow. As the procession swells, it reaches the riverside where, at the steep embankment, people toss branches into the water, sending off their hopes and wishes with the current.

Another Kryashen village, Kulushchi, sits just off the busy M7 highway stretching between Moscow and Ufa. Like rural settlements across much of Russia, Kulushchi has seen more farewells than arrivals. Every second house seems derelict, boarded up by owners who set out in search of the promise of larger towns and cities.

Despite the dwindling population, there is a new church here. The acrid smell of wood lacquer still hangs in the air. Its predecessor – an old wooden chapel (a social club during the Soviet era) – sags deferentially, as do most of the other village homes.

Valentina Petrovna and her husband spent much of their adult lives in the city, only returning to Kulushchi at their retirement, to tend their vegetable garden and raise rabbits for meat. Petrovna is an expert and great enthusiast of Kryashen traditional dress, and is well known in the Kryashen community. She regales us with countless photos detailing each and every style. Finally, she produces a book – more a stack of yellowing papers, really – inscribed in Church Slavonic on one side, and a Turkic language in Cyrillic script on the other. She flicks through the bilingual biblical stories, before posing a rhetorical question: “If we aren’t a separate people, why did we have our own language?”

For answers, one might turn to the icons of Kazan’s Tikhvinskaya Church. Father Pavel is keen to draw attention to the Cyrillic alphabet inscribed on them. These letters – the same as those in Petrovna’s book – differ from those conventionally used to write Tatar. On sale among the beeswax candles of the church shop, booklets written in this same alphabet offer biblical tales for children and moral lessons for their parents. The alphabet was designed in the nineteenth century by Russian missionary and ethnographer Nikolai Ilminsky; Muslim Tatars wrote their language using the Arabic script.

Nonetheless, academics at the Tatar Academy of Sciences assert that the Kryashen language is “impure,” riddled with influences from Russian. Yet in 1929 one prominent Russian linguist postulated that Kryashen could be “the last living remnant of the Tatar language before the Russian conquest.”

Perhaps the most obvious Russian influence is the fact that Kryashen are given Orthodox, Russian names – a practice shared with other Orthodox peoples in the area, such as the Chuvash and Mari. Indeed, in some rural and predominantly Tatar-speaking areas of the Republic, any villagers one meets with Russian names may well be Kryashen.

Today, it would be hard to call the language living, for its use is almost entirely restricted to the liturgical. “Reviving our [Kryashen] language,” says Kryashen journalist and editor of Tuganaylar Lyudmila Belousova, “is impractical in this globalized world. Losing the Tatar language would mean losing some of our distinctiveness, and to that end we should see ourselves as a primarily Tatar-speaking people.”

In Russia’s Volga region, late spring and early summer is festival season. The Tatars have Sabantui, the Mari have Cemik, the Mordvin have Boltai and the Russians in Tatarstan have Karavon. The Kryashen have Petrov Den, which, in many circles, is regarded as the Volga’s biggest and best festival. Commonly known as Pitrau, Petrov Den has its origins in Orthodox celebrations held in honor of the apostles Peter and Paul.

Tens of thousands of revelers from every ethnic, religious, and national background descend on a small village in the Mamadishsky Region, over 150 kilometers east of Kazan. They pour out of buses and cars and are funneled through a human corridor of Kryashen folk ensembles in traditional costumes, each brighter than the last. Parades of performers representing the various Kryashen communities sing and dance as Pitrau officially begins. A mock village is set up with a small hut for each Kryashen community, each offering tea, local delicacies and games for the children. The crowds remain until the small hours of the morning.

Traditionally, Pitrau was when young villagers would find love. In keeping with Kryashen custom, there is a small area set aside for this purpose, yet it is empty for much of the evening. The beauty pageant proves far more popular, with young women expected to perform dances, songs, or pieces on musical instruments.

Arm wrestling and weight lifting contests offer prizes ranging from a goat to a new car, and in another popular contest two competitors straddle a pole suspended over a creek, beating one another with sacks filled with soccer balls.

A Kryashen ensemble performs in the village of Lyaki.

Kryashen village in the Sarmonovsky region.

In the early morning hours, contestants take their turn jumping over a bonfire during Petrov Den in the Mamadishsky region.

As night falls, techno beats, Tatar pop music and the smell of shashlik fill the cool summer air. After midnight, once the bonfire has burned down to campfire size, the fire-jumping contest commences. Fire jumping has roots in pagan traditions, but at Pitrau it is more of a contest for the daring.

Census numbers notwithstanding, the real number of Kryashen in Tatarstan is difficult to ascertain. And the elaborate criteria for recognition as an official minority and the status it confers in legal and administrative provisions makes the situation both politically and economically significant. Some have claimed a population upwards of 200,000, and there are peoples in Russia far fewer in number who have their own autonomous Republics.

Kryashen leaders themselves estimate their numbers at some 100-120,000 across Tatarstan, and were sorely disappointed at the far lower 2010 census results. Some local authorities have been accused of pressuring census organizers to reclassify self-identified Kryashen as Tatars, and many villagers reported that they were asked by the local government to reclassify themselves, to check the box for Tatar instead of Kryashen. In the ensuing skirmish over political representation, politicians and public figures have taken irreconcilable positions. One potential compromise – that Kryashen instead concede their identity “as Kryashen Tatars” (or “baptised Tatars”) – is widely seen by Kryashen leaders as unacceptable.

We had travelled to these communities in search of clarity, but found little. Perhaps little was needed.

The Kryashen are often presented as a living ambiguity, hovering between the two immovable poles of Russian and Tatar. For outside observers and ideological claimants alike, their identity is rendered a problem to be solved, rather than a reality to be lived. For the majority of Kryashen, the opposite is true. “We have always been, and always will be Kryashen,” villagers said, “not simply baptised Tatars.”

Exiting Tikhvinskaya Church, we pause before the Mother of God icon – “Alla Anasi” – and are caught in the act by Father Pavel. “I know what you’re thinking,” he exclaims, “but it’s not true! Alla may sound like ‘Allah’, but it’s not. It has… a different etymology.”

We leave the church’s garden and, lit by the mirrored cross, return to the city of contrasts. RL

* the origin of this “Russian” proverb is actually French, most often attributed to the Russophobe Marquis de Cuistine.