The Mari

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On a hot June afternoon in the forest outside a village called Marisola, the smoke of cooking fires rises among old trees, and in great cauldrons hundreds of pounds of goose meat come slowly to the boil. Men in white felt hats move between the trees. The food is not for a fair or a feast in the ordinary sense. It is an offering, set out at the foot of chosen trees for the gods of the Mari, and when the prayers are finished it will be shared and eaten among the people who brought it. There is no building here, no altar of stone, no roof. The grove itself is the sanctuary. This is among the oldest continuously living acts of worship in Europe, and it is being performed now, in the twenty-first century, by a people who never finally let it go.

The Mari are a Finno-Ugric people of the middle Volga, in the forested heart of European Russia. Their homeland is the republic that bears their name, Mari El, on the great river’s banks, and their communities reach beyond it into the neighboring regions. They have lived between forest and river for as long as the record reaches back, and they are known above all for one thing: that they have kept, into the present day, their own pre-Christian religion of sacred groves and grove-sacrifices, a living tradition where almost everywhere else in Europe the old faiths were long ago broken. For this they are sometimes called, with only a little exaggeration, the last pagans of Europe.

The people of the middle Volga

The Mari call themselves Mari — a name that means, simply, the people, or the man. The older name used by outsiders, and the one that fills the historical sources, is Cheremis (Russian Cheremisy), a designation that reaches back through Russian and, before it, Turkic usage to early medieval times; the Khazar form tsarmis is recorded in tenth-century material. By their own name they are the Mari, and that is the name now in use.

Their numbers are not large by the measure of the great nations, but they are a real and present people, not a remnant. Counts put the Mari at roughly half a million and more — on the order of 600,000 worldwide, with around 424,000 recorded in the Russian Federation at the 2021 census. Their core is the Republic of Mari El on the Volga, where they make up about two-fifths of the population, with the Russian majority alongside them; large Mari communities live east of the homeland, in Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, in Udmurtia and Perm Krai, the so-called Eastern Mari who migrated toward the Urals over the centuries. Two main ethnographic and dialect groups have long been distinguished: the Meadow Mari of the lowland left bank, the larger group, and the Hill Mari of the higher right bank near the bend of the Volga.

They speak the Mari language, a tongue of the Uralic family. It is written in two literary standards — Hill Mari and Meadow-Eastern Mari (often given simply as Meadow Mari) — both with official standing in Mari El, and these correspond to the principal dialect divisions of the language, with Eastern and Northwestern varieties besides. Here a point of classification must be made carefully, because it is genuinely unsettled. Older handbooks grouped Mari with the Mordvinic languages (Erzya and Moksha) into a “Volga-Finnic” or “Volgaic” branch of Uralic, a tidy box on the family tree. Modern linguistics has dismantled that box. The Volga-Finnic grouping is now widely regarded as obsolete — a label of geography rather than of genuine common descent — and recent classifications, including those followed by reference works since around 2009, treat Mari as a branch of Uralic in its own right rather than as a junior partner of the Finnic peoples. The Mari language, on this view, is not Finnish’s close cousin so much as its own old line within the wider family. The point matters less for the speaker than for the family tree, but it should be stated plainly: the once-standard “Volga-Finnic” label is no longer a safe one.

One thing must be set aside at the outset, because the spelling invites a confusion that has nothing in it. The Mari people of the Volga have no connection whatever to the ancient city of Mari on the Euphrates, the Bronze Age Syrian capital excavated at Tell Hariri. The two share four letters and not one thread of history, language, or place. The Mari here are a living Uralic people of the Russian forest; the other Mari is a buried Semitic city of the Near East. The coincidence is purely one of spelling.

The recorded history of the Mari as a distinct people runs through the great political shifts of the middle Volga. They lived under the influence of Volga Bulgaria and then, for centuries, within the orbit of the Golden Horde and the Khanate of Kazan that succeeded it. The decisive break came in 1552, when Ivan IV — Ivan the Terrible — took Kazan and brought the middle Volga under Moscow. The Mari did not submit quietly. Their long resistance is remembered in Russian historiography as the Cheremis Wars, a series of bitter risings against Muscovite rule that ran into the 1580s, with the heaviest fighting in the 1550s, the early 1570s, and the early 1580s. The wars failed, and the Mari passed into the Russian state, but the memory of having fought, and the stubbornness it expresses, run deep in how the people understand themselves.

The sacred grove, the priest, and the offering

What sets the Mari apart in the imagination of Europe is their religion — the Mari traditional faith, which they kept alive through every pressure to give it up. It is not a reconstruction and not a revival in the sense of something rebuilt from books. It is a tradition that went into the forest and survived there, and has now come back into the open.

At its head stands the great sky-god, Kugu Yumo — the name means the Great God, kugu great and yumo god — addressed in the prayers by a fuller and more solemn formula, Osh Poro Kugu Yumo, the Great White Good God. He is the foremost of the powers, the maker of the order of the world and the protector of humankind, the high god associated with the sky, the light, and the reason of things. Around him stands a whole host of gods and powers: the deities of the sun and the wind, of the earth and the water, of the household and the field and the forest, the many spirits of place that fill a world understood as alive throughout. The Mari religion is in this sense plural — a worship of many powers under a foremost one — and at the same time it tends, in the way its keepers speak of it, toward the sense that all these powers stand within a single divine order. It is a faith without scripture and without a central church; its authority is the tradition itself, carried by the community and its elders.

Its central institution is the sacred grove. The Mari word is kusoto (also rendered küsoto or kÿsoto) — a stand of old trees, set apart as holy, in which the community gathers to pray and to offer. There is no temple. The grove is the temple, and the living trees are its pillars. Scattered along both banks of the Volga and beyond, several hundred such groves survive — counts run from around four hundred to five or six hundred — each tended, each known, many of them protected now as natural and cultural monuments. Into the grove the people come, under the guidance of their priests, the kart (plural karts), the men in the white hats who lead the prayers and the offerings. The kart is not a priest in the sense of an ordained clergy set apart for life; he is a respected elder, knowledgeable in the prayers and the proper forms, who presides at the communal rites. In the household, an elder leads the family’s own worship; where there is no elder fit to do it, a kart is invited in.

The offering at the grove is the heart of the rite, and it is best described at the plain distance of what an observer sees and what the worshipers themselves say of it, as recorded in modern field reporting from the Mari groves (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty). The people bring food — bread, kvass, honey, porridge — and the animals to be offered, most often geese, sometimes a sheep, on the largest occasions a horse. The goose holds a special honor, regarded as the purest of the offerings because it belongs at once to earth, water, and air. The chosen animals are slaughtered, and their meat is cooked in great cauldrons in the grove itself; portions of the food and the meat are set out at the foot of the trees dedicated to the gods, the smoke and the prayers rising among the living wood, and the rest is shared and eaten by the gathered people. The kart prays aloud on behalf of those who have brought the gifts, asking for the well-being of the family, the harvest, the herd, the people. The offerings are made many times in the year, at the turning-points of the agricultural season — some twenty communal occasions in all — and the very largest, the all-Mari and regional prayers, draw worshipers from across the whole homeland, on a scale that runs to many hundreds and, on the great communal days, to the thousands.

Here a distinction must be drawn that careless sources blur. The kusoto is the prayer-grove of the heavenly gods, the grove of Kugu Yumo and the bright powers. But the Mari sacred landscape holds another, narrower and more dangerous category, the keremet. In the strict usage of the tradition and its scholars, the keremet is not simply a synonym for the sacred grove. It is bound up with a particular order of power — a chthonic spirit of the earth and the water, in some accounts a single ambiguous figure who keeps the count of human wrongs and metes out punishment for broken rites, in others the spirits of the dead or of place that must be appeased rather than loved. The keremet site is the grove or enclosure set apart for such a spirit, and the offerings made there have a different character: not the open thanksgiving of the kusoto, but the careful, propitiatory dealing-with of a power that can harm. To collapse kusoto and keremet into one word for “sacred grove” is to lose exactly the distinction the Mari themselves keep — between the worship of the high bright gods and the appeasement of the dark powers of the ground (on the character of the keremet, see L. S. Toidybekova).

It should be said, against the temptation to make the Mari more pristine than they are, that their religion did not survive in isolation from Christianity. From the sixteenth century onward most Mari were, at least nominally, baptized into Russian Orthodoxy, and the faith as it is actually lived is in many quarters a layered thing, in which Orthodox saints and the gods of the grove occupy the same year and the same household. A portion of the people — by some estimates around a quarter who call themselves followers of the old faith, a smaller share who practice it as their religion proper — hold the grove-religion as their own, whether alongside the church or instead of it. The tradition is real and continuous; it is not, and has not for centuries been, hermetically sealed.

A tree set apart for the gods in a Mari sacred grove, with offerings at its foot, in the Mari Republic, 2002. Ildikó Lehtinen, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

Suppression, survival, and the open revival

The grove-religion endured two long ages of pressure, and that endurance is the larger part of its meaning.

The first came with the Russian conquest. After 1552 the tsarist state and the Orthodox Church set themselves to convert the Mari, and the pressure ran through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the familiar pattern of coercion and inducement — missions, the building of churches, exemptions from tax and military service offered to those who would be baptized, penalties and contempt for those who clung to the old ways. The Mari converted in name and largely kept the substance of their religion underground or in plain forest sight, and the official record of the period is a missionary record, written from outside and from above, that regarded the grove-worship as idolatry to be stamped out. Read for its facts rather than its judgments, that hostile record is itself one of the main early witnesses to the tradition it sought to destroy.

The second age of pressure was the Soviet one, and it was, if anything, harsher. The atheist state of the twentieth century made war on religion of every kind, and the Mari faith was no exception: groves were closed and in places destroyed, public prayer was forbidden, and the keepers of the tradition — like religious leaders across the Soviet Union — were harassed, silenced, imprisoned, and in the worst years killed. The Mari national and cultural intelligentsia suffered severely in the purges. Through all of it the religion did what it had done under the tsars. It went quiet, it went into the forest and the family, and it waited.

When the Soviet system fell, it came back into the open. In 1991 the Mari traditional faith was formally registered, an organizational center was established, and the great communal prayers that had ceased under Soviet rule began again in public. In the post-Soviet decades the religion has been recognized as a living faith of the Mari people, its largest gatherings drawing thousands into the groves, its priests once more presiding without concealment, its calendar of offerings observed across the homeland. The revival has not been without friction — adherents have at times reported renewed official pressure, and the modern movement has had to mark itself off from the imported neo-paganisms that look superficially like it — but the essential fact stands. Where almost every other indigenous European tradition of this kind was broken and had to be reconstructed from fragments, the Mari grove-religion was carried unbroken, in living practice, across both the imperial and the Soviet century.

A Mari kart at prayer in the grove, praying on behalf of those who have made the offering, in the Mari Republic, 2004. Ildikó Lehtinen, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

The Mari among the sources, and among the living traditions

How the Mari are known shapes how they are understood, and the knowledge comes from three distances.

The earliest written witness is the outsider’s: the Russian and missionary records of the conquest era and after, which described the grove-worship in order to condemn it, and the travelers and early ethnographers who, from the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century, recorded the Cheremis and their religion with growing care. Out of this came a substantial ethnographic literature — accounts of the groves, the gods, the offerings, the kart and the keremet — gathered by scholars of the Russian Empire and, in the same decades, by the Finnish and Hungarian researchers who saw in the Mari kindred speakers of a Uralic tongue and a precious living example of a Finno-Ugric religion still being practiced. To these scholars the Mari were not a museum but a field, and the comparative study of Finno-Ugric religion drew heavily on what could still be observed among them.

The second distance is the documented history of the suppression and the survival itself — the conquest of 1552 and the Cheremis Wars, the tsarist missions, the Soviet persecution, the registration of 1991 and the open revival — a record held in state archives, census returns, and the modern study of the post-Soviet religious revival. It is this documented continuity that gives the phrase “the last pagans of Europe” whatever exact meaning it has. The phrase is a journalist’s and an admirer’s coinage, and it should be handled with some care: it flattens the layering of the actual faith, it slights other surviving and revived European traditions, and it carries a whiff of the exotic. But it points at a real distinction. The Mari grove-religion is a genuinely indigenous tradition that was never wholly broken, and that is rare enough to be worth marking.

The third distance is the present one — the living Mari themselves, their own scholars and writers and priests, and the photographers and ethnographers who now document a religion practiced in the open. The Mari are not the only Uralic people whose old sacred world has drawn this attention. They stand alongside the Sami of the far north, whose shamanic religion of the noaidi and the drum was broken by missionary zeal, and the Karelians of the runo-song, from whose oral poetry the Kalevala was drawn. Against those, the Mari case is distinct in its own way: not an Arctic shamanism and not an epic preserved in verse, but the worship of the grove kept up as worship — the kart’s prayer and the offering at the tree, performed without interruption into a century that expected such things to be long dead. The Mari did not preserve a memory of their religion. They preserved the religion. That is the thing the visitor to the grove outside Marisola is actually looking at: not a survival in the sense of a relic, but a faith that is simply, still, being practiced.

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