Man, Past and Present

by A. H. Keane

The Volga Finns.

Similar beliefs and practices still prevail not only amongst the Siberian Finns—Ostyaks of the Yenisei and Obi rivers, Voguls of the Urals—but even amongst the Votyaks, Mordvinians, Cheremisses and other scattered groups still surviving in the Volga basin. So recently as the year 1896 a number of Votyaks were tried and convicted for the murder of a passing mendicant, whom they had beheaded to appease the wrath of Kiremet, Spirit of Evil and author of the famine raging at that time in Central Russia. Besides Kiremet, the Votyaks—who appear to have migrated from the Urals to their present homes between the Kama and the Viatka rivers about 400 A.D., and are mostly heathens—also worship Inmar, God of Heaven, to whom they sacrifice animals as well as human beings whenever it can be safely done. We are assured by Baron de Baye that even the few who are baptized take part secretly in these unhallowed rites[727].

To the Ugrian branch, rudest and most savage of all the Finnish peoples, belong these now moribund Volga groups, as well as the fierce Bulgar and Magyar hordes, if not also their precursors, the Jazyges and Rhoxolani, who in the second century A.D. swarmed into Pannonia from the Russian steppe, and in company with the Germanic Quadi and Marcomanni twice (168 and 172) advanced to the walls of Aquileia, and were twice arrested by the legions of Marcus Aurelius and Verus. Of the once numerous Jazyges, whom Pliny calls Sarmates, there were several branches—Maeotae, Metanastae, Basilii ("Royal")—who were first reduced by the Goths spreading from the Baltic to the Euxine and Lower Danube, and then overwhelmed with the Dacians, Getae, Bastarnae, and a hundred other ancient peoples in the great deluge of the Hunnish invasion.

The Bulgars—Origins and Migrations.

From the same South Russian steppe—the plains watered by the Lower Don and Dnieper—came the Bulgars, first in association with the Huns, from whom they are scarcely distinguished by the early Byzantine writers, and then as a separate people, who, after throwing off the yoke of the Avars (635 A.D.), withdrew before the pressure of the Khazars westwards to the Lower Danube (678). But their records go much farther back than these dates, and while philologists and archaeologists are able to trace their wanderings step by step north to the Middle Volga and the Ural Mountains, authentic Armenian documents carry their history back to the second century B.C. Under the Arsacides numerous bands of Bulgars, driven from their homes about the Kama confluence by civil strife, settled on the banks of the Aras, and since that time (150-114 B.C.) the Bulgars were known to the Armenians as a great nation dwelling away to the north far beyond the Caucasus.

Originally the name, which afterwards acquired such an odious notoriety amongst the European peoples, may have been more geographical than ethnical, implying not so much a particular nation as all the inhabitants of the Bulga (Volga) between the Kama and the Caspian. But at that time this section of the great river seems to have been mainly held by more or less homogeneous branches of the Finno-Ugrian family, and palethnologists have now shown that to this connection beyond all question belonged in physical appearance, speech, and usages those bands known as Bulgars, who formed permanent settlements in Moesia south of the Lower Danube towards the close of the seventh century[728]. Here "these bold and dexterous archers, who drank the milk and feasted on the flesh of their fleet and indefatigable horses; whose flocks and herds followed, or rather guided, the motions of their roving camps; to whose inroads no country was remote or impervious, and who were practised in flight, though incapable of fear[729]," established a powerful state, which maintained its independence for over seven hundred years (678-1392).

Acting at first in association with the Slavs, and then assuming "a vague dominion" over their restless Sarmatian allies, the Bulgars spread the terror of their hated name throughout the Balkan lands, and were prevented only by the skill of Belisarius from anticipating their Turki kinsmen in the overthrow of the Byzantine Empire itself. Procopius and Jornandes have left terrible pictures of the ferocity, debasement, and utter savagery, both of the Bulgars and of their Slav confederates during the period preceding the foundation of the Bulgar dynasty in Moesia. Wherever the Slavs (Antes, Slavini) passed, no soul was left alive; Thrace and Illyria were strewn with unburied corpses; captives were shut up with horse and cattle in stables, and all consumed together, while the brutal hordes danced to the music of their shrieks and groans. Indescribable was the horror inspired by the Bulgars, who killed for killing's sake, wasted for sheer love of destruction, swept away all works of the human hand, burnt, razed cities, left in their wake nought but a picture of their own cheerless native steppes. Of all the barbarians that harried the Empire, the Bulgars have left the most detested name, although closely rivalled by the Slavs.

To the ethnologist the later history of the Bulgarians is of exceptional interest. They entered the Danubian lands in the seventh century as typical Ugro-Finns, repulsive alike in physical appearance and mental characters. Their dreaded chief, Krum, celebrated his triumphs with sanguinary rites, and his followers yielded in no respects to the Huns themselves in coarseness and brutality. Yet an almost complete moral if not physical transformation had been effected by the middle of the ninth century, when the Bulgars were evangelised by Byzantine missionaries, exchanged their rude Ugrian speech for a Slavonic tongue, the so-called "Church Slav," or even "Old Bulgarian," and became henceforth merged in the surrounding Slav populations. The national name "Bulgar" alone survives, as that of a somewhat peaceful southern "Slav" people, who in our time again acquired the political independence of which they had been deprived by Bajazet I. in 1392.

Great and Little Bulgaria.

Nor did this name disappear from the Volga lands after the great migration of Bulgar hordes to the Don basin during the third and fourth centuries A.D. On the contrary, here arose another and a greater Bulgar empire, which was known to the Byzantines of the tenth century as "Black Bulgaria," and later to the Arabs and Western peoples as "Great Bulgaria," in contradistinction to the "Little Bulgaria" south of the Danube[730]. It fell to pieces during the later "Tatar" wars, and nothing now remains of the Volga Bulgars, except the Volga itself from which they were named.