Shyoltozero

Shyoltozero (English) Шёлтозеро (Russian) Šoutjärv’ (Veps)
-  Rural locality[citation needed]  -
Location of the Republic of Karelia in Russia
Shyoltozero Location of Shyoltozero in the Republic of Karelia
Coordinates: 61°22′15″N 35°21′29″E
Administrative status
Country	Russia
Federal subject	Republic of Karelia
Statistics
Time zone	MSD (UTC+04:00)
Postal code(s)	186114[citation needed]

A road sign on the P–19 highway, with the name of the village in Russian, and in a mishmash of Veps and Finnish.

Shyoltozero (Russian: Шёлтозеро; Veps: Šoutjärv’; Karelian: Šoutjärvi) is a rural locality (a selo) in the Prionezhsky District of the Republic of Karelia, Russia, located 84 kilometers (52 mi) south of Petrozavodsk, close to the shore of Lake Onega.

Present-day Shyoltozero

Shyoltozero is the cultural center of the north Veps people, and during 1994–2005 it was the territorial center of Veps National Volost. In the 2002 Census, it was reported that the population was 1,039, but in a study conducted in the mid-1990s, it was found that the population was ca. 970, of which 61% were Veps or of Veps descent, 7% represented other Baltic Finnic nationalities, and 32% represented Russians and other East Slavic ethnicities.

The present-day Shyoltozero was originally a group of separate villages (posads). Shyoltozero consists of the following posads, with the museum and the House of Culture being points of reference:

• D’eremišt — from the museum to the main intersection, Ulica Pochtovaya
• Mel’kamättaz (‘the Mel’kin Hill’) — the museum vicinity, Ulica Pochtovaya
• Markimättaz (’Mark’s Hill’) — across the river, Ulica Goristaya (the farthest away houses in the southeast)
• Minamättaz — across the river, Ulica Goristaya (from Markimättas to the village)
• Hamamättaz — across the river, Ulica Goristaya, houses 14–35
• Pedroimättaz — across the river, Ulica Goristaya, houses 1–11
• Kukoinposad (‘Rooster’s Village’) — across the river, Ulica Zarechnaya, houses 24–40
• Alažagd’ (‘The Lower End’) — the first houses as one arrives from the north, Ulica Zarechnaya, along the road
• Ülizagd’ (‘The Upper End’) — the most southwestern part of the village, Ulica Zagorodnaya
• Dokuc’ — Ulica Lisicynoĭ
• Papinposad (‘Priest’s village’) — Ulica Pionerskaya
• Noumančug — Ulica Sovhoznaya, Ulica Molodyozhnaya; the small houses and the two-storey apartment buildings
• Mikroraion (apartment building neighbourhood) — Ulica Molodyozhnaya, the newer three-storey apartment building

In practice people have for several decades used only street names to identify most of these places, to the effect that in 1997 it was possible to find only one older resident, Anna Nikitina (b. 1922), who knew where the former posads were located and where their boundaries were. It was thanks to her that it was possible to establish that the former church (the present House of Culture) was not located in Papinposad (‘Priest’s village’), but in Dokuc’ instead.

History

The archbishop of Novgorod mentioned the village of Shyoltozero for the first time in 1453.

The original Shyoltozero was located 6 kilometers (3.7 mi) to the southwest of the present village, near the villages of Kalinansar’ and Sürd’, by the lake Kodijär’v. The name of this lake in older Russian maps is Shyoltozero. The inhabitants of the original Shyoltozero had at some point moved to the site of the present village, and the original village and lake had been given the name Kodijär’v (Veps for ‘home lake’). Kodijär’v can be seen in the Yandex maps as Кодьярви.

In the place name Šoutar’v one can see the sound change *l > u, which has occurred in Veps throughout (cf. Finn. kolme ~ Veps koum ‘three’). When considered together with the testimony of old Russian maps, it is clear that the earlier Veps name has been *Šoltjärvi. Thus this place name has nothing to do with the Finnish word soutaa (‘to row’), and the frequently used Finnish form Soutjärvi is based on an incorrect etymology.

Before the 1920s, Shyoltozero and its neighboring villages (roughly the territory of the former Veps National Volost) formed the Shyoltozero pogost, which was part of Petrozavodsky Uyezd. With the advent of the Soviet state, the pogost became part of Shyoltozersky District, which was dissolved in 1957 and made part of Prionezhsky District.

During the post-Soviet era, Shyoltozero functioned as the administrative center of Veps National Volost that existed in 1994–2005. Besides Shyoltozero, the volost included two other villages with their own selsoviets, Shoksha and Rybreka. The office of the volost was located in Shyoltozero, and Shyoltozersky Selsoviet was located near the post office, and the other selsoviets were Rybreka (in Čuur) and Shoksha (in Kvarcitnyĭ).

On January 1, 2006, the volost was dissolved and the three main villages of which it had consisted now became municipal rural settlements, of which one is Shyoltozerskoye Rural Settlement.

Museum

Shyoltozero has a local museum, the name of which has been, as of May 2010, The Rjurik Lonin Veps Ethnographic Museum in Šoutar’v (Shyoltozero) (Russian: Sholtozerskiĭ vepsskiĭ ètnograficheskiĭ muzeĭ imeni R. Lonina; Veps: Šoutar’ven vepslahnje etnografine Rjurik Lonin –muzei). It was founded in 1967 by a resident of Shyoltozero, sovkhoz worker Rjurik Lonin (1930–2009), who was originally from the village of Kaskez’. The first premises of the museum were in the village library house in the Dokuc’ neighbourhood, opposite of the House of Culture (former church). Later the museum was given its own house in the Hamamättaz neighbourhood. In the 1980s the museum was given the so-called Mel’kin House as its premises, where it is now located. According to the home pages of the museum, the building “was built in the mid-19th century, and it is a monument of Karelian wooden architechture.

The museum also includes the Tuchin House that is located behind the Mel’kin House. The Tuchin House was originally located in the village of Kalinansar’, along the road from Shyoltozero to Matfejansel’g. During World War II it was the home of Dmitriĭ Yegorovich Tuchin and his wife Maria Mihailovna Tuchina, who accommodated Soviet partisans in their house. Also a woman of Finnish extraction, Sylvi Paaso, lived in this house for eight months and radioed information on the movements of the Finnish troops to the Soviet military. The novel The Operation in the Vacuum Zone by Oleg Tikhonov tells about this period. An excerpt of the novel has been published in Finnish in the journal Punalippu (‘The Red Flag’).

The director of the museum is Ms. Natal’ya Ankhimova, originally from the Ogerišt village of Vehkoi.

External links

• Veps National Volost www.gov.karelia.ru — Official server of the republic’s administration.
• Official statistics