The Vepsian people live in remote villages just 300 kilometres from Saint Petersburg, combining smartphone use with ancient forest magic and traditional folklore.
Reporters from Lenta.ru visited the Vepsian Forest alongside the Mediarazvedka project organized by Tutu.ru. They explored how this small Finno-Ugric population maintains its distinct culture across Leningrad Oblast and Karelia.
Official protection for the region began in 1999 with the creation of the Vepsian Forest Natural Park in Leningrad Oblast, covering 189.1 thousand hectares of old-growth spruce forests, bogs, and rivers. The historical territory of the Vepsians extends further, stretching between Lake Ladoga, Lake Onega, and White Lake. Ethnographers divide the population into three main branches: Northern or Lake Onega Vepsians, Middle or Oyat Vepsians, and Southern Vepsians. Today, community members live primarily in Karelia, Leningrad Oblast, and Vologda Oblast.
Population figures show a rapid decline. Over an eleven-year period, the number of registered Vepsians in Russia fell from 5,936 to 4,534 people.
Local Hospitality and Language Preservation
In the village of Yaroslavichi, hidden inside a bend of the Oyat River, local resident Natasha Chudova welcomes travelers directly into her home. Rather than staging costumed theatrical performances with traditional iron pots, she serves homemade food cooked in a brick oven. Her table features mushrooms, pies, and kalitki, which are small open pastries crafted from rye dough.
While hosting guests, Chudova shares stories and speaks phrases in the Vepsian language. Vepsian belongs to the Baltic-Finnic language branch, making it closely related to Finnish, Karelian, and Estonian. To outside listeners, it features short words, soft transitions, and a constant emphasis on the first syllable, such as the word choma, which means beautiful or luxurious. Chudova admitted that when she was first asked to host tourists, she refused because she worried about speaking to city dwellers as a village woman. She later grew accustomed to the visits and now misses guests when nobody arrives.
Cultural hesitancy stems from severe twentieth-century restrictions. Vepsian education was phased out in the late 1930s as schools shifted entirely to Russian instruction. Authorities confiscated Vepsian textbooks, and teachers punished children for speaking their native tongue during lessons or breaks.
Facing discrimination and ridicule over their accents, parents chose to speak Russian to their children so they could move to cities and build careers. Many individuals registered themselves as Russian, causing the Vepsian language to vanish from classrooms, official records, and family homes.
Sacred Beliefs and Forest Spirits
Local traditions retain a deep connection to magical practices and secret places. Chudova recalled sending a distressed woman from Moscow to a sacred local stone after the visitor arrived weeping and searching for a husband. The woman encountered her future husband immediately upon leaving the village. Chudova explained that she has never visited the stone herself because villagers must not go there without genuine need, and she only sent the visitor because her despair was overwhelming. Other women asked to visit the stone, but Chudova refused them because their distress was insufficient.
Similar sacred locations exist throughout the region. Residents of surrounding villages know their locations but refrain from guiding outsiders to them without cause.
For centuries, the forest provided timber, food, grazing land, berries, mushrooms, and game, yet villagers never viewed human beings as its primary master. Vepsian mythology assigns spiritual overseers to bodies of water, homes, bathhouses, ovens, and especially the forest. The forest master, known as lesnoy khozyain, governs wildlife and dictates human conduct within the woods.
Ilya Zheltyakov, a tour guide and founder of the Forest and Wind travel project, stated that he had never witnessed such deep integration with nature anywhere else. He observed local women near eighty years of age carrying woven baskets into the forest without tents or sleeping bags, staying overnight, and returning with berries. He noted that for these residents, knowing how to ask the forest for passage is a normal part of daily life. Zheltyakov added that in local culture, a day lived without visiting the forest is considered wasted.
Restoring Cabins in Remote Villages
Zheltyakov and documentary filmmaker Anastasiya Polukhina first arrived in Vepsian territory roughly ten years ago while searching for a shooting location free from modern visual clutter. After completing their film, they continued returning to the area and eventually purchased an old log cabin. In 2020, they established the Forest and Wind travel club, which brings small tour groups to remote villages, restores historic timber houses, and supplies elderly residents with winter firewood.
The team operates without transforming the properties into stylized commercial hotels. They restore cabins using authentic methods, requiring guests to stoke brick stoves and heat outdoor bathhouses. While gathering unwanted items for their first house, local families donated genuine heirlooms, including a patchwork quilt over one hundred and fifty years old that multiple generations of women had mended.
Visitors can rent these restored homes for minimum stays of several days to experience traditional village life. One restored cabin stands in Shondovichi, a settlement split by the Oyat River. Access to lower Shondovichi requires crossing a suspension bridge, while heavy construction supplies for restoring the cabin had to be driven across the river aboard timber trucks wading through the water.
Village Life and Natural Orthodoxy
In Shondovichi, thirty-year-old local resident Ivan prepares traditional pies and oven casseroles for guests. He plays guitar, writes poetry, and sings for visitors gathered in a gazebo beside the river while drinking tea from a samovar. Evenings often involve reading Vepsian fairy tales aloud. Unlike traditional Russian folklore focused on male heroics, Vepsian tales frequently center on female protagonists, incorporating witches, sorcerers, forest spirits, temporary death, and harsh cruelty blended into ordinary rural events.
Villagers discuss marriages and home repairs in the same routine manner as magic herbs or witch neighbors. Christianity arrived centuries ago, but residents maintain a hybrid belief system that locals humorously term natural Orthodoxy. Villagers pray before religious icons while simultaneously honoring the forest master, viewing prayers to the Virgin Mary as complementary to traditional spells.
Communities continue to recognize knowing people, who possess specific spoken incantations to interact with unseen powers without needing specialized attire or ceremonial items. Historically, shepherds requested a formal ritual known as an otpusk from a knowing person before grazing livestock in dense timber. This symbolic contract with the forest master required the shepherd to follow strict rules, such as refraining from breaking branches, picking berries, or engaging in intimate relations. Zheltyakov recalled a former shepherd and tractor driver explaining how he repaired a sunken tractor underwater, who considered obtaining a sorcerer permission as routine as changing tractor oil.
Local author Valentina Vasilyevna Lebedeva, who was born in Myagozero and has written books on Vepsian language and cuisine, shared how traditional remedies helped her recover from a severe accident. After suffering spinal injuries, hearing loss, and vision decline in her youth, she returned from Saint Petersburg to her decaying ancestral home following her mother's death, finding leaking roofs and rainwater collection tubs. Drawing on remedies remembered from her grandmothers, she treated her back using a dried pike head. She rubbed the smooth bone of the flexible fish spine over her injured back while reciting traditional words, resulting in her recovery.
Lebedeva explained that Vepsian culture values a quality known as slovutnaya, meaning a woman who is attractive, noticeable, feminine, and widely spoken of, rather than merely conventional beauty. Inside her home, Lebedeva keeps a dried pike head on her nightstand and iron pieces under her mattress alongside a traditional icon corner, illustrating how ancient spiritual traditions and Orthodox faith coexist in the Vepsian Forest.
