Mari mythology.

[HoneyBadger]

Hi!

I found a site that purports to be about Mari people beliefs/religion/mythology (it links to Wikipedia), incase anyone's interested in turning it into a mod Nation at some point, or just learning something new:

Here's the site below, in Russian:

http://virginia.ru/mari-mythology/

Ich's post below this one has a pretty useable version in English.

It's definitely worth checking out.

Here's a wikipedia article on the Mari: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mari_people
Apparently they're Volga-Finnic in origin, and considered the first people to live along the Volga river, so not only Russians but Finns on the boards (as well as clueless American history buffs like me :) ) might find them interesting.

[lch]

PROMT's translate.ru site offers near-perfect online translation (http://www.online-translator.com/site_Translation.aspx?direction=re&template=General&autotranslate=on&transliterate=&flw=1&showvariants=&sourceURL=http://virginia.ru/mari-mythology/) of russian text. Click on the link to try it out for that site.

[HoneyBadger]

Thanks Ich, that's a very big help!

So there you go, a relatively unknown (atleast in the US, I'd never heard of it, anyway), exotic and distinct, Pagan religion/mythology, for anyone who's interested in making a mod Nation based on it.

[Lingchih]

What? You guys can't read Russian. C'mon.

[Omnirizon]

all translation is scandalous.

-some social/knowledge theorist whose name escapes me at the moment

[Wrana]

Well, I was never particularly interested in this particular people - after all, there are more than 200 various peoples in Russia, according to statistics... But they are surely of Finn-hungarian group. Site seems authentic enough, but I'm not specialist. As I understand, you can also buy a full version of his encyclopedia - but of course, you will need somebody who will agree to translate such a volume! %)
There are also some sources on various mythologies of peoples of Russia in Russian sector of Livejournal - sometimes even posted by actual researchers...