Vepsian

The Vepsians are a Baltic Finnic people of the lake country between Lake Ladoga, Lake Onega and Lake Beloye. The Gothic writer Jordanes may name them in the sixth century. The Russian Primary Chronicle calls them the ves, the first inhabitants of Beloozero, who paid tribute to the Varangians in 859.

Farming, fur hunting and river trade on the Volga route sustained them. From the twelfth century most Vepsian lands belonged to Novgorod; groups crossing the Svir merged into the Karelians. After Moscow annexed Novgorod in 1478 the rest became state peasants, gradually assimilated by Slavic settlers.

In the early eighteenth century northern Vepsians were assigned to the Olonets ironworks and others to the Lodeynoye Pole shipyard. In 1824 the ethnographer Sjögren traced their identity back to the ves of the chronicles.