Votian

The Votians are a Finnic people of Ingria, between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Peipus, considered its oldest known inhabitants and probably descended from Iron Age farmers.

Medieval Russian chronicles call them the Voď and group them with Finnic neighbours as Chudes. In 1069 they joined a raid on Novgorod, but later became part of the Novgorod Republic, whose Vodskaya division took its name from them.

When Moscow absorbed Novgorod in the 1470s, many Votians were deported. From 1534 Orthodox missionaries sent by Archbishop Macarius destroyed their pagan shrines and gradually converted them. Sweden ruled Ingria for most of the seventeenth century; the Votians kept their Orthodox faith and Votic tongue, and their villages around Koporye and the Soikino peninsula remained the heart of Votia.