Pomors
From Free net encyclopedia
Pomors (помо́ры) are Russian settlers of the White Sea coasts. As early as the 12th century, explorers from Novgorod entered the White Sea through Northern Dvina and Onega estuaries and founded settlements along the sea coasts. They explored the Barents region and the Kola peninsula, Spitsbergen and Novaya Zemlya. With their ships (koches), the Pomors penetrated to the trans-Ural areas of Northern Siberia, where they founded the city of Mangazeya east of the Yamal Peninsula in the early 1500's. The Pomors maintained a Northern trade route between Arkhangelsk and Siberia. Their chief town used to be Kholmogory, until rise of Arkhangelsk in the late 1500's. The most famous Pomors are Mikhail Lomonosov, Fedot Shubin (both born near Kholmogory) and Semyon Dezhnev (born in Velikiy Ustyug).
The name of Pomors is derived from the Pomorsky Coast of the White Sea (between Onega and Kem), having the root of “море” (sea).
The traditional livelihoods of the Pomors based on the sea animal hunting, whaling and fishing; in the tundra regions they practiced the reindeer herding. The sea trading by corn and fish with the northern Norway was important for them. This trade was so intensive that a kind of Russian-Norwegian pidgin language Moja på tvoja (or russenorsk) was created and used on the North Norwegian coast in 1750-1920. Image:Коч.jpg
After the collapse of the Soviet Union a debate has started as to whether the Pomors should be recognized as an indigenous people and included into the list of Northern indigenous peoples of Russia.
As per the census of 2002, 6,571 people in Russia identified themselves as Pomors, almost all of them in Arkhangelsk Oblast (6,295) and Murmansk Oblast (127). It should be noted that one of the three universities of Arkhangelsk is named the Pomor State University. In line with the current Russian trend towards agglomeration of least populated and/or poorest federal subjects into bigger entities, a merger of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk Oblasts, the Komi Republic, and the Nenets autonomous district has been proposed, one of the possible names of this new territory being the Pomor-Nenets Republic.