Frequent commenter rozele sent me this link, describing it thusly:
it’s an epic-length 90s-style webpage (remember infinitely long webpages with tables of contents? are they scrolls to contemporary sites’ codex structure?) by one andrei conovaloff. it aims to disentangle the confusing terminology used for one corner of the russian spiritual christian landscape. along the way, it’s an insider’s history (and ethnography, really) of what conovaloff clarifies should be distinguished as the Molokane, the Pryguny, and the Dukh-i-zhizniki, especially their north american diasporic branches. i found it a great ride, and learned a lot along the way.
She’s not kidding. My jaw literally fell open after a few minutes and remained that way until I backed out to post; I’ve only scratched the surface, but I feared if I kept going I might not eat for the rest of the day, let alone post. Here’s a sample, about the “malakans” and why you shouldn’t confuse them with Molokans:
The ancestors of malakan people were Spiritual Christians who came from the Russian Empire after Russia began colonizing the Caucasus, after 1840, to get more economic benefits (more land, no taxes) and religious freedom. They are neither creeds, nor sub-creeds of one faith or religion. They are many faiths of mostly heterodox (non-Orthodox), mostly White people, many intermixed with other peoples (Asiatic, Northern Europe, Germanic) from many places in the Russian Empire who migrated to the Caucasus. The exception to non-Orthodox are the old rite Orthodox, Old Ritualists, who are also considered heretics to the New Orthodox. Most malakane lived in groups or clans, often in their own villages, or sharing a village with other heterodox people from Russia who met for the first time in the Caucasus, often clashing, some inter-marrying.
Malakan is an etic term used by indigenous Caucasian peoples referring to the “new invasive settlers from Russia” — a foreign group, “them” (chuzhikh grupp), “outsiders,” outgroup, ne nashi, aliens. In a similar xenophobic manner, before 1700 in the Russian Empire, all western foreigners in Russia were called Nemtsy (dumb, those who can’t speak our language), no matter what their actual nationality; and this term meant both Germans and stupid, because few could understand them. It was more insulting than Americans today who say: “It’s Greek to me” when they don’t understand something. In a similar fashion, a single derogatory term is used in the American Southwest “… to refer to (any) foreign citizens living in the U.S.” — “wetback” (morjado [sic; should be mojado — LH]).
Do not confuse the general category malakan with the Spiritual Christian Molokan faith. These 2 words sound alike, appear to be cognates, and are too often confused. The origin of Molokan is from the heresy of eating dairy (molochnye) products, probably morphed into a pun about nursing infants (molokane) who cannot understand religion. The origin of malakan is probably from a geographic river area in South Ukraine, northeast of Crimea.
Malakan originally was a demonym (gentilic) for “people from the Molochnaya (river area)” who were moved to the Caucasus(30) by the thousands. Molochnaya (German: Molotschna) is the river delta and territory in south Ukraine northeast of Crimea. Molochnaya means “milky” in Russian, which referred to the abundant dairy grazing land. In the native language Cuman (Polovtsy), the area was called syutana, meaning “nurse, mother.”(31) For most of a century, many descendants of Spiritual Christians in the southern republics of the Soviet Union and who migrated to the U.S.A. from the Caucasus, retained an oral history that their label (malakan) came from ancestors who lived in “Milky-waters.”(32) I was told by Molokane who remained in Central Russia that they never heard this rumor until they met Molokan refugees from the Caucasus and South Ukraine who were repatriated to Central Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Most settlers in the Caucasus from Russia called malakan were illiterate and did not know much of their history, nor how to define their faiths. They probably accepted the default geographic label, emic, from within their groups, like I did when some people who did not know, or could not remember my name, nicknamed me “Arizona” from my 1952 Ford car license plate, when I moved from Arizona to Los Angeles in 1966. The old car and my country manners excluded me from most of LA-UMCA parking lotters who valued sporty cars and surfers.
I could go on quoting — he tells us about Los Angeles tribalism and the Aktinsky congregation on Percy Street before getting back to how “the easy to pronounce term — malakan — expanded into common usage in South Caucasus languages […] to refer to any peoples similar to malakan, any indigenous non-Orthodox faith (heresy, sekt) from Russia, and later into a general term for all Russian-speaking settlers from anywhere in Russia” — but you get the idea. One could spend days lost in this labyrinth. Thanks, rozele!
I stumbled upon this site years ago, when the Kardashians’ TV show was popular and someone asked me whether the name Kardashian was really derived from a Western Armenian pronunciation of քարտաշ kʿartaš “stonecutter, stone dresser, stonemason” (քար kʿar “stone”; տաշել tašel, taš- “to hew”). At the time, I wondered offhand whether it could also be from regional Turkish kardaş “brother” (standard kardeş). Cf., in various orthographic conventions I don’t have time to organise, Բաբայան, Babayan, from Turkish baba “father”; Տետեյան, Dedeyan, from Turkish dede “grandfather”; Տայիեան, Dayiyan, from Turkish dayı “maternal uncle”; Kojayan, perhaps from Turkish koca “husband”; Դադաշյան, Dadashian, from Azeri dadaş “big brother, older brother” and also in Turkish “admirable, virile young man” and “good friend”. In this regard it is interesting to compare the other ethnicities of the former Russian Empire: Qardaşov, that is, Russified “Brother’s descendant”, is a surname in Azerbaijan: Is “brother” here a nickname for a particular clan? Or a respected guy in town? Also note the Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev, famous for proposing the Kardashev scale. (His mother was high up in the Comintern of the Azov and Black Sea region, so maybe Crimean Tatar qardaş?) Kardaşoğlu and Kardeşoğlu exist in the Republic of Turkey. Although Republican Turkish names only date from 1934, the existence of these names gives insight into naming patterns. The surname Dadaşov exists in Azerbaijan, and Dadaşoğlu in Turkey. And finally, within Armenophone world itself, surnames like Aghbarian and Եղբայրեան Ełbayrean, from (regional variants) of Եղբայր ełbayr “brother”, with an echt Armenian base.
The possible use of “brother” led me to the page linked to, specifically this:
Could that be motivation for an original use of Turkish “brother” in Kardashian, if that is indeed the correct etymology? I have no idea what the correct etymology of the name is. Maybe someone with more interest in these celebrities can ferret it out.
“Maybe someone with more interest in these celebrities can ferret it out.”
Oh. But it is the first time I got curious about Kim Kardashian:( (I have no idea who she is, just know that the name appears in unappeling sources and she has impressive buttocks).
I was similarly blown away by this page, and then I went to the home page of the site. There are hundreds more links, mostly external, with titles like “Survey of 23 Published Films on the Doukhobors”.
FWIW, the Kardashians are from the village of Karakale, in the far NE border of Turkey (per a map in a presentation by Vaux, showing the origins of a few famous Armenians).
My great grandfather (the father of my maternal grandmother) would go to the Molokans in the Caucasus in the summer to work as a herder (he had to support a family of ten, after all), where he learned some Russian. Now it seems incredible that there were people in Russia who could not speak Russian, but it was so. I remember coming upon my maternal grandma and a fellow villager, Aunty Polya, a Russian from the same village, speaking Tatar so fluently I can’t even hope for. Aunty Polya worked as a house help for the writer Vladimir Karpov, before he moved to Moscow.
I love family stories like that.
“ Now it seems incredible that there were people in Russia who could not speak Russian, but it was so.”
I met in Moscow someone (a taxi driver, частник) who spoke very little Russian. The language (and cultural) barrier was impressive. He was from Kabardino-Balkaria (unless I am confusing it with Karachaevo-Cherkesia). I assume there are plenty of villages where Russian is never used (and towns where most people speak something else).
The important question is how common are schools where most subjects are taught IN the local language.
Так между разнообразными выселенцами в Воронежской губернии извозом занимаются только русские.
Воронеж наш!
“Kabardino-Balkaria (unless I am confusing it with Karachaevo-Cherkesia). ”
(Karachay and Balkar are the same Turkic language. Kabardians are Circassians…)
Kabardino-Balkaria at LH.
“Уклеин в основу своего учения полагал библию, но объяснял её рационалистически, а Побирохин, как духоборец, ставил внутреннее просвещение выше св. писания и библию называл хлопотницею”
“Uklein based his teachings on the Bible, but he explained it a rationalist fashion, while Pobirokhin as a dukhoborets put internal enlightenment above the holy scripture and called the Bible ‘khlopotnitsa’ ”
Goes against some stereotypes about the village and city (though it makes sense:* Jesus too did not exactly graduate from an university).
—
* the analogy here is that U. was a tailor.
Свекровь хлопотница — того не минует…
Yes, I was also impressed by “хлопотница” and in the former quotation I also noted “между разнообразными выселенцами …. только русские”: it implies that Voronezh region is very multi-ethnic:) The reason for posting the former passage was the parallel between my observation of presumably a Kabardian taxi driver “в среде недружественного христианского населения” and his predecessors.
Who holds back the electric car?
Who keeps Kardashian a star?
We do! We do!!!
She seems to be the first person to be called “famous for being famous”.
Recency illusion strikes again! Farrah Fawcett(-Majors) was called “famous for being famous” in 1982, and that’s just a preliminary check.
Whoa, it goes back to (at least) 1896! Quote Investigator:
And Raquel Welch in 1966 said “I am famous for being famous.”
Fawcett and Welch were a model (“a professional beauty”) and actress, respectively, before being famous. KK’s closest equivalent is her friend and mentor, Paris Hilton. In earlier years they would have been famous socialites or débutantes.
Add: Folks like Edie Sedgwick or Evelyn Nesbitt were celebrities in their day. What’s special about the modern female FFBFs is that they have full control of their lives (thanks to feminism, to be sure, but being rich to start with helps, too.)
Speaking on behalf of an entire generation who were adolescent American boys in the late 1970’s, I can assure you all that at least four or five years prior to 1982 Mrs. Fawcett-Majors was famous for concrete accomplishments other than recursively being famous.
OTOH, I have sometimes tried to differentiate myself from my cohort by stating that the scantily-clad blond whose picture was on my bedroom wall circa 1978 was not Mrs. F-M but Robert Plant.
Calling her Farrah Fawcett-Majors now sounds like a joke. I think already by the 1980s, she was significantly more visible than Lee Majors, and while a few people still seem nostalgic for The Six Million Dollar Man, It’s been a long time since I met anybody who had anything positive to say about The Fall Guy. (I’m not a big follower of celebrity news, but I also remember hearing in the 1990s about Fawcett’s acrimonious split with her long-term partner Ryan O’Neal. He’s a real piece of garbage—drugged out and abusive, apparently—although I understand Fawcett took his cheating ass back when she was dying of cancer. Ryan O’Neal did then take Fawcett’s death pretty hard, after a fashion; he was so drunk at her funeral that he didn’t recognize his daughter Tatum and tried hitting on her.)
LH, can you explain svp what “Свекровь хлопотница — того не минует” means?
BTW, Knut Hamsun in his travel in Southern Russia and Caucasus hired a molokanin as a coachman. I don’t remember any insightful tidbits, but it was a while sinse I read his travelog.
No, but you can see it in context here (p. 476, #567):
Ah, thanks. Well, I never knew that “busy mother-in-law” is such a trouble that you can only hope that she “won’t be spared the same”, but alright.
Judging from the context I assume “сама в люди пойдет” and “сам в людях возьмёт” refer to выйти замуж and взять в жёны. I did not know that they can be used with в людях.
Karachay and Balkar
I have a K-B–Russian dictionary that is titled Къарачай-Малкъар-Орус Сёзлюк (Qarachay-Malqar–Orus Sözlük). The M–B variation strikes again!
I’m puzzled by this:
Were there people who had a taboo against eating dairy products at all? People who were lactose intolerant?
I know that dairy products are not commonly eaten in some parts of Asia due to lactose intolerance being common, but I’ve not heard of it being actively a taboo. I know that koumiss is commonly consumed in central Asia.
I have not heard of this before.
FFBF:
Edie Sedgwick and Evelyn Nesbit were models and actresses.
When you dig into artistic movements of the past, you can often find women who were very much involved in the scene, as models or in other roles, who do not get much credit today. Kiki de Montparnasse, for example.
Paris Hilton is among a long series of wealthy heiresses whose antics were and are widely reported in the press. She at least operates her own businesses. Some of her predecessors did not really do anything much other than be “socialites”. Barbara Hutton, for example. Such people are examples of FFBF from many years ago.
I don’t know much about the Kardashians, but didn’t they have something to do with “reality TV”? Which is doing something, I suppose. More than the Duchess of Windsor.
The whole tabloid journalism thing goes back a long way. Like
Much played up in the popular press, such as it was at that time.
Ah, so Kim Kardashian is far from the first to be called “famous for being famous”, but may actually be the first one to be famous for being famous…
@maidhc: The traditional fasting norms of the mainstream Chistian church were/are that during Lent and other such fasting occasions throughout the year the faithful not only refrain from eating meat but also from consuming dairy products* and eggs, with the exception (in the Byzantine church calendar) of one week just before Lent proper which is all-dairy all the time. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslenitsa. The medieval Western tradition of having pancakes on Shrove Tuesday had the functional purpose of using up the remaining stock of butter and eggs on the eve of Ash Wednesday. Western practice then became looser in this regard in the post-medieval era (and not just in Protestant lands), although I don’t know the exact details of timing and proffered rationale for the loosening up.
The Molokans were those who differentiated themselves from normative Orthodoxy in a Russian cultural context by adopting this Western-style laxity regarding the acceptability of consuming dairy products during fasting seasons (although imitating Westerners was not necessarily the actual causal chain) with respect to their own fasting norms.
*In medieval Rus’, the modern option of just switching over to soy-milk and various other vegan simulacra of dairy products until Easter arrived and you could switch back to the real stuff was presumably not available.
Not quite related, but Botkin has a definite resonance in Tashkent: it’s the name of the oldest Orthodox cemetery. I’ve just buried a dear friend of almost 60 years there, who lost her long fight to cancer. She was half Tatar on her father’s side, and I learned a mere ten or so years ago that her father had come from a village just 50 km or so from my grandmother/mother’s village. Galiya/Gala, rest in peace/җаниң җәннәттә булсин! (Not that she spoke any Tatar, but still.)
Among other things, it’s the cemetery where Ushakov of dictionary fame was buried.
I can only weep.
Back in the 50s I believe that I saw Tommy Manville described as being famous for being famous. He was a fabulously rich heir with few or no abilities or activities and was famous only for marrying 11 different women 13 times in all. All of his wives were showgirls (etc.) less famous than him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Manville
At one point Chinese called either Jews or Muslims “tendon eaters” based on a difference between kosher and halal rules. They weren’t fussy about dietary laws or theology either and I believe that in the categories of the Mongols of China Marco Polo was lumped with Muslims, Jews, other western or central Asian Christians , and Manichaeans if there were any left..
@J.W. Brewer I wouldn’t be so sure. I recall recipes form 13th century Italy and/or England with almond milk, and maybe even Roman ones? Now almonds may not have been available in the southern Caucasus or north of Crimea (again, not sure) but oats surely would have been.
Edit: “Jowles of Almaund Mylke (Forme of
Cury 89) Take erbes, boile hem, hewe hem, and grynde hem small. Take almaundus iblauchende; grynde hem and drawe hem up with water.”
14th century.
John Emerson: Well, Marco Polo himself classified all people into Christians, Jews, Muslims, and “idolaters.”
But do not we all do that?
Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists… finally there must be “Other”.
Of course this Other can be an exceptionally Right religion…
Polo didn’t classify Khublai Khan, though. He was Khublai Khan’s lackey and was classified by him. Though I guess that he reported his own classifications to the Khan.
John Emerson: How would you classify him (not Marco Polo) religiously, though? It’s a slightly meaningless question. It only makes sense in the context of highly religious people living in highly religious societies, which Cube Qanat was not.
EDIT: by “Cube Qanat” I meant “Kublai Khan”, because I couldn’t decide on a latinisation, and I thought it would be a fun pun? Sorry.
Imagine you’re an archaeologist and you’re going to a new site. How would you describe going there, in English?
@V: I assume almond milk would have been prohibitively expensive for most medieval people to be produced in quantities that could have been used as a substitute for normal uses of milk.
Since when is oat milk attested?
Well the trouble with the question of attestation is that recipes (not for nobles) were rarely written down until recently. We know that gazpacho was made with almond before the adoption of the tomato, but we don’t know how expensive or common almonds were in peasant food. Could have been quite common: There’s an wild almond grove just outside the town where I live currently. They’re not just in great demand here. Parenthetically, I don’t think almonds were seen _that_ much of an interesting nut until recently, with the fad. The growing of almonds in currently draining the California aquifers.
Likewise, we just don’t know if oats would have been used for a milk to use in recipes because oats would have been utterly beneath any noble. Same as with salmon — considered peasant food, now a luxury. There’s also somewhat of an opposite: during Stalinism, asparagus was banned from being cultivated in Bulgaria, and deemed a bourgeois vegetable. But it still grows wild. Eating asparagus was seen as western influence. Now it’s cultivated again, and it doesn’t have the problem that cultivation of almonds in California has.
So there’s cultural and ideological reasons we might or might not eats something, and, on the other hand, practical reasons we might not know what people ate in the past.
@V: and lobsters, and pine nuts…
@Hans: There might be something about it in Uncorking the Past by Patrick E. McGovern.
All the Kartashovs/Kartashevs I’ve known, read or heard about are either ethnic Russians (карташ ~ картавый) or ethnic Armenians. In the latter case, Kartashov sounds like a Russified version of Kardashian or a similar surname.
карташ : Could it be an Armenian adaptation of Sakartvelo? Armenian for “Georgian”? Did Nikolai Kardashev have Armenian/Georigian ancestry?
The Armenian word for ‘the Georgians’ is plural վիրք virkʿ, modern ‘a Georgian’ is վրացի vracʿi, and the country is Վրաստան Vrastan (the original i in the stem vir- was deleted when it became unstressed in derivation, a completely regular process in Classical Armenian). This is cognate with Persian گرج gurj (cf. Russian грузин) and ultimately reflects Middle Iranian forms like Parthian Wiržān. To my knowledge, the word first shows up in the Middle Persian–Parthian–Greek trilingual inscription of king Shapur I at Ka’ba-ye Zartošt, where Middle Persian Wiruzān, Parthian Wir(u)žān correspond to ΙΒΗΡΙΑΝ (Ἰβηρίαν) ‘Iberia’ in the Greek text.
Վրացեան Vratsian is known as an Armenian name, as here.
Re medieval-or-earlier plant-based beverages (that aren’t juices or wine or beer) there’s the complicated etymological relationship between Spanish “horchata” (“orxata” in Catalan), which is made from a variety of things (the etymology suggests it started with barley, but it didn’t stop there) but generally not almonds, and French (and English) “orgeat,” which is more or less the same as Italian “orzata,” which is typically made with almonds. Orgeat in the modern sense is not something you would substitute for milk in any context; not so sure about horchata, which may be more variable.
Intriguing. Any hope of relating the last to the other two?
On almond and oat milk: I don’t have time to look into this now, but my issue wasn’t so much with the rarity of almonds as such, but with the volumes of almonds or oats you would need in order to extract enough milk to substitute for regular intake of dairy products – milk, cheese, etc. It’s one thing to produce a bit of almond milk for the refined dishes a nobleman would try to impress his guests with, but without modern agricultural overproduction of everything and modern production processes, would almond / oat milk be viable substitutes for mass consumption, even during limited periods of fasting?
@Hans: to be fair I learn through googling that a semi-reputable published reference (The Oxford Companion to Food) asserts (in the entry for “almond”) that some form of “almond milk” was not only extant in the olden days but “served as a substitute for cow’s milk during Lent and periods of fasting [and] so was of great importance to medieval European cookery in general. This significance increased with the spread of MARZIPAN through Europe in the later Middle Ages.”
I still believe that the range of non-dairy substitutes for not only milk proper but cream cheese, sour cream, yogurt, etc etc that I can obtain at my local grocery store during Lent is considerably beyond what would have been available to a Person of Medievalness, whether serf or boyar.
*Not that they increase stock during Lent because people of my seasonal religious practices are not the primary driver of the relevant market segment. In general probably vegan-compatible foodstuffs are easier to find in the more secularized parts of the U.S., although out there in Bible-thumper Flyover Country there are no doubt specialty retail outlets wherever there is, e.g., a local critical mass of Seventh-Day Adventists.
@JWB: Thanks for checking!