The heirs of Kalevala

Documentary about the village from the Karelian epic

In the 19th century, the Finnish ethnographer Elias Lennrot drove through the north of the Russian Empire to collect songs (runes) of the Northern Karelians. The traditions recorded by him about the creation of the world and the sampo - the "Mill of Happiness" - formed the basis of the epic "Kalevala" .

The area in which most of the runes were collected were renamed Kalevalsky back in the 1920s of the last century. Later, the central village of Ukhta was renamed Kalevala, the descendants of the Runopians - Arkhip Pertunen and Ontre Macanen still live there.

Now Kalevalsky district is one of the most depressed in the republic. The number of jobs is reduced there, the villages are slowly dying, and only a few remember the history of the epic itself.

Ilya Kizirov and Peter Kosikhin visited the Kalevalsky district and looked at what happens when the epic meets with Russian reality.