People from Krasnoshchelye (Komi town on Kola Peninsula)

[Ymyyakhtakh]

The first Komis moved to the Kola Peninsula in 1887 from the region of Izhma and Pechora. Komis mainly moved to the pogosta of Lovozero, which had until then been inhabited mostly by Saami, but by 1915 Komis made up the majority of the population of Lovozero. In 1910s-1920s, Kola Komis founded several villages on Kola Peninsula along the Ponoi river: Ivanovka, Krasnoshchelye, Kanevka, and Oksino. In the 2002 Russian census, a total of 2,310 Komis were listed as living in Murmansk Oblast, out of whom 1,128 were listed as Izhma Komi. Today, most Komis on the Kola Peninsula live in the towns of Lovozero (which is also the center of the Kola Saami population) and Krasnoshchelye.

In the 2010 Russian census, 423 people were listed as living in Krasnoshchelye.

Translated from Russian Wikipedia (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Краснощелье):

Economics

The main enterprise is the reindeer herder agricultural cooperative. The cooperative is experiencing material and financial difficulties due to the remoteness of the cooperative’s branches, high transportation costs for the transportation of products and other goods. Of great importance for the villagers are fishing, hunting, picking mushrooms and berries. The village has a kindergarten and a school [6].

Transport

The village is not connected by all-weather roads with other settlements. Communication with them is possible only by air transport, which uses the Krasnoshchelye airfield for local flights. Every Tuesday, a scheduled helicopter flies from the village of Lovozero to Krasnoshchelye; once every two weeks the helicopter performs the route: Lovozero - Krasnoshchelye - Kanevka - Sosnovka [7].

Here's a map of the Lovozero region, which includes Krasnoshchelye, and where most of the Komi and Saami on Kola Peninsula live:



Population of Lovozero region in 2002 census (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ловозерский_район):

Russians - 10,098 (70.56%)
Komi - 1,438 (10.05%)
Saami - 1,012 (7.07%)
Ukrainians - 792 (5.53%)
Belarusians - 226 (1.58%)
Mordovians - 107 (0.75%)
Nenets - 106 (0.74%)
Total - 14,311 (100.00%)

The coat of arms of the Lovozero region features a reindeer, a fish, and a loparite crystal:



I searched VKontakte for users whose location was set as Krasnoshchelye (Краснощелье): https://vk.com/search?c%5Bcity%5D=10...tion%5D=people.

I then used the VKontakte API to make a list of photos posted by the users:

va(){ curl -Gd v=5.37 -d access_token="$vkacc" https://api.vk.com/method/"$1";}

while read u;do
  va "photos.getAlbums?owner_id=$u&count=1000&need_system=1"|jq '.response.items[]?.id'|while read l;do
    o=0
    while :;do
      c=$(va "photos.get?owner_id=$u&album_id=$l&count=1000&offset=$o")
      printf %s\\n "$c"|jq -r '.response.items[]?|(.owner_id|tostring)+" "+(.id|tostring)+" "+(.photo_2560//.photo_1280//.photo_807//.photo_604)'
      printf %s\\n "$c"|jq -er '.response.items|length<1000'>/dev/null&&break
      let o+=1000
    done
  done
done

I don't know which of the people in the photos below are Komi, Saami, Russian, or Nenets. Some of the photos are probably taken outside Krasnoshchelye or Lovozero, and some photos might even be taken outside Murmansk Oblast.

Part 1:

Spoiler!

[Ymyyakhtakh]

Part 2:

Spoiler!

[Ymyyakhtakh]

Part 3:

Spoiler!

[Ymyyakhtakh]

Part 4:

Spoiler!

You can view all images in this thread at a large size by running a shell command like this:

curl https://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php\?309044|grep -o 'src="[^"]*'|cut -d\" -f2|grep imgur|sed 's,.*,<img src=&>,'|echo "<style>img{height:calc(100% - 40px)}</style>$(tr -d \\n)">/tmp/a.html;open /tmp/a.html

[Ymyyakhtakh]

Here you can see that Krasnoshchelye is in the middle of the Kola Peninsula, very far from other settlements:



Either Krasnoshchelye or Kanevka is possibly the most isolated settlement on the whole Fennoscandian Peninsula. Kanevka is a smaller Komi-Saami settlement along the Ponoi river in the Lovozero region (population 67 in the 2010 census).

These were the largest localities in Murmansk Oblast in the 2010 census (https://www.citypopulation.de/en/russia/murmansk/):

(population in 2010 census;city)
315,953;Murmansk
59,672;Apatity
50,060;Severomorsk
45,361;Monchegorsk
35,654;Kandalaksha
28,625;Kirovsk
23,072;Olenegorsk
18,820;Kovdor
17,293;Polyarny
15,825;Zapolyarny
15,096;Polyarnye Zori
14,152;Murmashi
12,756;Nikel
12,683;Snezhnogorsk
11,199;Zaozyorsk
11,068;Gadzhiyevo
10,437;Kola
8,414;Revda
6,560;Zelenoborsky
5,532;Umba
5,255;Safonovo
5,208;Molochny
3,188;Pechenga
2,171;Ostrovnoy
2,063;Kildinstroy
1,580;Verkhnetulomsky
685;Tumanny

In the map below, you can see that almost all of the localities listed above are on an axis near the base of the peninsula. Only Ostrovnoy and Umba are in the outer part of the peninsula, but they are along the coast, and their population is fairly small. Therefore fairly large parts of the inner Kola Peninsula might still have an indigenous majority (Komi, Saami, or Nenets).



Edit: This page contains spreadsheets for the ethnic composition of Russian settlements: http://lingvarium.org/russia/settlem-database.shtml. In the 2002 census, 53% of the population of Krasnoshchelye was listed as Izhma-Komi. I think the figure might not include other Komi-Zyrians. The population of Kanevka was listed as 70% "с родным языком коми" (with native language Komi). The population of Lovozero was listed as 42% Russian, which probably makes Krasnoshchelye the westernmost settlement with a Komi majority. Krasnoshchelye and Kanevka were the only settlements in Murmansk Oblast where the largest ethnic group was not listed as Russian.

[michal3141]

Interesting phenotypes. They look Balto-Siberian.

[Jana]

Beautiful photos, very friendly and traditional looking bunch Really sweet people.

[Pansarkamrat]

Reminds me of Northern Sweden. That kid shows the fishes to the camera looks like me when i was a child

[Ülev]

too cold

[Laag]

Movie about the Komi of the Kola Peninsula