Identity is never a single element: it is a mosaic of personal roots, cultural memory, and ancestral geography. In my own case, it is divided between two worlds: on my father’s side, I come from Meshchera; on my mother’s, from a family rooted in a village near Galich in Kostroma province. That Galich (historically known as Galich Mersky) has always been my Jerusalem. Its tall churches rise above the town, and on the hills surrounding it, including Poklonnaya Hill, people gathered until the mid-20th century to celebrate a spring ethnic festival tied to the heritage of the Merja.
But what role does language play in shaping identity? The answer is complex. Until the census of 1897, most peasants in Russia did not even know what language they “spoke” in official terms. That census introduced, for the first time, a column labeled “native language.” With it began a new awareness. Yet language is not always equal to ethnicity. It can vanish while the people remain.
The Merja and Meshchera languages disappeared. Irish is another example: the Irish people largely speak English today, yet their identity remains intact. In some villages of Leningrad region, the Vepsian language could still be heard as late as the 1970s. Now it has vanished, a completed process of language shift, where communities abandon their ancestral tongue for the dominant state language.
Identity, then, is woven from multiple threads: language, culture, memory, religion and territory. No single one determines everything. But together, they form the layered construction we call heritage, a structure both fragile and enduring, surviving long after words themselves have faded from the tongue.
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