On the Far North

We have mentioned that the God Jassa seems to have been worshipped among the Ilmen Slavs (the name does sound vaguely Finnish, maybe?).  Lake Ilmen far in the (European) Russian North.  Further North and East is Lake Onega.  if you go a bit further East you get to a town called Kargopol.  It sits on the River Onega which empties into the White Sea.  The river starts, however, at another lake, not too far from Kargopol.  Here is a copy of a 19th century Gazetteer of the World (Volume 5) that describes the name of that lake.

In fact, the same is confirmed by a 1720 French map of the region (Yacz):

A 1568 Italian one seems less clear on the point (Ossoisera?):

Interestingly, the lake’s current (or perhaps alternative?) name appears to be Ozero Lacha or Lach Lake.   Maybe one name is Slavic and the other Ugro-Finnic?  Perhaps.

We are aware that “jassa” in North Saami (in Skolt Saami it is jocc or jece) means a patch of snow (up in the mountains in the summer) (see, for example, “On Germanic-Saami contacts and Saami prehistory” by Ante Aikio.  (Ante… Antes… Antes.  Hmmmm!) so there is a perfectly legitimate Saami explanation.  But someone might claim that a summer patch of snow does seem “light” i.e., “jasny” in comparison to whatever it lies on.

But we also know that Norwegian Sami also refer to lakes that are not quite lakes but not quite puddles either as “jassa” (see the Book of Informatics by Gammack, Hobbs and Pigott) and this is after all a lake.  But the Saami do not live that far south (this actually is south for the Saami!).  And as for the Lacha – well, for one thing, Kargopol was at one point besieged by a Polish-Lithuanian army so maybe that’s the source of the name or maybe it comes from Łacha or something like that.

Of course, all of this is more that likely.

On the other hand, it may be that it is not Saami that we should be focusing on but the Veps people.  After all it is the Veps people that live in the area of Lake Lacha.  You might say, ok, so what?  Well, there is something interesting in a 2014 genetic study of Europeans by Peter A. Underhill, et al.  That study has become a focus of many a discussion but we will not try to engage in polemics regarding the study’s main findings.  Rather we merely point out this curious diagram found on the pages of the Underhill study.  It shows the relative closeness (within the R1a group) of the various Slavic and certain other peoples (really geographic locations).  They are so close that they need to blow out the box in the lower left corner to show differences between them.  Makes sense?  Now look closer at “Poland” and what’s next to it.

That’s kind of a fun fact of the day.

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