Voknavolok: The Village That Sang an Epic

Picture a village where nobody wrote an epic down — they sang it. Every evening, an ordinary wooden house turned into a stage, and instead of a book, there was an old man's voice over the ring of a kantele, a plucked string instrument shaped a little like a small harp. Surely, you might think, someone just took dictation — wrote the epic down word for word from one singer's mouth. Then why did two singers from the very same village get recorded with different versions of the same songs, and both versions were called correct? Because a sung poem isn't a fixed text. It comes alive fresh in every performance. And the village of Voknavolok, in the north of Karelia, in northwestern Russia near the Finnish border, kept that singing alive for centuries without a break.

Voknavolok sits on the southwestern shore of Lake Verkhneye Kuito, and it's stood there since the seventeenth century. In Karelian and Finnish it's called Vuokkiniemi. In eighteen thirty-four, a Finnish country doctor and folklore collector named Elias Lönnrot travelled here — about one thousand six hundred kilometres from Helsinki, roughly the distance of a flight across half of Europe. He called it "the singing Voknavolok," and that wasn't just a phrase for effect: out of about a thousand residents, several dozen were rune-singers, and songs were sung in almost every household.

Lönnrot had already spent years walking from village to village on foot, a bag over his shoulder, collecting fragments of ancient songs. But it was here that he found something he'd been chasing all along: a song that held together as a whole story.

The singer's name was Arhippa Perttunen. He was past sixty, nearly blind, and lived in a neighbouring village called Latvajärvi, close to Voknavolok. Lönnrot stayed at his side for two days. Perttunen sang without stopping, and he didn't remember the old songs as scattered pieces — he held them as one connected story, with a beginning, characters, events unfolding in order. He sang out more than six thousand lines of verse for the collector, more than any other rune-singer on record. Lönnrot wrote it all down by the light of a burning splinter of wood, and he later admitted that Perttunen's way of telling a story, his sense of narrative logic, showed him how scattered songs could be woven into a single epic at all. A few years later, Lönnrot published the Kalevala. Without those two days in Latvajärvi, it might well have stayed a pile of unconnected fragments.

The father's work was carried on by his son. Mihkali Perttunen learned the songs from his father and became so renowned that folklorists nicknamed him the Homer of the North. Roughly three and a half thousand more lines were recorded from him. In eighteen ninety-four, a Finnish photographer named I. K. Inha photographed Mihkali Perttunen on a glass plate that has since faded with age — a stooped, blind old man, his face turned toward where the sun rises over Lake Kuito.

Rune-singers weren't only men. A woman named Maria Remshu married into Voknavolok from a village called Kiviyarvi. She learned to sing the old songs from her own mother and from another singer in a neighbouring village. Before the revolution, Finnish folklorists recorded her voice, and starting in nineteen thirty-four, Soviet expeditions recorded her too. Her songs became part of a folk-poetry collection running to thirty-four volumes. In nineteen thirty-five, when the Kalevala turned a hundred years old, Remshu was invited to the anniversary celebrations as a living link to the very oral tradition Lönnrot had once written down.

That changes the question of who actually wrote the Kalevala. Officially, it's Lönnrot — the doctor and philologist who stitched scattered songs into one continuous story and filled in some of the transitions between episodes himself. But every line in that story was sung first by an actual person — Perttunen, his son, Remshu, and dozens of others whose names haven't survived nearly as well.

The twentieth century nearly silenced this tradition for good. Soviet rule, a Finnish occupation in the early nineteen-forties, forced resettlements, schools that taught only in Russian — one rune-singing village after another fell quiet. By the twenty twenty-one census, Voknavolok itself was down to around three hundred residents, compared with over four hundred just twenty years before.

And still, the village held on. In nineteen ninety-one, a bronze statue of Mihkali Perttunen was raised at the entrance to the old part of Voknavolok — cast in Finland from that faded photograph, the blind singer seated on a stone, facing the lake. In twenty seventeen, Voknavolok was officially named the cultural capital of the Finno-Ugric world.

Today the village still keeps its Karelian language and its old customs alive: on the summer feast day of Ilyin Den, people still gather into round dances, just as they did in Perttunen's time. The epic itself has long since been printed, translated into a hundred and fifty languages, and sits on shelves all over the world. But the lines it's built from can still be heard almost exactly as Lönnrot first heard them — if you know where to go, and who to listen to.

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