Pomors

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Ship of the Pomors

Pomors (Russian: помо́ры) are Russian settlers of the White Sea coasts, where they used to live side by side with the Kola Norwegians (to the west) and the Nenets people (to the east).

As early as the 12th century, explorers from Novgorod entered the White Sea through the Northern Dvina and Onega estuaries and founded settlements along the sea coasts of Bjarmaland. Their chief town used to be Kholmogory, until the rise of Arkhangelsk in the late 1500s. From their base at Kola, they explored the Barents Region and the Kola peninsula, Spitsbergen, and Novaya Zemlya.

Later in history, the Pomors discovered and maintained the Northern Sea Route between Arkhangelsk and Siberia. With their ships (koches), the Pomors penetrated to the trans-Ural areas of Northern Siberia, where they founded the settlement of Mangazeya east of the Yamal Peninsula in the early 1500s.

Their name is derived from the Pomorsky (literally, "maritime") coast of the White Sea (between Onega and Kem), having the root of more (море, meaning "sea"). The same root is evident in the toponym Pomerania. The most famous Pomors are Mikhail Lomonosov, Fedot Shubin (both born near Kholmogory), and Semyon Dezhnev (born in Veliky Ustyug).

Malye Korely, a 17th-century Pomor village, 28 km north of Arkhangelsk.

The traditional livelihoods of the Pomors based on the sea included animal hunting, whaling and fishing; in tundra regions they practiced the reindeer herding. Sea trading in corn and fish with Northern Norway was important for them. This trade was so intensive that a kind of Russian-Norwegian pidgin language Moja på tvoja (or Russenorsk) was created and used on the North Norwegian coast in 1750–1920.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union a debate has started as to whether the Pomors should be recognized as an indigenous people and included into the list of Northern indigenous peoples of Russia. As per the 2002 Census, 6,571 people in Russia identified themselves as Pomors, almost all of them in Arkhangelsk Oblast (6,295) and Murmansk Oblast (127).

It should be noted that one of the three universities of Arkhangelsk is named the Pomor State University. In line with the current Russian trend towards agglomeration of least populated and/or poorest federal subjects into bigger entities, a merger of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk Oblasts, the Komi Republic, and the Nenets Autonomous Okrug has been proposed, one of the possible names of this new territory being the Pomor Krai.