Traditions of Cultivation and Storage of Turnips in the Russian North: The View of an Ethnolinguist

Abstract

The article is drawn on lexical and onomastic data collected during field research in the Arkhangelsk, Vologda, and Kostroma regions of Russia, as well as on relevant materials from lexicographic and ethnographic sources. It takes an ethnolinguistic standpoint to examine the toponyms and geographical terms that exhibit commonalities with the word turnip in various motifs, and explore the complex of cultural and linguistic phenomena related to the cultivation and storage of turnips. Areal topology and context analysis approaches to methodologies of studying vocabularies have been instrumental in reconstructing the specifics of turnip cultivation in slash-and-burn agricultural systems and discovering the influence of Baltic-Finnish everyday practices on Northern Russian traditions. The article discusses the geographical distribution of so called repishche, that is names given to forest areas burned and cleared for turnip, flax, and rye lots, as well as the tradition of constructing basic unequipped storage facilities called “turnip pits”.