Ryurik Lonin has been characterised as the most important Veps person ever to have lived and the best-known Veps person of his time.
19 Facts About Ryurik Lonin
1.
2.
Ryurik Lonin's mother was Fjokla Lonina from Ogerist, Vehkoi, from the same area.
3.
Ryurik Lonin's father believed that Prince Rurik had been Veps by ethnicity.
4.
Ryurik Lonin then attended the Finnish school established by the occupiers.
5.
Ryurik Lonin has said that only two people from his home village were evacuated further in the Soviet Union.
6.
At the age of sixteen, Ryurik Lonin moved to Petrozavodsk and studied at a vocational school, and from 1948 on, he worked as a toolsmith and farm machinery mechanic at a garage.
7.
Ryurik Lonin was no stranger to this task, having begun to collect Russian folk songs in his home village during the Finnish occupation.
8.
Ryurik Lonin now became an assistant at YALI, and he was given a letter of recommendation from the Academy of Sciences.
9.
Some items collected by Ryurik Lonin were published in 1969 in the book Obrazcy vepsskoi reci.
10.
In 1958, while still living in Petrozavodsk, Ryurik Lonin attended a concert held in the Sulazhgora neighbourhood.
11.
Ryurik Lonin found a job as a toolmaker at the village sovkhoz.
12.
In 1963, Ryurik Lonin made his first folklore-collecting trip outside of Karelia, to the Veps villages of the Lodeinopol'skii raion in the Leningrad Oblast'.
13.
Ryurik Lonin repeatedly presented applications to this effect to the local village soviet, and finally in 1967, in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Union, he was given two rooms from the village library for his museum.
14.
Ryurik Lonin remained a scientific employee of the museum until 2001.
15.
Since the 1980s, Ryurik Lonin participated in revival efforts of the Veps language and culture.
16.
Ryurik Lonin was later part of a group that commented upon the texts produced by Bible translator Nina Zaitseva.
17.
Ryurik Lonin was a longtime member of the Veps national choir in Shyoltozero.
18.
Ryurik Lonin participated in the third Finno-Ugrian World Congress in Helsinki in December 2000, and he took part in the First Veps Authors' World Conference in Kuhmo, Finland, in the autumn of 2002.
19.
Ryurik Lonin was one of the winners of the All-Union Amateur Artists' Festival as well as in the Second All-Union Popular Culture Festival.