Lutsi Villages

Retracing Oskar Kallas’s journey

In 1893, Estonian researcher Oskar Kallas journeyed through the Ludza area and recorded in his book published the next year, Lutsi maarahvas, Estonian-speaking inhabitants as living in 53 villages in the Ludza area. As of 2017, I have visited all of these villages or, in the case of villages which are no longer inhabited, the actual or approximate site where these villages once stood. Most are still inhabited, some have inhabitants that remember the Estonian (Lutsi) roots of themselves or their neighbors, others have inhabitants with no memory of Estonian origins. However, at least some of even these people have last names suggesting that they too may be descendants of Lutsi families known to previous researchers decades ago. Certain villages, such as Abricki (Lutsi: Dunduri külä), though, are completely gone now for one reason or another.

Some of the places shown below are not Lutsi villages themselves, but have importance to the Lutsis and their history. Ludza is the city at the center of their home territory and the city for which they are named. The Raipole Catholic Church has been of importance to the residents of the Pilda area — Lutsi and otherwise — and the Catholic Church in Latvīšu Stiglova has been of significance to the Lutsi and non-Lutsi residents of the Mērdzene area.

The villages are too numerous to easily display pictures from all of them for the moment, but perhaps in time I will find a way to do this. For the moment I wanted to include a representative selection of images from the Lutsi villages that Oskar Kallas saw at the end of the nineteenth century and that I have seen now as they are in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

I’ve given each image with its village name and then in parentheses written the broad area that I classify this village under (Pilda, Nirza, Mērdzene). The administrative divisions of Latvia have changed drastically over the course of the last 75 years and so I felt that it was just simpler and clearer to classify each of these places according to these three areas into which the villages can be fairly clear classified. The Pilda area is roughly to the south of Ludza, Nirza to the east, and Mērdzene to the north. Mērdzene is the most distant of these areas from Ludza.