Inhabitants
The inhabitants of Karelian provinces historically belonging to Finland are known as Karelians. Confusingly, the same name is used also of a closely related but distinct ethnic group living mostly in East Karelia, earlier also in some of the territories Finland ceded to the Soviet Union in 1944. The Finnish Karelians include the present-day inhabitants of North and South Karelia and the still-surviving evacuees from the ceded territories. Present Finnish Karelia has 315,000 inhabitants. The more than 400,000 evacuees from the ceded territories were re-settled in various parts of Finland. (The displacement of the Finnish Karelians in 1940-44 as a result of the Winter War and the Continuation War, according to official Finnish statistics resulted the total number of 415,000 evacuees from the territories ceded to the Soviet Union while 5.000 Finnish Karelians remained in the Soviet controlled territory.)
Finnish Karelians are considered as a regional and cultural sub-group of the ethnic Finns. They speak the eastern or south-eastern dialects of the Finnish language. The Finnish Karelians include also people of East Karelian origin or roots, but these have been linguistically and ethnically assimilated with closely related Finns after the Second World War. However, the Orthodox religion is still maintained by many Finnish Karelians with East Karelian background, especially in North Karelia; the majority of the Finnish Karelians are predominantly Lutheran.
Read more about this topic: Karelia (historical Province Of Finland)
Famous quotes containing the word inhabitants:
“If men will believe it, sua si bona norint, there are no more quiet Tempes, nor more poetic and Arcadian lives, than may be lived in these New England dwellings. We thought that the employment of their inhabitants by day would be to tend the flowers and herds, and at night, like the shepherds of old, to cluster and give names to the stars from the river banks.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one tenth part of the inhabitants of the earth pursue it consistently, and in a day’s time they will have turned it into a Hell.”
—Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)
“When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the “big canoe” of the European rolling through the blue waters towards their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal embrace! They fold to their bosoms the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys; and the instinctive feeling of love within their breasts is soon converted into the bitterest hate.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)