Budini

Budini, an ancient nation in the NE of the Scythia of Herodotus (iv.21, 108, 109). Herodotus wrote:

The Budini for their part, being a large and numerous nation, is all mightily blue-eyed and ruddy. And a city among them has been built, a wooden city, and the name of the city is Gelonus. Of its wall then in size each side is of thirty stades and high and all wooden. And their homes are wooden and their shrines. For indeed there is in the very place Greek gods’ shrines adorned in the Greek way with statues, altars and wooden shrines and for triennial Dionysus festivals in honour of Dionysus...

Later located estward probably on the middle course of the Volga about Samara. They are described as light-eyed and red-haired, and lived by hunting in their thick forests. The 1911 Britannica surmises that they were Finns of the branch now represented by the Votiaks and Permiaks, forced northwards by later immigrants. In their country was a wooden city called Gelonos, inhabited with a "distinct race", the Geloni, who according to Herodotus were Greeks that became assimilated to the Scythians. Later writers add nothing to our knowledge, and are chiefly interested in the tarandus, an animal which dwelt in the woods of the Budini and seems to have been the reindeer (Aristotle ap. Aelian, Hist. Anim. xv. 33).

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)