Kreevins () were Votes who lived in the proximity of Latvian town of Bauska and spoke their own dialect of Votic. In the middle of the 19th century they merged with the surrounding Latvians, although many traditional aspects of Votic culture are still preserved. The name means "little Russians" (diminutive form) in Latvian due to their equally foreign-sounding language to Latvians.
Kreevins () were Votes who lived in the proximity of Latvian town of Bauska and spoke their own dialect of Votic. In the middle of the 19th century they merged with the surrounding Latvians, although many traditional aspects of Votic culture are still preserved. The name means "little Russians" (diminutive form) in Latvian due to their equally foreign-sounding language to Latvians.
==History== 200px|thumb|left|Bauska Castle The ancestors of the Kreevins were Votes who originally lived in Ingria. Vincke von Overbeg of the Teutonic Order took about 3,000 Votic prisoners of war during his attack of Ingria in 1444–1447. They were transferred to be used as laborers during the construction of Bauska Castle. Before this, virtually whole of Semigalian population moved to Lithuania in 1290 (The Rhymed Chronicle claims 100,000 migrated to Lithuania at once) and the later plague had killed many of the rest original inhabitants. When the castle was finished, the Votes settled the area and became farmers. The first written record of them dates from 1636. In 1805, there were estimated 1,200 Kreevins in Bauska and its surroundings, but according to local priest Karl Lutzau, five years later there were only 12–15 persons who could still speak Votic, all of whom were elders. Anders Johan Sjögren made a research trip to the area in 1846, and concluded that Votic had almost disappeared from the region. After this there are no records from living Kreevins. Ferdinand Johan Wiedemann, in 1871, was the first to prove a link between Votes and Kreevins.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).