The Seven Miracles Of Uralica

The Seven Miracles Of Uralica are seven major events in the nation's history that are considered so improbable under normal circumstances that both Christians (who make up the large majority of Uralica's religious demographic at roughly 91.75%) and Jews (who comprise most of the remainder) consider these to be miracles of an otherworldly nature.


 * 1) The Great Linguistic Shift - Many ethnic Russians whose mother tongue was Russian began, almost abruptly, to shift to speaking other, primarily Uralic languages in the home. As of 1 July 2010, roughly 15% of ethnic Russians in Uralica claimed Finnish as their preferred language. Other languages benefitting strongly from this in terms of sheer speaker numbers were Eastern Mari, Komi-Zyrian, Udmurt, Moksha, and Erzya. Also, around 20% of the Hungarian-speaking population of Uralica is ethnic Russian.


 * 1) The Resurrection Of Tongues - Several critically endangered languages experienced dramatic revival within a short period of time within Uralica. All members of minority ethnic groups now speak their ethnic language flawlessly, and Bible translation efforts, if not completed, are at least underway.


 * 1) The Restoration Of The Pechora - although this was supposedly a human endeavour, many environmentalist groups had the cleanup of the Pechora taking years to complete, yet the second attempt at it, which started in April of 2009, took merely two and a half months to complete.


 * 1) The Kirov Air Raid - often called "The Kirov Massacre" in external histories, this came about during the A Tale Of Two Ghosts conflict in May 2008 when Amerzican bombers flew towards Kirov in a desparate attempt to inflict maximum damage on the city. However, unforeseen electrical problems in the bombers (dubbed "inexplicable" by Uralicans who recovered the black boxes) caused the bomb bay doors to fail, sparing Kirov from even so much as a scratch. The frustrated Amerzicans would be shot down wholesale, save for one fighter, who barely managed to keep his fighter in the sky, by the UAF led by Samppa Valalahti. Of crews of the planes downed, not one person survived.


 * 1) The Fear Factory - this actually occurred in the three months during which Uralica's charter was suspended after the disappearance of Jarkko Salomäki. A then-allegedly haunted, abandoned chemical weapons factory in what is now Nenetsia-North Uralica, was found by the Tribal Chief, who entered it after reportedly having a vision near Usovuori, and began a harrowing two-and-a-month one-man crusade to fight some very real demons and spirits. Over the time, he lived off of frozen rations from abandoned (but still frozen) iceboxes, and jars of distilled water that were scattered around the factory. On 18 December, a loud screaming noise could be heard from as far away as Mezen' to the west, Naryan-Mar to the east, and Emva to the south - this would have deafened Salomäki but for the fact that he was a hundred feet underground. However, a professional exorcist visited the factory two days after Salomäki's return to Syktykvar (23 December 2008) and said that "all that was left of the demons was physical marks of their presence."

The factory collapsed on Christmas Day.


 * 1) The Pazhga Prophecy - perhaps the grimmest of these seven, a shell-shocked Mennonite civilian woman had a series of visions on the days following the Battle of Pazhga, in which her fiancé lost his life. These predicted with startling accuracy the fate of various nations and rulers, most notably that of Ionizer - "he will cause much pain, yet in the end his body will be barely recognisable. The wild dogs will devour his flesh, and his bones will dissipate into the great forest soils." Ionizer apparently laughed this off as foolishness, but not even two months later, he was shot in the left leg and lower abdomen in a suburb of Pechora, which was nowhere near enough to kill him, but enough to scare him into fleeing east. After having to run from a lynch-mob in Vuktyl, he wandered along the edge of the Virgin Komi Forests, where he was eventually attacked, killed, and half-eaten by a pack of wolves. He was discovered by Uralican forest rangers two days later, with various bones of his missing. After having it identified as him, what remained of Ionizer was cremated and buried in an unmarked location near where his body was discovered.


 * 1) Uralican Diglossia and Multilingualism - When the average Uralican of 13 or older speaks five or six languages regularly, one has to wonder if there's something other than simply diglossia going on. Linguistic surveyors have dubbed the city of Syktyvkar "the code-switching capital of the world" as conversations can rapidly change language and the speakers and listeners all understand!