South Coscivians

Southern Kiravians, also known as South Coscivians, Southerners, or Southrons are a Coscivian ethnic group native to the southern regions of Great Kirav. They form the majority of the population in the states of Andrēdan, Issyria, Valtéra, and are the plurality group in several others. Southrons constitute the dominant and foundational culture of the South Kiravian cultural region.

Southern Kiravians are known for their unique cultural traits that distinguish them from the other regional cultures of Great Kirav and from the "mainstream" national culture of Kiravia at-large, especially their time-honoured and complex codes of civility, affinity for social hierarchy, aristocratic and noble ethos, rich cuisine, and much beloved musical tradition.

Social Organisation
The basic unit of social organisation among Southern Kiravians is the lineage, conceived of as the unbroken patrilineal line of ancestors and unborn future descendants linked by the living generation. Individual Southern Kiravians are typically very aware and intensely proud of their ancestry, and typically know their family histories several centuries back, if not further. Southerners subjectively rank theirs and other lineages against each other based on a number of criteria, including length of their known history, how long they have inhabited their current area, wealth (current or historical), feudal, honorific, or Imperial titles, and notable ancestors. The prestiege of a suitor's lineage is an important consideration in the arrangement of marriages.

Southern Kiravians pride themselves on their strong family lives and family cohesion. They are more likely to praticipate in recreation and appear in public as a family than their more northerly counterparts, and due to their emphasis on rootedness and low geographic mobility, tend to live very near to members of their extended family.

Culture and Values
When contrasted with other Kiravians, both by themselves and by outsiders, Southern Kiravians are typically considered to be more grounded and organic than their neighbours, valuing direct relationships and local affairs over more distant and abstract values. They are more communitarian than Coscivian-Kiravians living in the Midlands, North, and Northeast, and much more communitarian than the highly individualistic Western Gaelic-Kiravians and Arnórian Coscivians. Religion plays a very important role in Southern Kiravian life, reinforcing its family and community dimensions and acting as a force of order and continuity.

Land is the most important status symbol among Southern Kiravians, in keeping with their agrarian and manorial orientation. A great deal of agricultural land in Southern Kirav is entailed or held in hereditary or clan trusts to ensure that successive generations of a family will have valid claims to land and the income it generates. Landless Southern Kiravians will go to great lengths to acquire title or life tenure to land, even if it is economically unproductive, in order to obtain the social prestige that comes with property ownership.

Recreation
Like other Kiravians, Southrons participate in the popular nationwide sports of fieldball (or "Kiravian-rules football") and shinty. Fieldball is an especially important cultural institution in Southern Kirav, where it is a key fixture of scholastic, university, and community life. Players from Southern states are greatly overrepresented in the ranks of the top professional fieldball leagues, although most professional teams are based in Northern cities. Southrons are noted for their continued enjoyment of pre-modern sports that have fallen out of mainstream popularity elsewhere in Kiravia and the wider world, such as equestrianism, archery, fencing, and falconry. Hunting is extremely popular among Southrons, both for sustenance (especially among the poorer classes) and for sport, and access to privately-held forests (which is often a hereditary privilege) is highly prized. Southern Kiravians frequently compete for the Federacy in international-level competitions for shooting sports and archery.

Religion
Most Southern Kiravians are Christians or Muslims, though a visible minority follow Coscivian faiths (mainly Rotarionism and Læstorianism). Localities in South Kirav tend to be homogeneous with respect to the religious and sectarian affiliation of their inhabitants, especially in rural areas and often correlating to the religion of a historical landowning family.

The Christian denominations among Southern Kiravians are the Coscivian Orthodoxy, the Discipular Church of Kiravia, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Catholicism. Many Coscivian Orthodox parishes have seceded from the Coscivian Orthodox Church at various points in time, mostly due to its perceived domination by Northern bishops, and have instead joined the Southern Orthodox Church or entered into communion with the Eastern Orthodox Church or Levantine Catholic Church.

About one-third of South Kiravians follow Islam. [Sects n' stuff].

Although they share the practice with most other Coscivian groups, Southern Kiravians are noted for their devotion to in Christianised or Islamised form. South Kirav is home to a large number of ancestral shrines, each of which is associated with a particular lineage. These shrines originated as graveyards with chapels on site, but have grown over the centuries into large complexes containing numerous tombs and ossuaries. Most Southerners will travel to their ancestral shrine a few times each year to honour their ancestors with burnt offerings and libations.

Cuisine
Southern Kiravians have a celebrated culinary tradition with influence far beyond their native region. The warmer climate and more fertile land of South Kirav relative to the rest of the island continent endowed the South with a more varied repertoire of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and spices. Southern cuisine has been praised for its often complex combinations of flavours and cooking methods, but also as being hearty and filling, a duality thought to reflect the twin influences of professional cooks serving the South's landowning families and the practical, homestyle cooking of the common people.

Due to the larger cattle-raising industry in the South (particularly Korlēdan) and the use of steak and veal as status symbols by the upper strata of South Kirav's hierarchical culture, Southern cuisine has traditionally made much greater use of fresh beef than other Kiravian regional cuisines, which relied heavily on poultry, fish, pork, and preserved beef products. Beef as a distinguishing feature of Southern cuisine became even more prominent after the introduction of Islam to South Kirav, as Muslim converts abstained from pork and certain seafoods.

Southerners have a fondness for fried dishes that reflects the abundance of oil crops (canola, soy, corn) in the region and a long history of importing olive, coconut, and palm oil from Heku and South Levantia.



Politics
Southern Kiravians have strong and  leanings in politics. On the state level, their general attitude of deference to authority and strong preference for stability and continuity have led to the establishment of under the rule of parties affiliated with the Southern Green-Right conference. Most opposition parties are affiliated with the Agrarian Caucus, Organic Social Union, or the Monarchist Parties of Kiravia, and have limited influence.

On the federal level, Southern Kiravians are strong supporters of the Reservatives & Conformists Caucus.