Besermyan

The Besermyan are a small Permian people of the forests between the Vyatka and Cheptsa in present-day Udmurtia, their name beserman deriving through Volga Bulgar from the Arabic word for Muslim. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Russian chronicles used it for the Muslim population of the Volga Bulgar lands and the Kazan khanate around Arsk, where Udmurts lived beside them.

As the Golden Horde fractured and Timur swept the Volga in the late fourteenth century, these settlers moved up the Vyatka into the lower Cheptsa, gradually absorbed by the Udmurts yet keeping a separate identity. After Moscow's 1489 annexation of Vyatka, Karino Arsk princes granted land and drew more from Kazan.

Their speech is an Udmurt dialect marked by Tatar words and sounds. Orthodox missionaries began converting them in the mid-eighteenth century, but folk rites kept Udmurt pagan spirits and Muslim customs.