Chuvash

The Chuvash are the only surviving people of the Oghur branch of the Turkic family, settled on the Volga around Cheboksary. Their language split from other Turkic tongues more than a thousand years ago, keeping the Oghur sounds r and l where Turks have z and sh, and most scholars trace it to Volga Bulgar speech mixed with Finnic settlers.

They are heirs of Volga Bulgaria: its rulers adopted Islam in 922, but the Mongols sacked it in 1236, and the region then passed to the Golden Horde and later Kazan's khanate.

After Ivan the Terrible took Kazan in 1552 they became Russian yasak taxpayers, and Orthodox missionaries pressed baptism on them. Many fled east to the Bashkirs rather than convert, and old keremet shrines where geese were sacrificed long survived beside the new churches; Chuvash schools and printed literature later emerged.