Komi

The Komi are a Permian people of the Uralic family in the Vychegda and Kama basins. Their endonym means man; southerners were called Permyaks, after Great Perm, and northerners Zyryans. They and the Udmurts descend from a Proto-Permian people that split in the first millennium BC; by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Komi had divided into Kama Permyaks and northern Zyryans.

From the twelfth century Novgorodian fur traders entered the country, while Great Perm's dukes ruled from Cherdyn. In 1365 Moscow sent Stephen of Perm to convert them; he created the Old Permic alphabet, though the shaman Pama resisted and the Permyaks were not fully baptised until Duke Mikhail accepted Christianity in 1470. Moscow seized Cherdyn in 1472 and abolished the duchy in 1505.

They kept hunting and gathering ways and the myth of rivals En and Omöl.