Merya

The Merya were an ancient Finnic people of the Upper Volga region, placed by the Primary Chronicle around Lakes Nero and Pleshcheyevo. Russian tradition records the Varangians exacting tribute from them in 859; Meryan warriors marched with Oleg of Novgorod against Smolensk and Kiev in 882 and against Constantinople in 907.

Their lands entered Kievan Rus in the tenth century, after which East Slavic settlement slowly absorbed them. The Life of Abraham of Galich still reports pagan Merya around Lake Galich in the fourteenth century, and they were not fully assimilated into the Russians until the seventeenth. No word of their language was written down, though Meryan river names link them to the neighbouring Muroma and other Volga Finns.