Komi

The Komi are a Uralic people of the northern forests of European Russia, whose homeland lies along the Vychegda, Pechora and Kama rivers on the western side of the Urals. They form two main branches: the Komi-Zyryans of the north, most of whom live in the Komi Republic, and the Komi-Permyaks of the upper Kama in Perm Krai. Their name for themselves comes from an old Finno-Ugric word for "person", while Russians long called them Permyaks and Zyryans; our maps label them "Permians".

"Perm" was the medieval name for the land between the Mezen and Pechora rivers, probably from a Veps word meaning "the far-away land"; Old Norse sagas spoke of a wider northern region called Bjarmaland. The name Zyryans for the northern Komi is recorded from at least the fourteenth century, while "Komi" itself was first noted by ethnographers in the eighteenth. Linguists reconstruct a single Permian people who split during the first millennium BC into the ancestors of the Komi and of the Udmurts, whose languages remain partly mutually intelligible. The Zyryan and Permyak branches separated later, as the Zyryans moved north.

From the twelfth century traders from Novgorod came north in search of furs and hides, and Novgorod claimed the region, though it held little real control and gave up its rights in 1471. In the south, Komi dukes ruled a polity the Russians called Great Perm, centred on the stronghold of Cherdyn.

In 1365 Prince Dmitry Donskoy of Moscow charged the missionary Stephen of Perm with converting the region. Stephen devised an alphabet for Komi, known as the Old Permic script or Anbur, and a bishopric of Perm was set up in 1383; after his death he became the Komi's patron saint. Conversion was slow and contested; among those who resisted was the shaman Pama. The duke of Great Perm was baptised as Mikhail only in 1470, but Moscow still seized Cherdyn in 1472 and made him its vassal. Komi self-rule ended in 1505, when Moscow removed his son Matvei and installed a Russian governor.

Russian settlement grew from the sixteenth century. Syktyvkar, called Ust-Sysolsk until 1930, was founded in the eighteenth century and became the region's main town. Komi revolts against Russian rule and Slavic settlement grew more frequent after freed serfs arrived in large numbers from the 1860s, and a movement to revive Komi culture took shape.

When the Bolsheviks took over the region in 1919, during the Russian Civil War, their nationality policy at first promoted Komi language and culture, but industrialisation transformed the land. The purges of the 1930s, part of the Great Purge, struck the Komi intelligentsia, accused of "bourgeois nationalism", and further purges followed in the 1940s and 1950s. The region became a centre of the gulag labour-camp system, and with the influx of prisoners and wartime industry the Komi became a minority in their own republic.

Timber villages traditionally lined the rivers, while the reindeer-herding Izhma Komi of the north lived in chum tents and shared much with their Nenets neighbours. Food came from hunting, fishing and gathering: fish pies, berries and mushrooms remain staples, and pelmeni dumplings may come from Komi and Udmurt cooking, the name meaning "ear bread". Komi myth tells of the world's creation through a struggle between the gods En and Omöl, who after conversion came to resemble God and Satan.

Komi, a Permian language within the Uralic family, has two main written forms, Zyryan and Permyak, long treated as separate languages. It is written in Cyrillic with two extra letters. Like other Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia, the Komi are declining in number: the 2010 census counted 228,235 people identifying as Komi, against 336,309 in 1989. Since 1991 they have reasserted their distinct identity.

Our 800 map labels the Komi lands "Permians", a broad area stretching from the Karelians and Veps in the west to the Urals, with the Volga Bulgars and the Bashkirs to the south. The outline is approximate and covers more than the Komi alone.