Besermyan

Last updated
Besermyan
Besermyans in traditional dress.jpg
Regions with significant populations
Udmurtia (Russia)
Flag of Russia.svg Russia 2,036 (2021) [1]
Languages
Udmurt (Besermyan dialect)
Religion
Majority: Sunni Islam
Minority: Russian Orthodoxy
Related ethnic groups
Udmurts, Chepetsk Tatars  [ ru ]

The Besermyan, Biserman, Besermans, or Besermens, [a] are a numerically small Permian people in Russia. [2]

Contents

The 1897 Russian census listed 10,800 Besermans. There were 10,000 Besermans in 1926, but the 2002 Russian census found only 3,122 of them. [3]

The Besermyan live in the districts of Yukamenskoye, Glazov, Balezino, and Yar in the northwest of Udmurtia. There are ten villages of pure Besermyan ethnicity in Russia, and 41 villages with a partial Besermyan population.

A map of Udmurtia with highlighted regions where the Besermyan live. Rasselenie besermian v Respublike Udmurtiia po gorodskim i sel'skim poseleniiam.png
A map of Udmurtia with highlighted regions where the Besermyan live.

History

The Besermyan are of Turkic origin, [4] [5] and are probably the result of a group of Tatars who were assimilated by the Udmurts. [6] [7] [8] In the 13th century, during his travel to Mongolia, papal envoy Plano Carpini claimed that the Besermyan were subjects of the Mongols. Russian chronicles sometimes made mention of the Besermyan but it's unclear whether the term was meant to denote the modern group as it was a common derivation of the term "musulman" (Muslim). [4] It is likely that the term had broader usage before it became an ethnonym. [4]

Culture

The language of the Besermyan is a dialect of the Udmurt language with Tatar influences. [9] Although they speak a dialect of Udmurt, the Besermyan consider themselves a distinct people. [10]

The Besermyan used to historically practice their own indigenous religion. [2] According to scholar Shirin Akiner, most current Besermyan practice Sunni Islam. [11] Some Besermyan also practice Christianity. [10] The Russians began converting the Besermyan to Christianity around the middle of the 18th century. [2]

Genetics

In a mtDNA research which was done on Besermyans there were 41 tested persons from the village of Yozhovo in Yukamenskovo raion of Udmurtia. The proportion of Eastern Eurasian haplogroups, primarily of haplogroup C, turned out to be significantly higher than that of the Udmurts. According to this indicator, the Besermyans genetically stand out against the background of the Volga-Ural region and are closer to the Turkic-speaking peoples of Southern Siberia. [12]

A study was conducted of the Y-chromosome haplogroups of 53 Besermyans from the villages of Yukamenskoye and Yozhevo, as well as the village of Shamardan, Yukamensky district of Udmurtia. It turned out that more than half of the samples belong to haplogroup N, which may indicate the predominance of the Finno-Ugric component in the formation of the Besermyans along their male line. [13]

The data from lexicostatistics also did not reveal a noticeable Bulgar (Old Chuvash) substrate in the Besermyan dialect. Only Tatar adstrate, associated with the Chepetsk Tatars, can be traced. [14]

According to a 2019 study, the Besermyan's autosomal genetic admixture can be modeled as mostly Srubnaya-like and about 25 percent Nganasan-like. [15]

Notes

  1. ↑ Russian: бесермяне, besermyane singular: besermyanin, Udmurt: бесерманъёс, Tatar: бисермәннәр, romanized: bisermännär.

References

  1. ↑ Национальный состав населения Российской Федерации согласно переписи населения 2021 года [National composition of the population of the Russian Federation according to the 2021 population census] (in Russian). RU: GKS.
  2. 1 2 3 Bondarenko, Dmitri; Kazankov, Alexander; Khaltourina, Daria; Korotayev, Andrey (2005). "Ethnographic Atlas XXXI: Peoples of Easternmost Europe" . Ethnology . 44 (3): 262. doi: 10.2307/3774059 . ISSN   0014-1828. JSTOR   3774059.
  3. ↑ demoskop.ru: Alphabetical list of peoples of the Russian Empire Archived 2012-02-05 at the Wayback Machine
  4. 1 2 3 Akiner, Shirin (1986). Islamic Peoples Of The Soviet Union. Routledge. p. 103. ISBN   978-1-136-14266-6.
  5. ↑ Sinor, Denis (1988). Handbuch Der Orientalistik. BRILL. p. 765. ISBN   978-90-04-07741-6.
  6. ↑ Olson, James Stuart; Pappas, Lee Brigance; Pappas, Nicholas Charles (1994). An Ethnohistorical Dictionary of the Russian and Soviet Empires. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 104–105. ISBN   978-0-313-27497-8.
  7. ↑ Wixman, Ronald (2017-07-28). Peoples of the USSR: An Ethnographic Handbook. Routledge. p. 27. ISBN   978-1-315-47540-0.
  8. ↑ Dalby, Andrew (2015). Dictionary of Languages: The definitive reference to more than 400 languages. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 324. ISBN   978-1-4081-0214-5.
  9. ↑ Olson, James Stuart; Pappas, Lee Brigance; Pappas, Nicholas Charles (1994). An Ethnohistorical Dictionary of the Russian and Soviet Empires. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 104–105. ISBN   978-0-313-27497-8.
  10. 1 2 Bremmer, Ian; Taras, Ray (1996). New States, New Politics: Building the Post-Soviet Nations. Cambridge University Press. p. 180. ISBN   978-0-521-57101-2.
  11. ↑ Akiner, Shirin (1986). Islamic Peoples Of The Soviet Union. Routledge. p. 103. ISBN   978-1-136-14266-6.
  12. ↑ Грошева А. Н., Шнейдер Ю. В., Морозова И. Ю., Жукова О. В., Рычков С. Ю. Генетическое разнообразие бесермян по данным о полиморфизме митохондриальной ДНК // Генетика. 2013. № 11. С. 1337—1344.
  13. ↑ Трофимова Н. В., Литвинов С. С., Хусаинова Р. И. и др. Генетическая характеристика популяций Волго-Уральского региона по данным об изменчивости Y-хромосомы // Генетика. 2015. Т. 51. № 1. С. 120—127.
  14. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20180221100145/http://beserman.ru/publications/Idrisov_Thesis_2013.pdf ГЕНЕТИЧЕСКАЯ ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКА ПОПУЛЯЦИЙ ВОЛГО-УРАЛЬСКОГО РЕГИОНА ПО ДАННЫМ ОБ ИЗМЕНЧИВОСТИ Y-ХРОМОСОМЫ
  15. ↑ Jeong, Choongwon; Balanovsky, Oleg; Lukianova, Elena; Kahbatkyzy, Nurzhibek; Flegontov, Pavel; Zaporozhchenko, Valery; Immel, Alexander; Wang, Chuan-Chao; Ixan, Olzhas; Khussainova, Elmira; Bekmanov, Bakhytzhan; Zaibert, Victor; Lavryashina, Maria; Pocheshkhova, Elvira; Yusupov, Yuldash (2019-04-29). "The genetic history of admixture across inner Eurasia". Nature Ecology & Evolution. 3 (6): 966–976. Bibcode:2019NatEE...3..966J. doi:10.1038/s41559-019-0878-2. ISSN   2397-334X. PMC   6542712 . PMID   31036896.

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