(1) A Balto-Finnic tribe. According to the chronicle, it inhabited the Beloe Lake region; according to available toponymic data, it occupied the territory from the eastern Lake Ladoga region to the Beloe Lake region. There are grounds to suppose that to the Arabian geographers of the tenth to 14th centuries, the Ves’ were known as the Visu people, who lived to the north of Bulgaria on the Volga-Kaina in the vicinity of the Iugra. Bulgarian merchants traded with the Ves’, exporting fur in exchange for metal articles. In the ninth century, a group of Ves’ from the Beloe Lake region had already become part of Kievan Rus’. Gradually part of the Ves’ became Russianized. The Vepsy and apparently the Karelian-Ludiki are descendants of the Ves’ The settlements and burial grounds of the Ves’ have been very little researched; only burial mounds from the ninth to 13th centuries have been excavated in the eastern Lake Ladoga region.

(2) The name of a small village settlement of several Slavic peoples, now in existence.