Kiremet is the name both of the Chuvash sacred grove and of the ambivalent spirit that inhabits it. The word is a borrowing of Arabic karāmah, 'miracle' or 'mark of divine favour' — the same notion that underlies the Islamic veneration of a saint and his shrine — and it entered Chuvash as the designation of a sanctuary set apart from ordinary land. Such sites are fenced groves, glades, hillocks, springs or sometimes graveyards that may not be ploughed or used for secular purposes; there the community offers animal sacrifice and porridge in prayer for health, harvest and protection. The kiremet is widely understood to be bound up with the souls of the dead and revered ancestors. The ethnographic and reference literature stresses its double nature: originally a giver of blessing, it came increasingly to be feared as a sender of illness and misfortune to those who neglect or offend it, and under later Christian influence its malevolent aspect was emphasised. It stands in the lower, earthly tier of the cosmos, beneath the heavenly god Tură and the bright fate-deities. Unlike the named celestial powers, kiremet is a class of local sanctuary-spirits rather than a single individual, but it is treated throughout the sources as a distinct, named category of being central to Chuvash cult.