Drevlians Erotic

The Drevlians were an East Slavic tribe that lived from about the sixth to the tenth century in the forests of Polesia, in what is now northwestern Ukraine and the southern fringe of Belarus, and were absorbed into Kyivan Rus after a failed revolt in 945. The name comes from derevo, tree: they were the forest people, set against the Polans, whose name means field people and who held the open country around Kyiv to their east. Drevlian land was low, wet and densely wooded, cut by the Teteriv, Uzh, Ubort and Stsviha rivers, bounded by the Sluch to the west where the Volhynians began and by the Dregoviches to the north. It suited hunting, forest beekeeping and farming in cleared patches, and it yielded the furs, honey and wax that made the Drevlians worth taxing. Their chief stronghold was Iskorosten, today's Korosten. Almost everything written about them comes from their enemies. The Primary Chronicle, compiled by monks in Kyiv, says they lived like beasts, ate unclean things and carried off brides at the waterside instead of marrying. Archaeology says otherwise: fortified hillforts, semi-sunken timber houses, iron tools, cremation burials under kurgans, and a settled economy not much different from the Polans' own.

The slander had a purpose, because the Drevlians resisted Kyiv longer and harder than most. Oleg forced tribute on them in 883, a black marten pelt per hearth. They threw it off when he died, and Igor had to reconquer them in 914. In 945 Igor collected his tribute, turned back for a second helping, and the Drevlians under their own prince, Mal, killed him near Iskorosten. Mal then proposed marriage to Igor's widow, Olga. Her answer is one of the set pieces of Rus history: two embassies murdered, one buried alive in its boat and one burned in a bathhouse, a massacre at Igor's funeral feast, then a siege of Iskorosten that the chronicle says ended when she released birds carrying burning tinder back to their nests under the town's thatch. The legend is Olga's. The burn layer at Korosten is real. What followed mattered more than the revenge: Olga replaced ad hoc tribute raids with fixed quotas and regular collection stations, an early piece of state administration, and the tribe became a province handed to Kyivan princes. The Drevlian land is last named as a distinct territory in 1136. After that the Drevlians dissolve into the Ukrainian population of Polesia, whose dialects and folk practice still carry the forest culture the Kyiv monks pretended to despise.