Krivichs Erotic

The Krivichs were an East Slavic tribal union that held the headwaters of the Dnieper, the Western Dvina and the Volga from about the sixth century until the twelfth, when they dissolved into the principalities of Polotsk and Smolensk and the town of Pskov. The chronicles last name them in 1162. Their descendants are the Belarusians, especially of the north and east, and the Russians of the Smolensk, Pskov and Tver regions. The name outlived them in Latvian, where krievi is still the ordinary word for Russians.

What set them apart was position. The portage country where those three rivers rise was the switching yard of early medieval eastern Europe, the place where a boat coming up from the Black Sea could be hauled across to a river running to the Baltic, and the Krivichs sat on it. Gnezdovo, their trading camp outside Smolensk, has yielded Scandinavian swords, Arab silver and Byzantine glass from the same graves. The Primary Chronicle counts them among the peoples who supposedly called in Rurik in 862, with his brother Truvor taking the western stronghold at Izborsk, and they rowed with Oleg against Constantinople in 907. Scholars divide them into three groupings, around Polotsk, Smolensk and Izborsk, and each grew its own political life.

Their origin is tangled with the Balts. The Smolensk and Polotsk lands were Baltic-speaking before the Slavs arrived, and the Krivichs absorbed that population rather than replacing it. The name itself may go back to a Baltic priestly title, Krive, to an ancestor called Kriv, or to the Slavic word for crooked. Nobody has settled it. Archaeologists know them first by long barrows, collective mounds stretched over several cremations, and later by a single piece of jewelry: the bracelet-shaped temple ring with tied ends, worn in clusters at a woman's headband, which identifies a Krivich grave as surely as a passport. Their speech left a mark too. The Old Pskov dialect, with quirks that set it apart from the language of Kiev, is usually assigned to them.

They were pagans who cremated their dead until Vladimir's baptism of Rus in 988 brought a bishop to Polotsk within a few years, after which the rite shifted to inhumation over the following century. The Krivichs did not vanish so much as stop being a useful category once princes and towns replaced tribes. Belarusian writers of the early twentieth century reached back for the name, proposing Kryvia as an alternative name for their country, and the word still carries that charge in Belarus.