Novgorod Slavs Erotic

The Novgorod Slavs, called the Slovene of Ilmen in the old chronicles, were an East Slavic tribal people who settled the lake country of northwestern Russia between roughly the eighth and tenth centuries, and who dissolved into the population of Novgorod and, through it, into the northern Russians. What set them apart was less any single custom than their position: they were the northernmost Slavs of the East, wedged between Finnic peoples on nearly every side and the Baltic trade routes that Scandinavian boats worked from Ladoga up the Volkhov. Their name is the plain, generic word Slavs used for themselves, and they were the only East Slavic group to keep it as a tribal name, which is why Slovene here has nothing to do with modern Slovenia beyond a shared root.

Their homeland was the basin of Lake Ilmen and the rivers that feed and drain it: the Volkhov, the Lovat, the Msta, the Shelon. The Krivichi lay to the south and west. The Chud, Ves and other Finnic groups lay north and east. The chronicle tradition has the Slovene, Krivichi and their Finnic neighbors first paying tribute to Varangians, then expelling them, then inviting Rurik to rule in 862. Whatever actually happened, the fortified settlement at Gorodishche above the lake, and the new town of Novgorod that grew a short way downstream, became the northern anchor of Rus. Archaeologists know the pre-Christian Slovene best from their sopki, tall earthen burial mounds along the Volkhov and its tributaries, usually holding cremated remains, sometimes several generations deep.

Religion followed the usual sequence, but with a sharper edge than elsewhere. The promontory at Peryn, where the Volkhov leaves the lake, is generally read as a sanctuary of Perun, the thunder god. Novgorod was baptized around 990, and a later chronicle preserves the bitter line that one of Vladimir's men baptized the town with the sword and the other with fire. Orthodoxy took root regardless, and the cathedral of Saint Sophia, finished in 1050, still stands where the tribe's descendants built it.

The most distinctive thing they left is their speech. The Old Novgorod dialect, recovered from more than a thousand birch bark letters dug out of the city's waterlogged ground since 1951, lacks a consonant shift found in every other Slavic language, and its grammar diverges enough that some linguists treat it as a separate early branch of Slavic rather than a provincial variant of Old East Slavic. Those letters, scratched by merchants, wives, monks and at least one bored schoolboy, are the tribe's real monument: an ordinary, literate, argumentative people, absorbed over centuries into the Russian North.