Polabian Slavs Erotic

The Polabian Slavs were the West Slavic tribes who settled the country between the Elbe and the Oder, in what is now eastern Germany, from around the 7th century, and who were conquered, converted and absorbed into German-speaking society over the next six hundred years. They are gone as a people. Their language died in the Hanoverian Wendland in the mid 1700s, and their descendants are simply the population of Mecklenburg, Brandenburg and Holstein, most of whom would never think to call themselves Slavs. The name comes from Laba, the Slavic word for the Elbe: the people along the Elbe. Germans called them Wends, a catch-all for any Slav on the frontier.

They were never one polity. Three groupings mattered most: the Obotrites in the northwest around Mecklenburg and eastern Holstein, whose trading port at Reric a Danish king sacked in 808 to carry its merchants off to Hedeby; the Veleti, later called the Lutici, a warlike league of tribes across the middle Oder country; and the Rani of Rügen, whose priests ran the temple of Svantevit at Arkona. Smaller peoples like the Hevelli on the Havel and the Drevani in the Wendland filled the gaps. These northern tribes spoke Lechitic dialects, the same branch of West Slavic as Polish and Kashubian, and the Polabian written down by a pastor and a literate farmer in the 1700s reads like a cousin of Polish worn smooth by centuries of German neighbors.

What set them apart from other pagan Slavs was organized religion. Elsewhere Slavic paganism was mostly household and grove worship. The Polabians built temples with priesthoods, oracle horses and many-headed idols, and on Rügen the chronicler Helmold said the priest outranked the king. That cult held out late. When the Lutici rose in 983 they threw German rule back across the Elbe for a century and a half, and the Wendish Crusade of 1147 failed to break them. It took Henry the Lion killing the Obotrite prince Niklot in 1160 and the Danes leveling Arkona in 1168 to finish it. Niklot's son converted, and his line ruled Mecklenburg as German dukes until 1918, the longest-lived Slavic dynasty in Germany.

The legacy is on the map and in the ground. Berlin, Rostock, Schwerin, Leipzig and Lübeck are all Slavic names. Women's temple rings turn up in graves across the region, and the circular Rundling villages of the Wendland may preserve a settlement pattern from the contact zone. The Sorbs of Lusatia, on the southern edge of the old Polabian world, still speak their language today, the one Slavic community in Germany that never disappeared.