Polochans Erotic

The Polochans were an East Slavic people of roughly the ninth through eleventh centuries who lived along the Polota river and the middle Western Dvina, in what is now northern Belarus. They did not vanish so much as get absorbed by their own success: the name stopped being useful once the Principality of Polotsk grew out of their territory, and the people themselves are among the ancestors of today's Belarusians. The Primary Chronicle names them and explains the name in one flat line, that they settled on the Dvina and were called Polochans after the small river Polota that runs into it. Most historians read them as Krivichi who took a local identity from a local river rather than as a wholly separate tribe, which is a useful correction to the idea that early Slavic tribes were sealed ethnic units. They were geography with a name attached, and the geography did most of the work.

That geography was a corridor. The Dvina is the western half of the route between the Baltic and the Dnieper, and the Polochans sat on its hinge, which is why Arab silver turns up in hoards in their fields and why Polotsk appears in the chronicle as early as 862, ahead of most towns in the region. Their neighbors were Balts, Latgalians and Selonians, and that Baltic presence is written permanently into the map: a large share of the rivers and lakes around Polotsk still carry Baltic names, given by the people the Slavs settled among rather than replaced. Politics arrived early and violently. Around 980 Vladimir of Kiev took the town, killed its prince Rogvolod and married his daughter Rogneda by force; their son Izyaslav was sent back to rule Polotsk, and the line descended from him spent the next two centuries refusing to behave like a branch office of Kiev. Its most notorious member, Vseslav Bryachislavich, held Polotsk for more than fifty years, sat briefly on the Kievan throne in 1068, and was remembered in verse as a sorcerer who ran between cities as a wolf. Christianity followed the same track: an early bishopric, a stone cathedral of St. Sophia raised in the eleventh century as a deliberate answer to the Sophias of Kiev and Novgorod, and in the twelfth century Euphrosyne of Polotsk, Vseslav's granddaughter, who took vows, copied books, founded monasteries and became the region's own saint. The Polochans as a named people are gone. The town, the river, the cathedral and a strain of stubborn local independence are all still there.