Ukrani Erotic

The Ukrani were a West Slavic people who lived along the Uecker river in what is now northeastern Germany, from roughly the eighth century until the thirteenth, when conquest, church organization and German settlement dissolved them into the general population of Brandenburg and Pomerania. Nobody calls themselves Ukrani today. What survived is their name on the map: the Uckermark, the lake country running north from Prenzlau toward the Baltic lagoon, is named for them, and Ueckermuende stands where their river reaches the water.

Their country was glacial ground, sandy soil, beech and pine, and an unusual density of lakes and marsh, which shaped how they defended themselves. Settlement clustered around ring forts of earth and timber set on peninsulas and islands, of which the rampart at Drense near Prenzlau is the best known and the most excavated. They spoke a Lechitic Slavic tongue, the branch that also produced Polish and the extinct Polabian, and their speech would have shaded without a clear border into that of the Pomeranians east of them and the Lutici tribes west of them. Latin chroniclers tended to lump all of these together as Wends, but the Ukrani appear to have run their own affairs rather than taking orders from the Lutici federation.

They sat directly in the path of Saxon expansion, and it went badly for them. A Saxon chronicler records Otto the Great leading a campaign against them in 954, and the raiding, tribute and reprisal that followed continued in cycles for two centuries. They held to Slavic polytheism longer than most of their neighbors, and Christianization arrived with armies rather than ahead of them. By the twelfth century the region was being fought over by the dukes of Pomerania and the Ascanian margraves of Brandenburg; the Treaty of Kremmen in 1236 handed much of the Uckermark to Brandenburg, and German colonists moved in behind the settlement. The Slavic population was not expelled so much as taxed, converted, married and slowly renamed.

Their traces are quiet but real: dozens of Uckermark village names are Slavic under their German spelling, the ring forts are still legible as bumps in the fields, and at Torgelow on the Uecker a reconstructed settlement called Ukranenland keeps their crafts and boatbuilding in public view.