Yotvingians Erotic

The Yotvingians were a West Baltic people who held the lake and forest country between the Neman and Narew rivers, now northeastern Poland, southwestern Lithuania and western Belarus, from at least the second century CE until the Teutonic Order broke them in 1283. The survivors were deported or absorbed over the following centuries by Lithuanians, Poles, Old Prussians and Ruthenians. Nobody is a Yotvingian today, but the Suwałki region of Poland and the Lithuanian districts of Suvalkija and Dzūkija sit on their old ground and carry part of their descent.

What set them apart from their Baltic cousins was reputation. They spoke a West Baltic language close to Old Prussian and more distant from Lithuanian, but chroniclers on every side remembered them for war. Ptolemy noted the Sudini in the second century. The Rus chronicles record Vladimir of Kiev marching against the Yatvyagi in 983, and for the next three hundred years Yotvingian raiding parties struck Masovia, Volhynia and the Rus borderlands while Polish dukes, Galician princes and finally the Teutonic Knights answered in kind. Peter of Dusburg, the Order's own chronicler, called the Sudovians the noblest and richest of the Prussian tribes and credited them with six thousand horsemen. Their last major leader, Skomantas, fought the Knights for years before submitting, and the Order deported whole communities to a corner of the Sambian peninsula that Germans went on calling the Sudauer Winkel. The emptied homeland became the Great Wilderness, a buffer that stayed largely unsettled until Lithuanian, Masovian and Ruthenian colonists moved in during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

They stayed pagan to the end. The barrows of the early Sudovian culture around Suwałki, including the Szwajcaria cemetery, hold graves furnished with weapons, bronze ornaments and sacrificed horses. By the Middle Ages the Yotvingians cremated their dead. A sixteenth-century German text known as the Sudovian Book describes the deported community in Sambia still sacrificing a goat at communal feasts, with a priest blessing the animal and the beer while villagers confessed their faults. The name itself covered several tribes, the Sudovians, Dainavians, Pollexians and the Yotvingians proper, which is why Lithuanian sources say Sūduva and Polish ones say Jaćwież for the same people. Their language survives only in place names and personal names, plus a disputed Polish-Yotvingian glossary that surfaced in 1978. Hill forts such as Szurpiły still stand, a nineteenth-century Russian census still found some thirty thousand people near Grodno calling themselves Yotvingians, and the name lives on in the Lithuanian regional identity of Suvalkija.