Classical Pontic Steppe Divisions

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 39-41:

Ovid’s contemporary Strabo, author of the acclaimed Geographies, knew more about the Pontic steppe than did the famous Roman exile. From Strabo we learn the names of the Sarmatian tribes and the areas under their control. According to him, the Iazyges and Roxolani were “wagon dwellers,” or nomads, but the famous geographer gives us literally nothing about the sedentary population of the forest-steppe areas around the Dnieper, not to mention the wooded areas farther to the north. Unlike Ovid, however, he did not live among the peoples of the region; nor were his sources as good as those of Herodotus. They knew nothing about the “northerners,” and Strabo complained about the ignorance that prevailed “in regard to the rest of the peoples that come next in order in the north; for I know neither the Bastarnae, nor the Sauromatae, nor, in a word, any of the peoples who dwell above the Pontus, nor how far distant they are from the Atlantic Sea, nor whether their countries border upon it.”

Strabo’s informants came from one of the colonies, but if Herodotus made numerous references to the Dnieper, Strabo seemed more familiar with the Don. His sources likely came from Tanais, a Greek colony at the mouth of the Don that belonged to the Bosporan Kingdom, the most powerful union of Greek colonies revived with the arrival of the Romans. For Strabo, the Don had a special meaning. It served as the easternmost boundary of Europe, the term used in the Aegean homeland to describe the expanse of the Greek presence in the outer world. Europe lay to the west of the Don, while Asia began to the east of it.

Thus, at the beginning of the first millennium AD, when the Romans came to the Pontic colonies, the Ukrainian territories found themselves once again at the very edge of what would become Western civilization. The northern frontier of the Hellenic world had now become the eastern boundary of Europe. There it would remain for almost two thousand years, until the rise of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century redrew the map of Europe, moving its eastern boundary all the way to the Urals.

The division of the Pontic steppes into European and Asian parts did not mean much in the time of the Romans. Strabo wrote about the Sarmatians on both the left and right banks of the Don, and Ptolemy, one of his successors, wrote in the second century AD about two Sarmatias, one European, the other Asian—a division that would remain constant in the works of European geographers for another millennium and a half. More important than the imagined eastern boundary of Europe was the real civilizational frontier between the Mediterranean colonies on the northern shore of the Black Sea and the nomads of the Pontic steppes. Unlike the Greek colonies with their surrounding fortifications, that frontier was never set in stone, creating instead a broad zone of interaction between colonists and locals in which languages, religions, and cultures intermixed, producing new cultural and social realities.

The all-important boundary between the steppe nomads and the agriculturalists of the forest-steppe areas that was known to Herodotus became invisible for Strabo. Whether it disappeared altogether or Mediterranean writers simply did not know about it is hard to say. Geography and ecology stayed the same, while the population probably did not. It certainly refused to stay put in the middle of the first millennium AD, when we next encounter references to the region in the writings of learned Greeks.

Herodotus on Ukraine

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 29-30:

THE FIRST HISTORIAN of Ukraine was Herodotus, the father of history himself. This honor is usually reserved for the histories of countries and peoples belonging to the Mediterranean world. Ukraine—a stretch of steppes, mountains, and forests north of the Black Sea, which was known to the Greeks as the Pontos euxeinos (Hospitable Sea, latinized by the Romans as Pontus euxinus)—was an important part of that world. Its importance was of a particular nature. The world of Herodotus was centered on the city-states of ancient Greece, extending to Egypt in the south and the Crimea and the Pontic steppes in the north. If Egypt was a land of ancient culture and philosophy to study and emulate, the territory of today’s Ukraine was a quintessential frontier where Greek civilization encountered its barbaric alter ego. It was the first frontier of a political and cultural sphere that would come to be known as the Western world. That is where the West began to define itself and its other.

Herodotus, known in Greek as Herodotos, came from Halicarnassus, a Greek city in what is now Turkey. In the fifth century BC, when he lived, wrote, and recited his Histories, his birthplace was part of the Persian Empire. Herodotus spent a good part of his life in Athens, lived in southern Italy, and crisscrossed the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds, traveling to Egypt and Babylon among other places. An admirer of Athenian democracy, he wrote in Ionic Greek, but his interests were as global as they could be at the time. His Histories, later divided into nine books, dealt with the origins of the Greco-Persian wars that began in 499 and continued until the mid-fifth century BC. Herodotus lived through a good part of that period and researched the subject for thirty years after the end of the wars in 449. He depicted the conflict as an epic struggle between freedom and slavery—the former represented by the Greeks, the latter by the Persians. Although his own political and ideological sympathies were engaged, he wanted to tell both sides of the story. In his own words, he set out “to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements of both the Greeks and the Barbarians.”

Herodotus’s interest in the “barbarian” part of the story turned his attention to the Pontic steppes. In 512 BC, thirteen years before the start of the wars, Darius the Great, by far the most powerful ruler of the Persian Empire, invaded the region to avenge himself on the Scythians, who had played a trick on him. The Scythian kings, nomadic rulers of a vast realm north of the Black Sea, had made Darius march all the way from the Danube to the Don in pursuit of their highly mobile army without giving him a chance to engage it in battle. This was a humiliating defeat for a ruler who would pose a major threat to the Greek world a decade and a half later. In his Histories, Herodotus spared no effort in relating whatever he knew or had ever heard about the mysterious Scythians and their land, customs, and society. It would appear that despite his extensive travels, he never visited the region himself and had to rely on stories told by others. But his detailed description of the Scythians and the lands and peoples they ruled made him not only the first historian but also the first geographer and ethnographer of Ukraine.

Defining Ukraine and Ukrainian

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 24-27:

Nation is an important—although not dominant—category of analysis and element of the story that, along with the ever changing idea of Europe, defines the nature of this narrative. This book tells the history of Ukraine within the borders defined by the ethnographers and mapmakers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which often (but not always) coincided with the borders of the present-day Ukrainian state. It follows the development of the ideas and identities linking those lands together from the times of the medieval Kyivan state, known in historiography as Kyivan Rus’, to the rise of modern nationalism and explains the origins of the modern Ukrainian state and political nation. In doing so, the book focuses on Ukrainians as the largest demographic group and, in time, the main force behind the creation of the modern nation and state. It pays attention to Ukraine’s minorities, especially Poles, Jews, and Russians, and treats the modern multiethnic and multicultural Ukrainian nation as a work in progress. Ukrainian culture always existed in a space shared with other cultures and early on involved navigating among the “others.” The ability of Ukrainian society to cross inner and outer frontiers and negotiate identities created by them constitutes the main characteristic of the history of Ukraine as presented in this book.

Politics, international and domestic, provide a convenient storyline, but in writing this book, I found geography, ecology, and culture most lasting and thus most influential in the long run. Contemporary Ukraine, as seen from the perspective of longue durée cultural trends, is a product of the interaction of two moving frontiers, one demarcated by the line between the Eurasian steppes and the eastern European parklands, the other defined by the border between Eastern and Western Christianity. The first frontier was also the one between sedentary and nomadic populations and, eventually, between Christianity and Islam. The second goes back to the division of the Roman Empire between Rome and Constantinople and marks differences in political culture between Europe’s east and west that still exist today. The movement of these frontiers over the centuries gave rise to a unique set of cultural features that formed the foundations of present-day Ukrainian identity.

One cannot tell the history of Ukraine without telling the story of its regions. The cultural and social space created by the movement of frontiers has not been homogenous. As state and imperial borders moved across the territory defined by Ukrainian ethnic boundaries, they created distinct cultural spaces that served as foundations of Ukraine’s regions—the former Hungarian-ruled Transcarpathia, historically Austrian Galicia, Polish-held Podolia and Volhynia, the Cossack Left Bank of the Dnieper with the lower reaches of that river, Sloboda Ukraine, and finally the Black Sea coast and the Donets basin, colonized in imperial Russian times. Unlike most of my predecessors, I try to avoid treating the history of various regions (such as the Russian- and Austrian-ruled parts of Ukraine) in separate sections of the book but rather look at them together, providing a comparative perspective on their development within a given period.

In conclusion, a few words about terminology. The ancestors of modern Ukrainians lived in dozens of premodern and modern principalities, kingdoms, and empires, and in the course of time they took on various names and identities. The two key terms that they used to define their land were “Rus’” and “Ukraine.” (In the Cyrillic alphabet, Rus’ is spelled Pycь: the last character is a soft sign indicating palatalized pronunciation of the preceding consonant.) The term “Rus’,” brought to the region by the Vikings in the ninth and tenth centuries, was adopted by the inhabitants of Kyivan Rus’, who took the Viking princes and warriors into their fold and Slavicized them. The ancestors of today’s Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians adopted the name “Rus’” in forms that varied from the Scandinavian/Slavic “Rus’” to the Hellenized “Rossiia.” In the eighteenth century, Muscovy adopted the latter form as the official name of its state and empire.

The Ukrainians had different appellations depending on the period and region in which they lived: Rusyns in Poland, Ruthenians in the Habsburg Empire, and Little Russians in the Russian Empire. In the course of the nineteenth century, Ukrainian nation builders decided to end the confusion by renouncing the name “Rus’” and clearly distinguishing themselves from the rest of the East Slavic world, especially from the Russians, by adopting “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian” to define their land and ethnic group, both in the Russian Empire and in Austria-Hungary. The name “Ukraine” had medieval origins and in the early modern era denoted the Cossack state in Dnieper Ukraine. In the collective mind of the nineteenth-century activists, the Cossacks, most of whom were of local origin, were the quintessential Ukrainians. To link the Rus’ past and the Ukrainian future, Mykhailo Hrushevsky called his ten-volume magnum opus History of Ukraine-Rus’. Indeed, anyone writing about the Ukrainian past today must use two or even more terms to define the ancestors of modern Ukrainians.

In this book, I use “Rus’” predominantly but not exclusively with reference to the medieval period. “Ruthenians” to denote Ukrainians of the early modern era, and “Ukrainians” when I write about modern times. Since the independent Ukrainian state’s creation in 1991, its citizens have all come to be known as “Ukrainians,” whatever their ethnic background. This usage reflects the current conventions of academic historiography, and although it makes for some complexity, I hope that it does not lead to confusion.

PCV Exit Interviews in Moldova

From Lenin's Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 239-241:

The COS [Close-of-Service] conference convened on a spring weekend at a campground that wealthy Russians used as vacation property. The Peace Corps staff had reserved us several cabins that overlooked the river separating Moldova and Ukraine. For the first time in two years, the entire group of remaining volunteers was in the same place at the same time. Our original class had dwindled from thirty-seven to twenty-two. The meetings were brief and confusing. Our boss, the Country Director, described how we should avoid areas like shopping malls and rock concerts when we returned to America; large groups of people would probably unnerve us. He read updates from the previous volunteers who had quit or been evacuated; Callie was teaching English in Turkey and Paul was completing his first year of law school in Cincinnati. They were happy. We listened less to their advice for readjustment, and more to where these people lived. America was a big place. Jesse would live in Minnesota, Colin in Virginia, Will in North Carolina. And Sadie would be in New Jersey. I wouldn’t be anywhere near those places. The medical officer asked that those of us who’d contracted ailments continue our medications when we returned home. Jesse—in direct relation to his refusal to ever seek medical treatment—was awarded recognition as the group’s healthiest volunteer over the two-year period. The safety officer asked that we not celebrate our final days in country with binge drinking; our final benefit package would be delayed if we were arrested and deported from the country at the last minute.

The lecture portion of the conference now concluded, the necessary advice for readjustment into American life dispensed, the Country Director congratulated us and excused us to our exit language interviews.

* * *

The Country Director’s secretary was the only one in the office who spoke Russian well enough to test Jesse and me. I waited outside as Jesse spoke with her for ten minutes. He came outside smiling and said, “Piece of cake.” The secretary had given him an advanced mark.

Inside the cabin, I found the secretary sitting on the bed, her feet not touching the floor. She pointed to a chair in the corner and asked me to sit. She asked me to spell my name and then we began. We talked about transportation using verbs of motion, of food preparation, of my likes and dislikes and specific events in the past and future. It took five minutes to finish her checklist of language proficiency.

“So,” said the secretary. “We have some time to kill. What shall we talk about?”

I shrugged my shoulders and said, “It’s all the same to me.” The secretary giggled.

“Your accent is good. Your body language is good, also. Very Russian, it seems to me.”

I nodded, brushing aside the compliment.

“You live with Russians, I must guess. Is this true?” 

I nodded. 

“Tell me about them.”

“Not much to tell. Very good people. They treat me well.”

“Do you respect them?”

“Of course.”

“What do you mean by, ‘Of course?’”

We sat in silence for a moment as the secretary allowed me to compose my thoughts. My mind returned to my imagining Dima working across the border in Romania, taking orders in a language he hated. And in Bulgaria the women drank coffee on the street corners, I thought. Dima would never be happy anywhere else.

“I spend most of my time in family with the father, Dima. He’s a baker and enjoys working, perhaps not the amount that he must, but the work itself.”

I paused to see if the secretary understood me. She nodded encouragement and waved her hand in a rolling circle to keep me going.

“Like this there is happiness, which I respect. In Riscani, where we live, the streets are clean and pleasant; there is always someone to stop and chat with along the way on these roads. The purpose of life is open and understood, I think. Every day, life has a simple and direct purpose. Walk to work, don’t hurt anyone along the way, and get back home at night for a drink and a sleep.” The secretary nodded and then dismissed me from the cabin. She scored me advanced as well.

Patron Saint's Day in Moldova

From Lenin's Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 193-195:

Riscani’s town birthday, a day festival called hram, fell on a Tuesday.

Only a handful of students had come to school; none of the kids higher than sixth grade or any of the village classes showed up that day. I was thankful that my older kids had taken the day off. They would have certainly arrived to class intoxicated. Instead, they wandered the streets with cans of beer, toasting anyone they recognized.

My fifth grade girls asked if I’d be celebrating in the town center. I assured them I wouldn’t be drunk.

“Why not?” asked Olia. “It is hram.”

“Do you realize that drinking so much can damage your health?”

“You are not little,” the class explained. “You can drink without problems.”

After school, I called my friends. I wouldn’t be going out into the hram without backup. Michael was in the capital, so he couldn’t help. With such short notice, Colin was the only one who could make it there in time. He was in Riscani an hour after I called, ready to take on the best the Russians could offer.

Colin was in the apartment for ten minutes before I realized he’d arrived. Dima had met him at the door and taken him to the kitchen for a shot of vodka in honor of Riscani. I walked into the kitchen and found Dima talking to Colin in broken Romanian. Dima pushed out a chair for me, explaining that he and Colin had started while I finished my nap. “Dude,” said Colin, his cheeks flushed. “I really like your father.”

Dima poured three more shots of vodka. We drank. Then Dima reached down to the cabinet below the sink and produced five different bottles: apple garilka, Moldovan samagon [самогон, self-distilled, i.e., homemade moonshine], cognac, high-class vodka, and red wine. We took a shot from each bottle. Then Dima took a bottle of cold beer from the ice box and we drank that. Colin had been a bartender in Virginia before joining the Peace Corps. Now he offered his professional commentary: “Dude, we just drank ten shots of alcohol in twenty minutes.”

“Go enjoy yourselves in the street,” said Dima. “It’s a party.”

...

Colin was already something of a celebrity in Riscani. The town folk who’d met him on his first visit recalled meeting the tallest man in the world. Those who hadn’t seen him carried in their minds an image akin to Big Foot.

From my front door we followed the techno music to its source at the Lenin statue. A crowd of a thousand cheered when we arrived. People hugged me and shook Colin’s hand, took pictures of us with their cell phones. In Russian, Colin said, “Good evening, Riscani,” and the crowd lost it. Students appeared holding beers for us to drink. I refused and told Colin not to accept anything from a minor—even former students like Edgar. Soon enough adults gave us drinks. The Riscanians gyrated to the techno music in disorganized, Russian-head-bobbing, non-circle dancing. Dariya appeared, only the second time I’d seen her since she went off to college. She’d dyed her hair black and wore even tighter clothes than she’d worn in high school. She kissed me on the cheek without her previous childhood awkwardness, whispered she’d see us back at the apartment, and then disappeared into the crowd.

...

Soon after hram, a well-known student from the Moldovan lyceum passed away from illness. My ninth graders had played with him as kids and weren’t in the mood to study, so I let class out early. With a handful of sunflower seeds, I walked down the main street. Live music carried through the air, trumpets and drums. I said hello to Katya at the bazaar and ate one of her sugar rolls. Outside the bazaar, I stepped into a tractor-trailer that had been converted into a shooting range, and I paid five lei to shoot twenty bee-bees at paper targets. I only hit one. Back on the main street, I decided to have a beer. As I walked toward the lake, the live music grew louder. The drumming vibrated my stomach. Then the funeral procession for the dead boy turned a corner into my view. Pedestrians stopped walking and removed their hats; I did the same. The casket was carried on the back of a flat-bed truck. His body was open to the air and slightly blue. Some type of jelly made his face look shiny. The priest walked directly behind; he made eye contact with me and smiled, placed his hand over his heart and bowed his head. I mirrored him, placing my hand on my heart and bowing my head. Several of my students were in the procession following the casket and the priest. They waved to me. Everyone looked sad, but no one cried. I continued on to the lake. The sounds of the trumpets and drums diminished until I only heard them in memory. At the bar they only had liters in the fridge, so that’s what I drank.

Our Quick Visit to Moldova

The Far Outliers have just returned from a short visit to Moldova, flying from Warsaw to Chișinău for Poland's Corpus Christi school holidays. We had multiple reasons for the visit.

We had earlier considered doing another year abroad under the English Language Fellow program after our year in Poland. In fact, we had originally hoped to go to Romania, but there were no current openings. Moldova has an opening for next year, but my scary health problems during our deep winter in Poland made me fear I might not make it through a Moldovan winter, despite my advantage of arriving in Moldova still fairly fluent in Romanian. Public signage all over Chișinău was indeed almost fully in Romanian (not in Moldovan Cyrillic or Russian), and I enjoyed being able to converse much more readily in Romanian than I have been able to in Polish. (My ability to navigate written Polish is far ahead of my conversational ability.)

Our other reason for visiting Moldova was to make a pilgrimage to the village where Ms. Outlier's Bessarabian German grandfather was born, and from which his family emigrated via Odessa to Canada and the Dakotas in the 1890s. Their rural village was named Neudorf, like dozens of German villages around the world. (There is a Neudorf village in Saskatchewan, and a poorly documented Neudorf cemetery in Eureka, South Dakota, originally settled by Germans from Russia). All the remaining Germans were expelled from Bessarabia in the 1940s, and Neudorf was renamed Carmanova (in Russian, Карманово).

Carmanova now lies in Transnistria, so near to the Ukrainian border that T-Mobile sent us "Welcome to Ukraine!" text messages when our phones came within range of their Ukraine cell towers. To get us there (and back), Moldova Tours was able to arrange for a private driver fluent in Russian, Romanian, and English, who had prior experience driving groups into the Transnistrian capital, Tiraspol, on their Soviet-era culture tours. But he had never been to very rural Carmanova and was curious about it. We ended up getting turned back twice at Russian Army checkpoints that could not handle international passports, and we had to wait in a long, slow line at the Grigoriopol checkpoint that could process our passports. They gave us a temporary insert but did not stamp our passports.

The rolling green hills of the Transnistrian countryside are quite lovely in June, with vast acres of foot-high sunflower sprouts. Several forks in the road had signposts directing us to the German settlements, and the road into the village featured a roughly made tall welcome sign with the year 1809 (when Neudorf was founded), its name in Cyrillic, Нойдорф, the year 1944, and its new name Карманово (from Карман 'pocket'?). There was also a rock monument in the village inscribed to mark the 200th anniversary of its founding in 1809.

The village itself was very small and quiet. We were given a tour of the House of Culture by its cordial manager. It contained a curtained stage and auditorium, a disco hall, a barre-lined ballet studio, and several rooms for workshops of various kinds. We also visited the cemetery for Soviet soldiers who died there, billboards with the names and faces of local citizens who died between 1941 and 1945. We saw no sign of a former church. The little country store where we bought a bottle of Ukrainian water took only Transnistrian rubles, so our driver/translator handled the payment.

I've added a Moldova album to my Flickr site, Joel Abroad.

New Year, New Classes in Moldova

From Lenin's Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 182-184:

The first week at school passed without any major incidents. There weren’t any fires or drunk students or kids challenging me to fights. As they had the year before, the students hesitated to participate—even the pupils who’d been in my classes the year before. I might have felt stress if I were a new volunteer. In retrospect, my comfort level with craziness was the only difference between the beginnings of the first and second school years. This time nothing fazed me, not even when a boy went after his classmate with a belt.

Several parents and guardians had requested the school keep their sons and daughters under my tutelage. Natashka’s class—the class that had started the trash fire—were now sixth graders. Two boys I knew from basketball, Vova and Alexander, were now in my ninth grade class. And the rambunctious pupils belonging to Lyudmila Petrovna’s homeroom, a different class of sixth graders, also remained with me.

The group of ninth graders from the previous year had moved on; there weren’t enough left to justify a space in my schedule. Edgar and the other boys who’d preferred drinking to English lessons had “graduated” to the work force or technical school to learn tractor mechanics. Nadezhda had absorbed the remaining girls into her own tenth grade class. In exchange she’d given me a new group of fifth graders—all girls. They listened to me, they conjugated, they played nice, they thanked me when class ended, never asked about grades and surrounded me in an awkward group hug when the bell rang.

The final class on my schedule, a village class, would prove to be my greatest challenge during this second year.

After watching me teach for a year, the school director had decided I was tough enough to handle a village class. A third class of sixth graders came into my room and began throwing playful punches while they waited for the bell to ring. I screamed for them to respect the classroom and they grew silent; this was the only time all year they’d respond to my yelling. They arrived in Riscani each morning on a bus from Novi Balan, a nearby village without a school. Their clothes were plainer than the town kids, with muted colors. Most had brown finger nails. The boys shaved their heads to keep dirt away, and the girls appeared to eat no more than once a day. Two of the boys called themselves gypsies, Artem and Maxim, of the Roma ethnicity. I soon learned that because of these two boys, Nadezhda had talked the school director into passing this class on to me.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s learn English.”

“As soon as you kick Artem and Maxim into the hallway,” said one of the girls. “Then we’ll begin.”

The class laughed.

Maxim calmly nodded his head to Artem, pushed his chair out, stood up, took off his belt and lunged after the girl. Two Russian boys promptly tackled him. The girl smacked Maxim over the head while the two boys held him down.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess that’s enough.”

I pulled the two boys off Maxim and got everyone back to their seats. The kids watched me silently, waiting for me to dispense punishment. Instead of yelling at Maxim, I directed my anger toward the girl. “Listen, little missy,” I said. “In English class I’m the only one allowed to hit people!” The class laughed. I tapped the girl on her forehead with her own text book.

I switched into English.

“Who wants to talk first?”

The room remained silent.

“What is your name?” I asked a girl.

Silence. “Who speaks English?” I asked. “Any words at all.”

Continued silence. Artem took out a cell, which I confiscated immediately.

“Give it!” he yelled in Russian.

“Ask me in English!” I said.

Artem laughed. The class laughed. This was a sixth grade class, so they’d studied English for three years.

I pointed at a girl, indicating it was her turn to speak.

“Not a word,” she said. “We usually draw in English class.”

“I know a word,” interrupted Maxim. “Motherfucker.”

The class laughed.

“Who has a textbook?” I asked. “Raise your hands.”

Only one girl in the class of fifteen raised her hand.

“Only you?” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Aaron. Don’t you remember hitting me over the head with it?”