The Slavs’ original homeland is still a matter of debate due to a lack of historical records; however, scholars generally place it in Eastern Europe, with Polesia being the most commonly accepted location. They were speakers of Indo-European dialects who lived during the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages (approximately from the 5th to the 10th centuries AD) in Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe and established the foundations for the Slavic nations through the Slavic states of the Early and High Middle Ages.
The comparitively recent discovery of
Cucuteni-Tripillja (named in 1885 after two sites, Cucuteni in Romania and Tripillja in the Ukraine) 40 kilometers south of Kyiv suggests the first cities may have emerged in Ukraine, as far back as 4000 BCE, housing more than 10,000 people.* This would indicate that Uruk, in ancient Persia, is not the oldest city. Researchers describe the remnants of what may have been “the largest city in the world,” were discernible only through aerial photography.
There is the suggestion though that, “In actual fact, the Crimean peninsula, for most of its history, had nothing to do with Russia. Since antiquity, Crimea’s mountainous south-eastern shores have been dominated by Tauri, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, and Genoese principalities, before they were conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1475. The vast inland steppes of Crimea were ruled and populated by Scythians, Greeks, Goths, Huns, Bulgars, Khazars, Mongols, and Karaites, and eventually, from 1441, formed the heartland of the Crimean Tatar Khanate, a tributary of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans and the Tatars continued to rule over their respective parts of the peninsula until 1783.
“Throughout the pre-modern era, Crimea’s only substantial historical connection to either Russia or Ukraine was the fact that the inland section of the peninsula was controlled by the Kievan Rus’ – the precursor state of both modern Ukraine and Russia – from the mid-10th to the early 13th century,” says Björn Alexander Düben, LSE.
History also implies that the Slavs assimilated the vikings in to their culture, which in turn gave rise to the Kievan Rus from approximately 880 CE. This means the Slavs have been in the area some 300 years prior to the Kievan Rus.
So whatever the political motivation maybe sought to justify a claim over the Ukraine, historically it was Slavic, Slavic-Varangian, then respectively, Tauri, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, Genoese then part of the Ottoman Empire in 1475. Scythians, Greeks, Goths, Huns, Bulgars, Khazars, Mongols, and Karaites have all played their part in forming the cultural identity of the Ukraine. Ostensibly they are a blend, similar to the make up of United Kingdom, descended from Angles Saxons, Norse, French, German, et al. The Slavic assimilation of the vikings helped establish the Kyivan Rus, which inturn inspired the contemporary sovereign state of the Ukraine.
Historians and authors can put their ‘spin’ on the ancestry, but DNA and hereditary markers do not lie. Most Ukrainians have the R1a haplogroup, and the R1a-Z282 subtype is particularly common in Eastern Europe. The Chernivtsi Oblast region has a higher percentage of the I2a haplogroup, which is more common in the Balkan region. However, time and migration also provided the admixture for a country that is located at the crossroads of trade routes, being influenced by both Russian and European culture.
Ukr_26Feb2025
23th inc
(Originally written in September 2024)
23th inc 