On the scent of Slavic autochtony in the Balkans

[Vojvoda]

Radivoje Pesic. On the scent of Slavic autochtony in the Balkans.
“Zavicaj”. Casopis Matice Iseljenika Srbije. Godina XXXVI.
Maj-August 1989. 344-347. p 77-79.


The field of similarity, most often even, of the homogeneity of cultures in Neolithic sites from Crete and Thessalia, through the regions of the Vardar and Kosovo, along the valleys of the Morava and Danube, and all the way to the Dniepr and Dniestr, now is extending its boundaries with elements from the culture of Tripolis, which, besides everything else, suggests the homogeneity of ethnic formations. Classical historiographers, however, are often controversial in their information about the ethnic formations that spread over these large regions. But, some of them also give slight and uncertain indications of what we have just said.

The vague ideas that Herodotus had of the tribes and ethnic formations which were more or less outside his possible field of vision, caused a great deal of controversy and uncertainty which, instead of being cleared up and subjected to necessary scrutiny, were to be doubted both by some of his contemporaries and by historians of the future. That is why it has turned out that truth should be left to the past and be searched for in the historical archives that lie hidden in the bowels of the earth. This is the only reliable documentation that is left, which is the indisputable testimony of the events of the distant past.

When Arthur Evans, an Englishman, discovered the Crete-Minoan civilization (1900-94), historiography dated the origins’ of the Hellenic civilization into the more distant past, reflecting the civilization that was to be called Protogreek. But, the question who was the true representative of that civilization had not yet been answered. The Pelasgic ethnic area, which was mentioned both by Homer and Herodotus, besides Crete and Mycenae, occupied the re(li)gions from the Western part of Asia Minor through the whole Balkan peninsula all the way to the Appennine peninsula.

Georgiev (L’ethnogénèse paléobalkanique d’après les données linguistiques, Sofia, 1971) relates this ethnic area to the Thracians, Locher-Hüttebach (Die Pelasger, Wien, 1960) to the Illyrians, and in their later period, when they were definitively assimilated, Milan Budimir relates one part to the Hellenes, and the other one to the Slavs.

In his comparative study Homerus Slavicis dialectis cognata lingua (1829), Gregorius Dankovsky explains in a documentary way that the Pelasgic language of Homer was the substratum of Slavic languages. The encyclopaedist Alyan pointed out that there had existed an Illiad in the language of the Bruges (Brygians or Phrygians) who had close connections with the Dardans. This Illiad, therefore, existed before the year 60 BC, when Peistratus the tyrant gave and order for a new, revised edition.

In the fifth century AC, the Armenian writer Moses Chorens wrote that Thrace consisted of five little states and a bigger one, which was inhabited by five Slav tribes.

The ethnic formations of the Venets (Vends), which was also mentioned both by Homer and Herodotus, could be found in the second millennium BC in Asia Minor by the river Hellis in Paphlagonia and near the Pontic coast, and also between the Black and Caspian Sea in Russia, all the way to the Baltic sea. The Venets could also be found in Norrick, in Upper Tyrol, as far as the Bodensee, which was called after them Lacum veneticum, as well as in Carnia and along the Adriatic coast. Appian (Belum Mithrid. 1,5) traced the Venets to the region of the Timok, from the Morava to the Vardar, and over the whole regions of Kosovo and Sandzak as far as the Montenegrin coast.

In the sixth century AC, the Gothic historiographer Jordanes wrote in his work Getica that “a large tribe of the Venets calles themselves the Sclavines and Antes”, and that as early as that time they were called “the Venets, Antes and Sclavines”. Even more precisely in the same work (2,14) he says : Scriptores aequivalenter modo Venedos, modo Venetes ac Vindos scripserunt, sed sub hoc nominee semper Vindos seu Sclavos intellexerunt”.

Polabius believes that the Venets are a branch of the Illyrians. Thus he indirectly relates the Venets to the Pelasts, in the same way as Helanicus, Mirsal and Plutarch relate the Etruscans or Rassens to the Pelasts. If we bear in mind the characteristics of the Appennine peninsula, where in immediate contact and close mutual communications we can find the Etruscans and Venets, whose alphabets are almost identical and languages similar, then we certainly should include this component, too.

In his study The Greeks and Pelasts (Beograd, 1950) Milan Budimir in a documentary way points out the oldest Indo-European substratum in the Balkans, which he considers the Pelasts to be. This is in accordance with the beliefs or indications of former historiographers. It was out of this substratum, Budimir concludes, that the Thracians, Illyrians, Macedonians developed. At this point it would be useful to remind ourselves of the observation that the outstanding French historiographer Cyprien Robert made in his extensive study Le Monde Slave I,II (Paris, 1852). Robert does not make a difference between the Illyrians and Slavs. The latter, according to him, have developed their language and culture from the same cradle as the Hellens, or from the Pelasgic branch.

Herodotus says that the Venets in Illyria lived in the neighbourhood of the Dardans and Macedonians, but he knows nothing about affinities between them. If there were some, how would it be possible for those Venets to have joined the Dardans together with the Peons and Brygians (Phrygians) and headed for Troy, where they were to take part in the Troyan war. Strabon and Appian find affinities between the Dardans and Illyrians, while Polibius makes a difference between them.

There are no grounds for interpreting dardanos as meaning “a dark-haired man”, as August Fik, a linguist, unconvincingly does. Neither can dardan be related to dardhus, which denotes “a pear” in Albanian. In pre-Greek, or to be more precise in Pelasgic darda, it means “bee”. But, it is only the first level of identification.

In Sanskrit dãrdhya means “consistency”, “firmness”, “strength”, “power”. The name of the Etruscan deity Turan means “present-giver” (daritelj, daritejlica). The Old Slav word daronosie is the Greek word daropsoria, which means “offering of presents” (prinosenja darova). Therefore, it is from the compound nouns Dardan, Dardania, Dardaneli that the Slav words dar-dat, dar-doneo, dar-dao-nama and dar-doneli are derived. This is in accordance with the Pelasgic word darda (“bee”), “she that gives the present”, therefore, is a “presen-giver”, the same as the Etruscan turan (or daran). This has been documented by many Slav anthroponyms (Bogdan, Vojdan, Gordan, Jordan, Lordan, Prodan, Slob(o)dan, etc.), and Sanskrit reveals to us the essential signification of dar (present) – darivanje (“giving a present”) – daronosia (“offering of presents”) as the ethical category of consistency, firmness and power which enables a present itself.

Similar to this, Ras, from which Ars is derived (hence Arsava between Pamphylia, Capadochia and Cyprus) belongs to the Pelasgic toponymy, where certainly one must search for Etruscan Rasni, Rasani, Raseni, or Serbian Raci, Rasi, Rasani (as the Serbs were called for a certain period of time).
This is analogous with the ethnonym Sarmat, which requires anagramic identification ras-mat. The Etruscan deity is ris, which they call ras. So it is similar to the deity that in the famous bas-relief holds Gilgamesh in his hand. Nor should we forget the Lydian town Sard, no the latest research of Massimo Pitau La Lingua dei Sardi Nuragici e degli Etruschi, Sassari, 1981) according to which the Etruscans first moved from Sardinia to Italy in the 15th or 16th century B.C. The Pelasgic hydronym Prasijas for today’s Lake of Dojran also belongs here. Therefore, Sarmat, Sarmati, Sarmatija or Rasmat is nothing else but the homeland of the Rassens, or as the Russians would say, matuska (mother) of the Rassens (derived from the Sanskrit word matr-majka). Damatrios incidentally is the great Pelasgic deity, who was accepted by many neighbouring tribes, but, the Sarmats are the only ones who write his name in their rich alphabet, which taking into consideration the afore-mantioned affinities, obviously had Vinca (on the outskirts of present-day Belgrade) for its source.

In the 12th century AC, Nestor of Kiev wrote in his Letopis (Annals) that the Slavs had been living for a long time in the region of the Danube, and, that when their migrations began, they preserved their names, even though they accepted the names of the places they migrated to. Those who migrated to Moravia were called Moravians, the other ones became Czechs. The same thing happened to the Slavs who were to call themselves White Croats (Hrvati Beli) and Serbs. Therefore, according to Nestor, the Homeland of the Slavs is at the boundary of the regions of the middle and lower Danube and in Pannonia.

At Herodotus’s time, however, and even later on, the Slavs were known only in ethnic formations as the Venets, Illyrians, Thracians, Scythians, Sarmats, Antes, Neures, or Dardans, Brygians, Dalmatians, Payons, Maryans, Meseys, Yapods, etc. But to a certain degree all of them were connected by a Pelasgic name which suggests a synonym for the Slavs. According to Gilbert Murray (The Rise of the Greek Epic, London, 1907) pelas could be interpreted as : “close”, “related”, “neighbourly”, “to be someone’s neighbour”, “communicative”, “friendly”, but, this interpretation does not have enough ground for further etymology. If, however, we assume the usual change of P into B – pelast becomes belasti (“whitish”). Actually, ancient peoples used to call the Pelasts white Gods or the first inhabitants of Levant, which was the old name of ancient Phoenicia. So, if we accept the meaning of another Pelasgic word – pleistoi, which denoted ascetics from the region of the Danube who respected the cult of Helios and therefore where “brights” (blistavi) or “enlightened” (prosveceni), etymology leads us to the concept of light (svetlost). As light is identifies with holiness (svetlost), everything exists in glory to holiness. In Sanskrit, light is satyasam, which is derived from satya (truth), and asam exist); to exist in light, therefore, means to be in truth, which is holiness and calls for respect, glory, fame. Therefore, the dialectics of the concept follow this line : light – holiness – glory. That is why this is the more logical etymology of the word Pelast.

In the spirit of the Yaphetic theory, Mavro Orbini (The Kingdom of the Slavs, 1601) finds the ethongenesis of the Slavs in the ethnic formations of the Sarmats, Scythians, Vends (Veneti), Antes, Serbes (Serbs), Swedes, Finns, Prussians, Vandals, Burgundians, Poloni, Bohemians, Illyrians, Thracians, etc. Mavro Orbini’s theory has not been so widely accepted or thorouly verifies, that it can be rejected, but, the fact is that the vestiges of the Slav inhabitants have remained in all the regions mentioned by Orbini : from Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Holland all the way to England, Germany, Austria and Italy.

Besides Letopis by Nestor of Kiev and the chronicle The Kingdom of the Slavs by Mavro Orbini, the distant past of the history of the Slavs is the subject of the so-called Isenbeck’s tablets, the parts of which were decoded and first published in 1954-1959 in San Francisco and edited by A.A Kur and J. Mirolubov. The complete edition of this unusual document of Slav history, entitled Vles kniga, appeared in ten volumes translated into Ukrainian and edited by M. Skripnik in the Hague, 1967. An unknown writer wrote down on these tablets (wooden ones), in the pre-Cyrillic alphabet, the history of the Slavs from the year 650 B.C up to the 9th century A.C, on the basis of which one may suppose that the document was written in the 10th or 11th century. This newly found chronicle of the Slavs, all together unusual, raises many fundamental questions concerning the Slav ethnogenesis and history and attracts the attention of scholars by pointing to the records of the Slavs in the epoch B.C existing in the very large area of the European and one part of the Asian continent.

The great explorer of Slav history P.I.Safarik (Slovanske starozitnosti, Praha, 1837) never questions the autochtony of the Slavs in the Balkans. In a documentary way, he rejects the credibility of Por(i)firogenitov’s information about the alleged migrations of the Slavs and their settlement on the Balkan peninsula in the 7th century. Categorically rejecting the veracity of Por(i)firogenitov’s information, Safarik considers it to be deliberately “involved” so that it could realize its “political apologia”. The history of the research of the Slav origins has come across such apologias for contemporary politics before, as well as after Safarik, but political apologias can never be accepted as history, but only as another kind of “history”.
The new archaeological discoveries that have been made during the last two centuries offer us very rich documentation, which definitively rejects all hesitations, doubts and playing with history. The archaeological, anthropological, ethnological, semiotic and linguistic explorations of this century are the new lights of history, which can no longer be blind to the facts.

So-called Pan-Slavism, which did not appear as a departure from history, but as protection from Pan-nordism in history, created a vacuum of cautiousness and obsequiousness towards fundamental facts. This seems to have been the main intention of that challenge.

The archaeological explorations of V.V Hvojka (Drevnie obiteli, Kiev, 1913) discovered in the regions of the Dnieper and Dniester, the valuable Neolithic culture known in archaeology as the culture of Tripolis. On the basis of a comprehensive analysis of the objects of this culture which was made by Hvojka, and later on by Rudenko, T.S Pesak, M.M Gerasimov; E.K Cernis and B.V Gorung, the conclusion was reached that the representative of that culture had been an agricultural people which tended to stay in one place and “in which one could recognize only our predecessors Pre-Slavs or Proto-Slavs, who on our soil preceded and survived all known migrations and invasions of other tribes, and whose ancestors have preserved power over the regions of their predecessors up to these days”.

In his further conclusions, the outstanding archaeologist Hvojka, besides everything else, points out that the beginning of the culture of Tripolis can be dated from the year 3500 B.C.

The general type of the actual monuments and the basis of the social system that, relying on these monuments, can be ascertained, closely relate this culture to the cultures from the region of the lower Danube, from the whole Balkan peninsula, with Thessaly and the oldest cultural centre of the Mediterranea(n) with Mycenae and Crete, and in the East with Asia Minor. For many archaeologists, this has provided enough ground for denoting the culture of Tripolis as Pre-Mycenaen.

If we bear in mind this documentation, the extremely rich culture that can be found in neolithic regions in Yugoslavia (Lepenski vir, Starcevo, Vinca, etc.) as well as in the regions of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, despite slight differences in style, we do not have enough ground for doubting the similarity or homogeneity of these cultures in such a big area.

The extremely early appearance of literacy (the Vincan alphabet), and its diffusion, are the testimonies of a high degree of civilization in this cultural area, which could have been the foundation of the Creteous-Mycenaen civilization. The valley of the Danube, especially the part between the middle and the lower regions, as the cradle of literacy which was so wide-spread, systematized and in so frequent, everyday use, is the testimony of the way of thinking which raised the achievement of human mind to the level of holiness. That was the outcome of the common ideals and aspirations. The anthropological explorations in these regions have discovered the results of the common characteristics of those people who knew how to exploit the fertile soil and how to express their creative energy.

It was out of this fertile soil that the great family of the Pelasts developed, whose branches were to touch the shores of the Mediterranean, Caspian, Baltic, North and Tyren Sea. This is confirmed by the rich documentation from the womb of the earth. It is the most reliable documentation history can possibly find.

Radivoje Pesic.

[Marcus Marulus]

Koješta. Da je tomu tako, starorimski i predrimski Ilirik, Mezija i Trakija bili bi prepuni toponima, oronima i hidronima slavenskog jezičnog korijena, a ne bi bili izvedeni iz danas nepoznatih i nestalih jezika ("ilirski" i sl.)

U hrvatskoj tradiciji misao o autohtonosti očitovala se u svetojeronimskoj legendi, ali ona nema nikakve povijesne temelje.