Lukomorye is one of the first place names that we recognize in life. It is not found on modern maps, but it is on the maps of the 16th century. Lukomorye is also mentioned in "The Lay of Igor's Campaign" and in Russian folklore.
The word "lukomorye" sounds mysterious and even fabulous for us, but its etymology is rather prosaic. It comes from the Old Slavonic "luk" and "sea". The word "bow" means bend. Words with the same root with it - "bow", "bend", "bow" (at the saddle). That is, "curvature" is translated as a curved seashore, a bay. That is, it is a curved seashore, a bay.
If we were talking about the bend of the Ob River, then why not call this area “onion”?
It's hard to believe, but in the 15th century, according to Karamzin, Moscow inhabitants had a clear idea of where Lukomorye was located. It was believed that this is a place on the ocean shore in the North, where the polar day and night divide the year in half. Different beliefs circulated about the inhabitants of Lukomorye themselves, to the point that they die during the polar night, and in the spring they return to life.
Since the Middle Ages, our Lukomorye has appeared on the geographical maps of Cantelli, Mercator, Gondius and other cartographers. The Austrian diplomat Baron Sigismund von Herberstein wrote in his book "Notes on Muscovy" (1549) that Lukomorye is located in the bend of the Ob River. This is how it was indicated on Asian maps.
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It is worth telling a little about the inhabitants of Lukomorye. There are mentions of the French traveler Mandeville about the peoples living just in the upper reaches of the Ob, about the cult of worshiping the image of the Sun and the red banner. According to the convictions of the famous thinker of the 20th century Rene Guénon, at the mouth of the Ob was one of the seven towers of Satan (Europeans have always been inclined to excessive demonization of our country).
We learn about Lukomorye from the prologue to the first great work of Alexander Pushkin, the poem "Ruslan and Lyudmila". Pushkin describes Lukomorye as a kind of fabulous place "where Russia smells", where there is an oak tree with a golden chain and a learned cat walking on it. It is important that the prologue was written already for the second edition of the poem, which was published 8 years after the first edition - in 1828. This can clarify a lot about the origin of the Pushkin Lukomorye. By this time, Pushkin had already visited the southern exile, where, together with the Raevskys, he visited both the Azov Sea and the Crimea. General Raevsky from Gorochevodsk wrote enthusiastically to his daughter Elena: “Here the Dnieper has just crossed its rapids, in the middle of it there are stone islands with a forest, very elevated, the banks are also forest in places; in a word, the views are unusually picturesque, I saw little on my journey,koi could compare with them”. These landscapes made an indelible impression on a military man. They simply could not help influencing the poet Pushkin.
It is also noteworthy that in the mythology of the Slavs there is an image of the northern kingdom at the end of the world, where a huge tree, the Tree of the Center, grows - the axis of the world, the top of which extends into the heavens, and the roots of the tree go deep into the ground (Nizzhi Mir) “… green oak, a golden chain on that oak ….
It is curious that in Pushkin's drafts the cat does not walk left and right "… it goes to the right - the song starts, to the left - a fairy tale …", but up and down, just like the gods.
Let's pay attention to the oldest texts of the Rig Veda (1700-1100 BC) and the Avesta (1200 BC), which tell about the ancestral home of the ancient Aryans, absorbed every six months at the polar night. But when the polar day comes and the Sun appears above the horizon, it does not set any more - it makes circles on the horizon for another six months. In practice, such a rotation of the Sun can be observed only at the North Pole.
Let's return to the map of Mercator (1569), on which an unknown continent was marked in the place of the North Pole, divided by rivers with a mountain in the very center. Signatures on the topographical document state that the map is based on numerous testimonies from travelers and knights of the Round Table.
Studies aimed at comparing the ancient map with the outlines of the coast of Karelia, the Kola Peninsula and Scandinavia tell us that the continent at the North Pole is shown very accurately on the Mercator map. Was there really a time when the North Pole was not yet covered with ice?
It is interesting that the mention of the knights of King Arthur suggests that the path of the seekers of the Holy Grail led them to the ancestral home of all Europeans - Hyperborea. It is impossible to ignore the fact that Ruslan went in search of his Lyudmila, kidnapped by the sorcerer Chernomor, from Kiev directly to the far north, and not south to the Black Sea, where the name of the sorcerer logically directs.
Further, according to legend, Ogier Danish, being the paladin of Charlemagne, came to Avallon, where the Center Tree grows. The already familiar oak near Lukomorye.
The opinions of researchers agree that all European peoples can have a common ancestral home, which hid under the ice of the Arctic. The Greeks called this homeland Hyperborea, the British - Avallon, the Germans - Thule, the Indians and Iranians - Arianna Veyejo.
At present, Artika has become a bone of contention for all major powers. Huge deposits of natural resources are hidden under the ice. And the advantageous strategic location opens up great opportunities. And every European nation can have its own rights to this territory - the ancestral home of all Europeans covered with ice.
And we, in turn, will not forget that Lukomorye is "the Russian spirit, it smells of Russia …". Our ancestors, leaving their native territories, captured by the Arctic ice, named the shores of the Ob, Azov, Black and Caspian seas in honor of Lukomorye.
LUKOMO'R'E - Sea bay, bay. Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language by Ushakov. By the side of the sea, a green oak. A. S. Pushkin, by the way, the preposition "U" shows that the poet had in mind by no means a fairy-tale country. Lukomorye no longer exists - Vladimir Semyonovich did not bother with the meaning of the word - he needed to show that the times of Pushkin's fairy tales had passed and everyone had become terribly progmatic.
Perhaps this is not a very deep and not very complete and certainly not at all scientific analysis, but I have an opinion:
Pushkin liked the sound of the word "Lukomorye" and it doesn't matter from whom he learned it - from his grandmother, from a nanny or from books, and he placed a fabulous oak in this place in "Ruslana and Lyudmila". And then, due to the popularity of the poet, the curvature of the sea became so fused with its fabulous meaning that its original meaning was gradually lost.
However, landscapes are landscapes, but what about Lukomorye? How could this image crystallize from Pushkin, which will go down not only in the history of Russian literature, but also in the subconsciousness of every Russian person? Source one: Arina Rodionovna. As you know, the plots of several Pushkin's fairy tales were inspired by the poet by his nanny. The literary historian Pushkin scholar Pavel Annenkov wrote that many episodes from the tales of Arina Rodionovna are expounded by Pushkin in his own way and transferred from work to work. Here is an excerpt from "The Tale of Tsar Saltan", as told by Annenkov: "So, she had a cat:" There is an oak near the sea-curtain, and on that oak there are golden chains, and a cat walks along those chains: it goes up - tells tales, goes down - sings songs. " As we can see, the cat walks up and down with Pushkin's nanny, that is, we are dealing with a description of the world tree typical of the Finno-Ugric tradition.
The cat here is at the same time the keeper of the border between the worlds, and the mediator between them. Source of the second: "The Word about Igor's Regiment." Back in the Lyceum years of Pushkin, A. I. Musin-Pushkin published The Lay of Igor's Regiment. About Lukomorye in the "Word" it is said: "And the filthy Kobyak from the onions of the sea from the iron great Polovtsian pl'kovs like a whirlwind, vytorzh: and Kobyak fell in the city of Kiev, in Svyatoslavl's gridnitsa." In the annals it was reported that the Russians constantly encountered nomads in the southern steppe: "even earlier in Luzѣmor, there would be krypko with them."
According to the chronicles, the inhabitants of Lukomorye were the Polovtsians, with whom the Kiev princes were constantly at enmity. Lukomorye was the name of the territory of the Northern Azov Sea. This opinion, according to S. A. Pletneva, is confirmed by the fact that “it is possible to trace the Lukomorian Polovtsi by the stone statues (idols) found in the area of the lower Dnieper. They belong to the developed period of Polovtsian sculpture, to the second half of the 12th and early 13th centuries”. Thus, we can say that Lukomorye (which was sung by Pushkin) was called the bend between the lower course of the Dnieper and the Sea of Azov.
Even today, in the toponymy of the Azov region, one can find echoes of this historical memory: the two steppe rivers Bolshoy and Maly Utlyuk. “Utluk” - “Otluk” - “Luka” is translated from Turkic as “pasture, meadow”. What kind of oak tree? It is also interesting to understand what kind of oak was described by Pushkin: “And there I was, and I drank honey; I saw a green oak by the sea."
Traveling along the Dnieper-Azov steppe during his southern exile, Pushkin could hear from old-timers the legend about the famous Zaporozhye oak that grew on the island of Khortytsya. The Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus wrote about him: “Having passed this place, the Russians reach the island of St. Gregory (the island of Khortitsa) and make their sacrifices on this island, as a huge oak tree grows there.
They sacrifice live roosters, stick arrows around, others bring pieces of bread, meat and what everyone has, as their custom requires. " Already in the 70s of the XIX century, the Zaporozhye local historian Ya. P. Novitsky also mentioned this oak: “Five years ago, on the island of Khortytsya, the sacred oak withered. It was branched and of colossal thickness, stood a hundred and fifty fathoms from Ostrov-Khortitskaya colonies ".
Where else to look for Lukomorye? Lukomorye is found not only in chronicles, "The Lay of Igor's Campaign" and Pushkin's poem, but also in Russian folklore. Afanasyev in his work "The Tree of Life" noted that this was the name of a reserved place on the border of the worlds in East Slavic mythology, where the world tree grows, resting against the underworld and reaching the sky. Karamzin also wrote that the word Lukomorye was used in the meaning of the northern kingdom, where people hibernate for six months and stay awake for six months. One way or another, in folklore perception, Lukomorye is a kind of conditional land on the border of the oecumene, most often located in the north.
Lukomorye could be considered a historical and semi-fabulous anachronism, if not for the Western European maps of the 16th-17th centuries, on which the location of the Lukomorye is precisely determined, both on the Mercator maps (1546), and on the maps of Gondius (1606), as well as on the Massa maps, Kantelli and Witsen, the territory on the right (eastern) bank of the Ob Bay is called Lukomorye. European cartographers themselves have not been to these places. Most likely, when drawing up the maps, they relied on the description of this area by travelers, in particular Sigismund Herberstein.
He gave it in "Notes on Muscovy": "in the mountains on the other side of the Ob", "From the Lukomorsk mountains flows the river Kossin. Together with this river, another river Kassima originates, and having flowed through Lukomoria, flows into the large river Takhnin. Nicholas Witsen, who published his Carte Novelle de la Tartarie in the 18th century, had graphic material at his disposal. On his map, the length of the Gulf of Ob corresponds to reality, and therefore "Lucomoria" is the designation of the Gulf of the Kara Sea itself. In Russian historical cartography, there was no toponym "Lukomorye", but it is obvious that Western European cartographers recognized Lukomorye as the ancient name of the Ob Bay.