Slavic Religion
SLAVIC RELIGION. The exact origin of the Slavs, an indigenous European people, is not known, but by about 800 BCE pockets of Slavs were scattered in a region east of the Vistula and the Carpathians and west of the Don. Some six hundred years later the Slavs inhabited a large area in central and eastern Europe. Over the centuries they were driven north, south, and east by successive migrations of Germanic and Asiatic tribes.
Around the sixth century CE the Slavs began separating into three groups, the West, South, and East Slavs. Proto-Slavic, an Indo-European language, was spoken in an area extending from the north of Russia to the south of Greece, and from the Elbe and the Adriatic coast to the Volga. By about the tenth century, Proto-Slavic had separated into three subgroups, the ancestors of the West Slavic, South Slavic, and East Slavic language groups.
The West Slavs lived in a region reaching beyond the Elbe and were bounded on the west by Germanic tribes. The language they spoke developed into modern Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Wendish. (The Wends settled between the Elbe and the Oder, in what is now Germany, and their descendants today are entirely surrounded by Germans.) The South Slavs, covering the area east of the Adriatic, south of the Danube, and west of the Black Sea, had the Magyars and Vlachs as their northern and eastern neighbors.
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