There are many beautiful cities and towns in the world. I would like to visit some of them, to see with my own eyes what I have read or heard about. But there is no place like home. I love my native town and that’s why I want to tell you about it. The Polotsk land! It is a land of old legends and people’s traditions, blue lakes and fast rivers, the captivating Lakeland of Belarus. This land was populated presumably in the VII-V centuries B.C. At that period the Indo-European tribes, called the “Balts” by the archaeologists, lived in the Dvina- river basin. In the process of great people’s remigration, the Slavs came there from the Central Europe on the borderline of the VI and VII centuries A.D., and the Slavonic spontaneity triumphed due to supplanting and assimilation of the Balts.
The Slavonic tribe Krivichy settled down in the vast territories, in particular in the Dvina-river side, their tribal alliance played the paramount role in formation of the Belarusian State system. The centre of the said alliance was Polotsk. The princes, who represented local dynasties governed there as early as the V century A.D. Polotsk sprang up on the Western Dvina offshoot of the world great mercantile marine route “from the Varangians to the Greeks” that favorably linked the lands of Polotsk and the Baltic, Scandinavian, Gothic shores and the Black Sea basin states, as well as with a distant Arabic Caliphate. The destiny of Polotsk was to be the European road crossing, the meeting point of the western and the eastern civilizations, the junction of historical and cultural traditions, where the mutual influence of the Russian, Baltic, Polish, Hebraic and Belarusian constituents was obviously felt over the centuries, being the factor that predestined the unique cultural and spiritual milieu.
The foundation date of Polotsk, the most ancient city of Belarus and all Eastern Slavs, is eventually considered the date or its first mentioning in...