Chapter I
It was the year 1241, when the Spirit of Spring had spread her magic mantle of fresh verdure over the hills and broad-backed, gently sloping mountain ranges of the Tukholian region in the Carpathian section of ancient Rus (Ukraine).[1]
One glorious day of this spring the woodland slopes of Mt. Zelemenya echoed with shouts and bellowing blasts of the huntsmen’s horns.
Tuhar Wolf (Wowk), the new boyar of Tukhlia, had organized a big game hunt to celebrate the beginning of his rule in the region for just recently king Danilo of the principality of Halich had granted him full tenure over this section of luxuriantly grassy downs and mountain woodlands.
As soon as he had chosen a site and built himself a house, he arranged a hunting expedition as a way of self-introduction to the boyars[2] of surrounding communities.
- ↑ Ancient Greek writers called the land “Rhos” and later Latin writers, “Rutheni”. In Ukrainian documents of old, the land is called “Rus” (pron. Roosh), this being the name of the dynasty as for instance the name Hapsburg or Hohenzollern.
Ukraine possessed the name Rus before the 10th century while the Muscovite or, as it is called today, the Russian nation did not have its beginning until the middle of the 13th century. The name Russia and the term Russian did not come into existence until the second half of the 18th century when the Muscovite government, in order to get its people to accept the name of another land, Rus, as their own, added on the the “sia”, thus creating a new name.
Ethnographically the plains of Rus or Ukraine once stretched in a wide belt of about 600 miles along the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, from the lower Danube and the Carpathian Range in the West, crossing the rivers Don and Volga and reaching to the Ural mountains in the East. - ↑ Boyar: A member of an aristocratic order, next below that of the ruling princes; one of a privileged class.
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