The Volhynians: How a Tribal Name Became a Land

History & Finds

A river, a handful of chronicle lines, and a name that has outlived its tribe by more than a thousand years: the story of the Volhynians is the story of how a word for people became a word for land.

One Line in the Old Chronicle

Search for the Volhynians and you will not find them in a chapter of their own, but in a single, almost offhand clause. The so-called Nestor Chronicle – the Povest' vremennykh let, the "Tale of Bygone Years", compiled in Kiev in the early twelfth century – opens with a survey of which Slavic peoples settled where. Tucked into that list, right after the Severians, sits a name that corrects itself within the space of a few words: they are called the Buzhans (from "Buh", the river), but later, the chronicle states plainly, they came to be called the Velynyane – the Volhynians.

This is not an incidental footnote. It is the only place in the whole of the early East Slavic record where a chronicle explicitly states that one tribal name replaced another – and where it even tells us why: because of the river they sat on, and because of a later place name that displaced the older one. Anyone who wants to understand how a people became a landscape has to start with this sentence.

Дулеби живяху по Бугу, где ныне велыняне. […] Се же токмо словенеск язык в Руси: Поляне, Деревляне, Ноугородьци, Полочане, Дреговичи, Север, Бужане, зане седоша по Бугу, послеже же велыняне.

"The Dulebes lived along the Buh, where the Velynyane [Volhynians] now are. […] So these are the Slavic-speaking peoples in Rus': the Polyanians, the Drevlyanians, the Novgorodians, the Polotchans, the Dregovichians, the Severians, the Buzhans, so named because they sat along the Buh, but later called the Velynyane [Volhynians]."Povest' vremennykh let (Nestor Chronicle), opening survey of the Slavic peoples, following the Laurentian text (cf. the edition of D. S. Likhachev, PSRL vol. 1); own translation into English, rendered in modernised Cyrillic without the jat letter.

From the Buh to the Volhynians: A Name in Three Steps

The chronicle itself sketches a small history of naming here, one that unfolds in three stages. First come the Dulebes (Dulěby), a tribal grouping said to have suffered badly at the hands of the Avar horsemen already in the sixth century – the notorious episode in which the Avars are said to have yoked Dulebian women to their carts in place of draught animals. Our article on the Dulebes covers that episode and their relationship to the Avars and neighbouring peoples in more depth, so we will not repeat it here. What matters for the Volhynians is simply this: the chronicle explicitly places the Dulebes "along the Buh, where the Volhynians now are" – treating both groups as the same population at different points in time.

The second stage is the Buzhans, named quite plainly after the river Buh, in the same way several other tribal names in the chronicle derive from rivers or landscapes. Their story and the exact origin of that name are covered in detail by our companion article on the Buzhans, written alongside this one; readers interested in the Buh etymology and the earliest mention of this group will find more there. For our purposes, the third step matters most: the chronicle records that the Buzhans were "later" – posleže, a word that marks a sequence in time without giving an exact date – called the Velynyane.

Where this new name came from, the chronicle does not say outright, but scholarship largely agrees on one point: it goes back to a place, not the other way round. West of present-day Volodymyr (Volodymyr-Volynskyi), near the upper Buh, lay a settlement called Velyn' or Volyn', which likely held some importance even before the town of Volodymyr was founded. A place name became a group name, and a group name later became a regional name – a direction of derivation that is by no means unusual in early East European naming, and one assumed for a good number of the tribal names in the chronicle that trace back to rivers, marshes, or a single fortified place.

Byzantium and the Volhynians: A Silence That Says Something

Here honesty serves the story better than a forced connection: the Volhynians do not appear by name in contemporary Byzantine sources. Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, writing his handbook De administrando imperio around the middle of the tenth century, describes among other things the route Rus' merchants took from Kiev to Constantinople, naming several Slavic groups who supplied the Rus' with dugout boats (monoxyla) for the journey. One of these groups he calls the Lenzaninoi (Λενζανηνοί). It is tempting to hear "Volhynians" in that name, but the phonetic resemblance to "Lendians" – Polish Lędzianie – is closer, and that is overwhelmingly how scholarship reads the Lenzaninoi: as a tribal grouping further west, around the upper Vistula and San rivers, whose name later passed, via Old Rus' Ljakh/Lyakh, into the general term for the Poles. This is not the same group as the Volhynians on the Buh, even though the two likely lived as neighbours and the archaeological line between them is hard to draw with any precision.

What can be said with confidence, then, is this: there is no secure, direct Byzantine attestation of the name "Volhynians." That absence is itself informative – it suggests the name was either not yet in use in Constantine's day, or simply held no interest for Byzantium, while neighbouring groups such as the Lendians or the Krivichians (to whom we have devoted a separate article) made it into the imperial chancery because they sat directly on the described trade route.

An Echo in Arabic Sources?

The case looks slightly different with two tenth-century Arabic-language authors, the historian al-Mas'ūdī and the Andalusian Jewish traveller Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub. Both mention a Slavic tribal grouping called Walīnāna or Walītāba, which they describe as especially respected and originally politically dominant among the Slavs – until internal discord broke that primacy apart. Some Slavicists have suspected this name to be an Arabic rendering of "Volhynian"/"Volynyane" and built on it a hypothesis that the report preserves a memory of an early, wider tribal confederation in the Vistula-Buh region. This reading is far from settled, though: the Arabic transcription allows other interpretations too, and the identification remains contested in scholarship, not least because al-Mas'ūdī drew his information second- or third-hand and placed it only vaguely on the map. To call this a proven link overstates the evidence; the honest description is a discussed, by no means excluded, but also unproven possibility.

Vladimir the Great, the Cherven Towns, and the Founding of Volodymyr

The region only becomes politically tangible with the westward expansion of Kievan Rus'. For the year 981, the chronicle records a campaign by Vladimir the Great "against the Lyakhs" in which he took the so-called Cherven towns – fortified places on the border between the Buh and Wieprz rivers that had apparently stood under Polish influence beforehand, and which changed hands between Kiev and Poland several times over the following decades. A little later, traditionally dated to 988, Vladimir had an older stronghold on the river Luha, a tributary of the Buh, rebuilt into the town of Volodymyr – named after himself, not after the tribe. This town, today's Volodymyr-Volynskyi in western Ukraine, became the political centre of the region and remained so for centuries.

The order of events matters here: according to the chronicle, the tribal name "Volhynians" was already in use before Vladimir's conquests. The town of Volodymyr was named after the prince, not the people – while the regional name "Volhynia" derives from the older settlement of Velyn' and, through it, ultimately from the tribal name. Two similar-sounding names, Volodymyr and Volhynia, thus have different roots, even though they became inseparably intertwined in the region's later history.

From Tribal Name to Princely Title: The Principality of Volhynia

In the second half of the eleventh century, an appanage principality of the Rurikid dynasty crystallised around Volodymyr: the Principality of Volhynia, at first just one of many shares in the growing web of Kievan Rus', ruled in turn by different branches of the dynasty. The decisive shift came at the end of the twelfth century: in 1199, Prince Roman Mstislavich succeeded in uniting Volhynia with the neighbouring Principality of Halych (Galicia). Out of this union grew the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia, which under Roman's son, Daniel of Galicia, rose in the thirteenth century to become one of the major political powers of post-Mongol Eastern Europe – in 1253 Daniel was even crowned by a papal legate. Tracing that political history in detail would exceed the scope of an article about a tribal name; what matters for us is only that the old chronicle name "Volhynia" became, in the process, the settled name for a realm that reached well beyond the tribe's original territory on the Buh.

What the Ground Shows: The Luka-Raikovetska Culture

Archaeologically, the population of the Volhynia-Buh region in the eighth to tenth centuries is most closely associated with what is known as the Luka-Raikovetska culture – named after two find sites and first systematically described in the 1940s by the Ukrainian archaeologist Volodymyr Honcharov. Characterised by hand-formed pottery, open pit-houses, and cremation burials under low mounds, this culture is attributed by most scholars to the southwestern branch of the East Slavic tribes – alongside the Volhynians and Buzhans also the Polyanians, Drevlyanians, Dulebes, Tivertsians and Ulichians. A note of caution is warranted here: archaeological cultures cannot simply be equated one-to-one with the tribal names given in the chronicle, since pottery styles and burial customs rarely follow political or ethnic boundaries exactly. What the finds do reliably show is a continuous Slavic settlement of the region across several centuries – long before the name "Volhynian" is attested in writing at all.

A Name That Outlived Empires

Which brings us to the real point of this story. While Galicia-Volhynia's political independence ended in the fourteenth century and the territory was divided between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland, the name Volhynia survived – now as the name of a landscape, no longer of a people. Under Lithuanian and later Polish-Lithuanian rule, a Voivodeship of Volhynia existed from the sixteenth century onward. After the partitions of Poland, the region belonged to the Russian Empire as the "Governorate of Volhynia"; between the world wars it was the Wołyń Voivodeship of Poland, and afterwards part of the Soviet Union. Today, the core of the historic landscape survives as Volyn Oblast in the far west of Ukraine – considerably smaller than the medieval principality, but recognisably carrying the same name.

That is the real lesson of that brief chronicle line about the Buzhans, who "later" were called Velynyane: ethnonyms from the early Slavic period were rarely built to last forever. They named people on a particular river, under a particular prince, at a particular time – and mostly vanished along with the political structures that carried them. That the name of the Volhynians instead made the leap from tribe to landscape, and carried through principality, voivodeship, governorate and Soviet republic all the way into the present, makes it one of the rare cases where an eleven-century-old chronicle line can still be found on a map today.

Read more with us

The Buzhans · The Dulebs · The Krivichs · The Polans.

Sources & literature

• Image credit: Dormition Cathedral in Volodymyr; photo Aeou, CC BY 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons).
• Povest' vremennykh let (Nestor Chronicle), based on the Laurentian manuscript text, edited in Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei (PSRL), vol. 1, and D. S. Likhachev (ed.), Povest' vremennykh let, "Literaturnye pamyatniki" series, Moscow/Leningrad 1950, new edition St. Petersburg 1996 – own translation of the quoted passages.
• Donald Ostrowski (ed.), The Povest' vremennykh let: An Interlinear Collation and Paradosis, Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, Cambridge (MA) 2003 (critical text collation, used as a reference for the textual tradition).
• Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio, ch. 9, Greek text ed. Gyula Moravcsik, English translation R. J. H. Jenkins, Dumbarton Oaks 1967 (on the Lenzaninoi/Λενζανηνοί).
• Tadeusz Lewicki, Źródła arabskie do dziejów Słowiańszczyzny, vols. I–II, Wrocław/Warsaw 1956–1969 (on al-Mas'ūdī and Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub).
• Henryk Łowmiański, Początki Polski, vols. I–VI, Warsaw 1963–1985 (on the Lędzianie/Lendians and the western Slavic neighbours of Rus').
• Simon Franklin, Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, Longman, London/New York 1996.
• Valentin V. Sedov, Slavyane v rannem srednevekov'e, Moscow 1995 (on the tribal structure of the East Slavs and the Luka-Raikovetska culture).
• Paul M. Barford, The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 2001.
• Lyubomyr P. Mykhailyna, Slov'iany VIII–X st. mizh Dniprom i Karpatamy, Kyiv 2007 (on the archaeology of the Volhynia-Buh region).
• Nikolai F. Kotlyar, Formirovanie territorii i vozniknovenie gorodov Galitsko-Volynskoi Rusi IX–XIII vv., Kyiv 1985 (on the political history of Galicia-Volhynia).
• Martin Dimnik, The Dynasty of Chernigov, 1054–1146, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1994 (on Kievan Rus' dynastic organisation, used for comparative framing).

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