Stories from Olesya Elderberry: “Russ is joy and drink”
Alcoholic chronicles. The topic of booze appeared in our stories already on the first pages of the Tale of Bygone Years. And since then does not dry out on sheets of books and protocols.
“Rus' joy is piti” - this phrase from Prince Vladimir from the chronicle became winged. She is remembered even by those who read nothing at all, except for the labels on the bottles. So I see how it was. Prince Vladimir listens to the boring debate of the mullah, the rabbi and the priest about the faith, begins to fall asleep from the promises of posthumous paradise pleasures, and suddenly it is overshadowed by sudden illumination. The prince takes the cup in his hand. Claw your hands The vigorous sound of a gurgling liquid in the throat, as in a drain. Savory quack. Good! No paradise is needed. Especially since paradise can not be repeated, and the glass can be.
But what did our ancestors drink during the time of Vladimir? That question is more important Hamlet! As you know, the most famous Russian drink is vodka. In Ukrainian - gorilka. But I will tell you right away: vodka is not a Russian invention. And not Ukrainian. And, perhaps, Prince Vladimir would have simply ripped apart those who first brought this hellish invention to Russia. After all, the consequences of vodka alcoholism are terrible. There is nothing fun in them. Who has seen a drunken woman with a blue face (and who has not seen her in our area?), Or a bluish man who is not less frequently encountered, is unlikely to argue with me.
But vodka alcoholism appeared relatively recently, only when there appeared an excess of rye and wheat grains - raw materials for the production of both bread and vodka. Even 100 years ago, our ancestor faced a choice: to eat or drink? At the same time and at the same time he simply did not have enough money.
And although the tavern was common in every Ukrainian village (it was located right at the entrance to it), there was simply not enough money for constant drunkenness. The large family and the high rates of the then birth rate prove that the Ukrainians drank not so much. The alcoholic was the exception, not the rule. And the current homeless people, milling around with a bottle through the streets of Kiev, in the old village was simply impossible to imagine.
But to be precise, the first Slavic word donated to world civilization was the name of the intoxicating drink. Not "satellite". And not a "matryoshka". And “honey” is “medos”, as the Byzantine diplomat Prisk Paniansky wrote in Latin. Priscus set off in the middle of the 5th century as an ambassador to the famous Hun Attila. On the way, he met nice natives. The natives rode him in a dugout boat, offered beautiful women "for intercourse" and treated him to a wonderful drunk. A cautious Byzantine refused coitus, and he remembered the name of the drink forever. And even handed it to his descendants.
Honey is the traditional low alcohol drink of the ancient Slavs. It was prepared from the honey of wild bees by natural fermentation in a wooden tub. To speed up the fermentation and increase the volume of melt, berry juice of raspberry or lingonberry was added to honey. The finished product was obtained in about ten or fifteen years of exposure. The honey obtained in this way was called put. You understand that with this technology (sugar will appear in our area already in the XVIII century, and the distillation cube - the prototype of the moonshine apparatus - somewhere at the end of XU-th!), You will not drink much and you will not weigh down your head.
While the Slavs were few, honey for ritual winter drinking was enough for everyone. But honey needs bees. And the Slavs bred much faster than the poor bees from whom they took honey. And then someone brought from the south the news that the Greeks and Romans have long been hopped by grape wine. Gangs of Slavic bogatyrs immediately rushed to the conquest of strategically important objects - wine cellars of civilized countries. The Balkan Peninsula fell into their paws, like an overgrown bunch. All the way down to the Alps, the Slavic thirsty drinker flooded. It was our Slavic contribution to the era of the Great Migration.
This event, which occurred in the 6th century AD, should be considered epochal. The ancient Slavs for the first time were divided into different groups. Moreover, the basis of their separation was the attitude to alcoholic beverages. From a single ethnic array stood out a group of South Slavic peoples. An important philosophical element of the worldview distinguishes them from the brothers who remained in the north - the South Slavs prefer dry grape wine to all other alcoholic beverages.
The fact that it was the wine that interested the Slavs in the south proves the campaign of Pope Prince Vladimir - Kiev Prince Svyatoslav to Bulgaria 400 years later. At the new historical revolution, he tried to repeat the feat of ancestors and move his capital of Russia closer to the sources of intoxicating fun. “I don’t like to sit in Kiev,” said Svyatoslav, “I want to live on the Danube. There is the middle of my land. All good things flow there. From Russia - honey, and from the Greek land - wine. "
But after the outflow of emigrants to the south in the northern forests came a temporary balance. A reduction in population has helped the bees recover. Honey again began to miss at all. Gulba went more than ever. “The Rus drink day and night,” mentioned Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan, “and sometimes they even die with cups in their hands.”
At the same time, an important improvement occurred in the technology of making honey. Ancestors noticed: if bee honey mixed with berry juice is heated on the fire, the fermentation process will go faster. Wait 10 years is no longer necessary. Boil honey to quickly, like beer, and then use it.
According to The Tale of Bygone Years, Prince Vladimir, having repulsed the Pecheneg invasion in Vasilev, ordered 300 to digest the beer: “He gathered his boyars and posadniks and elders from all cities. And Prince Vladimir celebrated here for eight days and returned to Kiev. And here again celebrated the holiday, convening an innumerable multitude of people. " An echo of this Golden Age forever remains the word "feast", which comes from "piti".
The fact that in such conditions we had to become Christians was predestined from above. Asking Muslims about their faith, Vladimir, according to the chronicles, listened for a long time and with pleasure about paradise, where 70 will be pleasurable to every beautiful maidens - “for he loved the polytour”. But as soon as it came to the prohibition of drinking, he immediately said the very textbook: “Russia is the joy of drinking — we cannot without this being.” And he immediately adopted Christianity.
Already in princely times, a hierarchy of alcoholic beverages was established. The common people drank beer - a low-alcohol drink brewed from grain. The top of the society preferred to put mature honey. Riding the same extravagance was considered overseas wine. He was brought from far away Greece. Peers of Prince Vladimir remained in the memory, because for Russia it was a time of victories. Golden age. Honey and wine literally flowed like a river.
Why didn't you make the wine yourself? And they did not have such an opportunity. Grapes did not grow on the territory of Kievan Rus. After all, the southern border ran just 100 kilometers south of Kiev - along the river Ros. Crimea controlled Byzantines. Odessa, Kherson, Nikolaev, Zaporozhye and Donetsk regions were inhabited by nomads - the Pechenegs and the Polovtsy. And most of Russia was occupied by the lands of Veliky Novgorod - the very northern lands. Are you here to take raw materials for wine? The first Russian wine itself appeared only in the 19th century, when vineyards were established on the Don and the famous Tsimlyansky wine was produced, and Prince Golitsyn laid the foundations of the Crimean winemaking. But for this it was necessary for Catherine II to conquer the southern steppes and the Crimea.
So it is not in vain that the monument to Catherine II was restored in Odessa. Thanks to this great woman and her no less glorious "Catherine eagles" - Potemkin and Suvorov, our people got the opportunity to drink a noble wine - dry. The contribution of the Zaporizhzhya Cossacks, who fought with the Turks in the army of the Empress, also, naturally, should not be forgotten. Victory has a lot of fathers, unlike defeat.
And somewhere in the middle between these two greatest ups of the Orthodox civilization - between Vladimir the Holy and Catherine the Great - there was the greatest fall of Russia.
Some bastards brought vodka to our lands. And they convinced us that this is our national drink.
Oddly enough, the Arabs invented alcohol first. That is, the very Muslims who are forbidden to drink the Koran. The word "alcohol" is of Arabic origin. It means "spirit" or "dope." And “the subtlest essence of all things.” In general, a rich word! Arab doctor and alchemist Rabez, who worked in the famous Baghdad hospital, got something alcohol-like from the old wine in 860 year. In Russia, then, great-grandfather Vladimir ruled — legendary Prince Helga. He is Oleg.
To get alcohol, Rabezu needed a still. This device is essentially no different from the set of the young chemist. During our childhood, it was sold in specialized stores, which were also called “Young Chemist”.
The question is: why did the Arabs, who invented alcohol, not drink it - neither in its pure form, nor in a diluted one? The taboo on the use of spirits in the Arab world is associated with the incredibly hot climate of those places where Islam originated. Indeed, try to drink half a liter in the sun in the Arabian desert! Immediately okochurites!
Therefore, the Arabian discoverers of alcohol used it only as a fixer for aromas in the production of perfumes. After all, the best perfumes in the Middle Ages were produced not in Paris, but in Arabia - in the homeland of the prophet Mohammed. The expression "Arabian incense" knew all the then European ladies.
Western merchants exported this technology from the East. The word "alcohol" literally translated from Arabic to Latin. Alcohol - he is "ershiv" - also means "spirit."
But it soon became clear that if ordinary water was added to alcohol instead of incense, then this “spirit” could be launched directly inward. New drink contained terrible energy. Once in person, he acted like an atomic bomb. The legs themselves started to dance. Languages untied. The blood accelerated even a severe frost.
And in the XV — XVII centuries, winter was much colder than today. It was the so-called Small Ice Age. In London, the Thames froze, in Amsterdam - the canals, and in Russia just a tooth on a tooth did not get from the cold.
And then the clever, commercially gifted western trade little people thought: why not to sell this thing to Slavs, since they like to drink so much? In 1386, the Genoese embassy brought alcohol to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, under whose authority the western part of Kievan Rus fell. The appearance in our area of "fiery water" led to a monstrous decline in morals.
It is a pleasure to read this in “Taras Bulba”, how a drunk Cossack in his trousers is lying in the middle of the road, having spread his legs. And imagine how much he needed to drink in order to lie that way - or rather, MITTLE? And who left his money drunk to the remainder? Of course, shinkar, to describe which Gogol did not find such bright colors as for the Cossack man.
In the part of Russia where the Moscow kingdom was formed, a new kind of “green serpent” was quickly taken under state control, and foreign alcohol traders were driven out into three necks. Already in the time of Ivan the Terrible, sovereign taverns existed there. Every alcoholic did not just drink, but strengthened the state budget, on which the fortress walls were renewed and stone chambers were erected.
And in Ukrainian, vodka is not without reason called a “mountain”. That is, "fire water". By the way, in Polish “mountain” is “mountain-like”. This part of Russia fell under the power of Poland. And here the vodka proved to be much hotter! Truly swept "fire and sword" in cities and villages. And also - the Jewish townships.
And it was not fun at all. Approximately, as now in the ATO zone. In Ukraine, drinking establishments - inns during the times of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth belonged mainly to the Polish gentry. It was her privilege. But the magnates and gentry themselves did not want to engage in troublesome economic activities, preferring her booze and hunting. They rented out their “license cards”. Most of these tenants came from Jewish communities who moved to Ukraine from Germany. This caused a monstrous explosion of alcohol-national contradictions in Ukraine!
Here is what the famous Jewish historian Dubnov wrote about this in his book A Brief History of the Jews: “In Poland, the landowners (gentry) were above all, and the peasant farmers were the lowest; between them, the Jews occupied a middle place, as a commercial-industrial class ... Jews often held noble estates as rentals and, thus, gained that power over the peasants, which the gentry had. Facing more often with a Jewish tenant than with a Polish pan, the Russian peasant considered the former to be the main culprit for his disasters and sought revenge. The long accumulated discontent led, finally, to the terrible uprising of the Cossacks and Russian peasants in the last year of the reign of Vladislav IV. The Cossack centurion from Chigirin, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, stood at the head of the insurgent Ukrainians. ”
“Rus' joy is piti” - this phrase from Prince Vladimir from the chronicle became winged. She is remembered even by those who read nothing at all, except for the labels on the bottles. So I see how it was. Prince Vladimir listens to the boring debate of the mullah, the rabbi and the priest about the faith, begins to fall asleep from the promises of posthumous paradise pleasures, and suddenly it is overshadowed by sudden illumination. The prince takes the cup in his hand. Claw your hands The vigorous sound of a gurgling liquid in the throat, as in a drain. Savory quack. Good! No paradise is needed. Especially since paradise can not be repeated, and the glass can be.
Get drunk and forget. Same way out. But coming out of this state, you still come back to reality.
But what did our ancestors drink during the time of Vladimir? That question is more important Hamlet! As you know, the most famous Russian drink is vodka. In Ukrainian - gorilka. But I will tell you right away: vodka is not a Russian invention. And not Ukrainian. And, perhaps, Prince Vladimir would have simply ripped apart those who first brought this hellish invention to Russia. After all, the consequences of vodka alcoholism are terrible. There is nothing fun in them. Who has seen a drunken woman with a blue face (and who has not seen her in our area?), Or a bluish man who is not less frequently encountered, is unlikely to argue with me.
But vodka alcoholism appeared relatively recently, only when there appeared an excess of rye and wheat grains - raw materials for the production of both bread and vodka. Even 100 years ago, our ancestor faced a choice: to eat or drink? At the same time and at the same time he simply did not have enough money.
And although the tavern was common in every Ukrainian village (it was located right at the entrance to it), there was simply not enough money for constant drunkenness. The large family and the high rates of the then birth rate prove that the Ukrainians drank not so much. The alcoholic was the exception, not the rule. And the current homeless people, milling around with a bottle through the streets of Kiev, in the old village was simply impossible to imagine.
But to be precise, the first Slavic word donated to world civilization was the name of the intoxicating drink. Not "satellite". And not a "matryoshka". And “honey” is “medos”, as the Byzantine diplomat Prisk Paniansky wrote in Latin. Priscus set off in the middle of the 5th century as an ambassador to the famous Hun Attila. On the way, he met nice natives. The natives rode him in a dugout boat, offered beautiful women "for intercourse" and treated him to a wonderful drunk. A cautious Byzantine refused coitus, and he remembered the name of the drink forever. And even handed it to his descendants.
Honey is the traditional low alcohol drink of the ancient Slavs. It was prepared from the honey of wild bees by natural fermentation in a wooden tub. To speed up the fermentation and increase the volume of melt, berry juice of raspberry or lingonberry was added to honey. The finished product was obtained in about ten or fifteen years of exposure. The honey obtained in this way was called put. You understand that with this technology (sugar will appear in our area already in the XVIII century, and the distillation cube - the prototype of the moonshine apparatus - somewhere at the end of XU-th!), You will not drink much and you will not weigh down your head.
While the Slavs were few, honey for ritual winter drinking was enough for everyone. But honey needs bees. And the Slavs bred much faster than the poor bees from whom they took honey. And then someone brought from the south the news that the Greeks and Romans have long been hopped by grape wine. Gangs of Slavic bogatyrs immediately rushed to the conquest of strategically important objects - wine cellars of civilized countries. The Balkan Peninsula fell into their paws, like an overgrown bunch. All the way down to the Alps, the Slavic thirsty drinker flooded. It was our Slavic contribution to the era of the Great Migration.
Meeting with Bacchus. Who has seen a drunken woman (and who has not seen her in our area?), Knows what kind of happiness.
This event, which occurred in the 6th century AD, should be considered epochal. The ancient Slavs for the first time were divided into different groups. Moreover, the basis of their separation was the attitude to alcoholic beverages. From a single ethnic array stood out a group of South Slavic peoples. An important philosophical element of the worldview distinguishes them from the brothers who remained in the north - the South Slavs prefer dry grape wine to all other alcoholic beverages.
The fact that it was the wine that interested the Slavs in the south proves the campaign of Pope Prince Vladimir - Kiev Prince Svyatoslav to Bulgaria 400 years later. At the new historical revolution, he tried to repeat the feat of ancestors and move his capital of Russia closer to the sources of intoxicating fun. “I don’t like to sit in Kiev,” said Svyatoslav, “I want to live on the Danube. There is the middle of my land. All good things flow there. From Russia - honey, and from the Greek land - wine. "
But after the outflow of emigrants to the south in the northern forests came a temporary balance. A reduction in population has helped the bees recover. Honey again began to miss at all. Gulba went more than ever. “The Rus drink day and night,” mentioned Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan, “and sometimes they even die with cups in their hands.”
At the same time, an important improvement occurred in the technology of making honey. Ancestors noticed: if bee honey mixed with berry juice is heated on the fire, the fermentation process will go faster. Wait 10 years is no longer necessary. Boil honey to quickly, like beer, and then use it.
According to The Tale of Bygone Years, Prince Vladimir, having repulsed the Pecheneg invasion in Vasilev, ordered 300 to digest the beer: “He gathered his boyars and posadniks and elders from all cities. And Prince Vladimir celebrated here for eight days and returned to Kiev. And here again celebrated the holiday, convening an innumerable multitude of people. " An echo of this Golden Age forever remains the word "feast", which comes from "piti".
The fact that in such conditions we had to become Christians was predestined from above. Asking Muslims about their faith, Vladimir, according to the chronicles, listened for a long time and with pleasure about paradise, where 70 will be pleasurable to every beautiful maidens - “for he loved the polytour”. But as soon as it came to the prohibition of drinking, he immediately said the very textbook: “Russia is the joy of drinking — we cannot without this being.” And he immediately adopted Christianity.
Europe also slipped under the table. Painting of the Portuguese artist Jose Malloa from the life of euroalcoholics
Already in princely times, a hierarchy of alcoholic beverages was established. The common people drank beer - a low-alcohol drink brewed from grain. The top of the society preferred to put mature honey. Riding the same extravagance was considered overseas wine. He was brought from far away Greece. Peers of Prince Vladimir remained in the memory, because for Russia it was a time of victories. Golden age. Honey and wine literally flowed like a river.
Why didn't you make the wine yourself? And they did not have such an opportunity. Grapes did not grow on the territory of Kievan Rus. After all, the southern border ran just 100 kilometers south of Kiev - along the river Ros. Crimea controlled Byzantines. Odessa, Kherson, Nikolaev, Zaporozhye and Donetsk regions were inhabited by nomads - the Pechenegs and the Polovtsy. And most of Russia was occupied by the lands of Veliky Novgorod - the very northern lands. Are you here to take raw materials for wine? The first Russian wine itself appeared only in the 19th century, when vineyards were established on the Don and the famous Tsimlyansky wine was produced, and Prince Golitsyn laid the foundations of the Crimean winemaking. But for this it was necessary for Catherine II to conquer the southern steppes and the Crimea.
So it is not in vain that the monument to Catherine II was restored in Odessa. Thanks to this great woman and her no less glorious "Catherine eagles" - Potemkin and Suvorov, our people got the opportunity to drink a noble wine - dry. The contribution of the Zaporizhzhya Cossacks, who fought with the Turks in the army of the Empress, also, naturally, should not be forgotten. Victory has a lot of fathers, unlike defeat.
And somewhere in the middle between these two greatest ups of the Orthodox civilization - between Vladimir the Holy and Catherine the Great - there was the greatest fall of Russia.
Some bastards brought vodka to our lands. And they convinced us that this is our national drink.
Ancient Russia did not know vodka alcoholism. She drank put honey, beer and occasionally imported wines.
Oddly enough, the Arabs invented alcohol first. That is, the very Muslims who are forbidden to drink the Koran. The word "alcohol" is of Arabic origin. It means "spirit" or "dope." And “the subtlest essence of all things.” In general, a rich word! Arab doctor and alchemist Rabez, who worked in the famous Baghdad hospital, got something alcohol-like from the old wine in 860 year. In Russia, then, great-grandfather Vladimir ruled — legendary Prince Helga. He is Oleg.
To get alcohol, Rabezu needed a still. This device is essentially no different from the set of the young chemist. During our childhood, it was sold in specialized stores, which were also called “Young Chemist”.
The question is: why did the Arabs, who invented alcohol, not drink it - neither in its pure form, nor in a diluted one? The taboo on the use of spirits in the Arab world is associated with the incredibly hot climate of those places where Islam originated. Indeed, try to drink half a liter in the sun in the Arabian desert! Immediately okochurites!
Therefore, the Arabian discoverers of alcohol used it only as a fixer for aromas in the production of perfumes. After all, the best perfumes in the Middle Ages were produced not in Paris, but in Arabia - in the homeland of the prophet Mohammed. The expression "Arabian incense" knew all the then European ladies.
Western merchants exported this technology from the East. The word "alcohol" literally translated from Arabic to Latin. Alcohol - he is "ershiv" - also means "spirit."
But it soon became clear that if ordinary water was added to alcohol instead of incense, then this “spirit” could be launched directly inward. New drink contained terrible energy. Once in person, he acted like an atomic bomb. The legs themselves started to dance. Languages untied. The blood accelerated even a severe frost.
And in the XV — XVII centuries, winter was much colder than today. It was the so-called Small Ice Age. In London, the Thames froze, in Amsterdam - the canals, and in Russia just a tooth on a tooth did not get from the cold.
And then the clever, commercially gifted western trade little people thought: why not to sell this thing to Slavs, since they like to drink so much? In 1386, the Genoese embassy brought alcohol to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, under whose authority the western part of Kievan Rus fell. The appearance in our area of "fiery water" led to a monstrous decline in morals.
It is a pleasure to read this in “Taras Bulba”, how a drunk Cossack in his trousers is lying in the middle of the road, having spread his legs. And imagine how much he needed to drink in order to lie that way - or rather, MITTLE? And who left his money drunk to the remainder? Of course, shinkar, to describe which Gogol did not find such bright colors as for the Cossack man.
In the part of Russia where the Moscow kingdom was formed, a new kind of “green serpent” was quickly taken under state control, and foreign alcohol traders were driven out into three necks. Already in the time of Ivan the Terrible, sovereign taverns existed there. Every alcoholic did not just drink, but strengthened the state budget, on which the fortress walls were renewed and stone chambers were erected.
And in Ukrainian, vodka is not without reason called a “mountain”. That is, "fire water". By the way, in Polish “mountain” is “mountain-like”. This part of Russia fell under the power of Poland. And here the vodka proved to be much hotter! Truly swept "fire and sword" in cities and villages. And also - the Jewish townships.
And it was not fun at all. Approximately, as now in the ATO zone. In Ukraine, drinking establishments - inns during the times of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth belonged mainly to the Polish gentry. It was her privilege. But the magnates and gentry themselves did not want to engage in troublesome economic activities, preferring her booze and hunting. They rented out their “license cards”. Most of these tenants came from Jewish communities who moved to Ukraine from Germany. This caused a monstrous explosion of alcohol-national contradictions in Ukraine!
Here is what the famous Jewish historian Dubnov wrote about this in his book A Brief History of the Jews: “In Poland, the landowners (gentry) were above all, and the peasant farmers were the lowest; between them, the Jews occupied a middle place, as a commercial-industrial class ... Jews often held noble estates as rentals and, thus, gained that power over the peasants, which the gentry had. Facing more often with a Jewish tenant than with a Polish pan, the Russian peasant considered the former to be the main culprit for his disasters and sought revenge. The long accumulated discontent led, finally, to the terrible uprising of the Cossacks and Russian peasants in the last year of the reign of Vladislav IV. The Cossack centurion from Chigirin, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, stood at the head of the insurgent Ukrainians. ”
Information