Did Rus' Have a Capital? (06.10.2024)

A monologue by Vitaliy Dribnytsya on the new academic edition Ukraine. Essays on History (Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Akademperiodyka, from 2023) and on the anachronism of the question of the “first capital of Rus’”. The article draws on the footnote on p. 301 of the first volume and on the historian A. Nazarenko’s paper “Was There a Capital in Old Rus’” (Moscow, December 1996): Rus’ did not know the term “capital”, and the metropolitan Ilarion’s “first-throned mother-city” is a calque from Byzantine ecclesiastical terminology. A source for the article on the myth of the “capital of Rus’”.