Europe's fifth-longest river once marked Asia for the Greeks
From Novomoskovsk near Tula, the Don winds 1,870 kilometres to the Sea of Azov—Europe's fifth-longest river and a Byzantine trade artery. Some ancient Greek geographers treated it as the Europe–Asia line; Kurgan theorists place Proto-Indo-European homelands near the Volga–Don steppe around 4000 BCE.
The basin sits between the Dnieper to the west, lower Volga to the east, and Oka to the north. Upper reaches meander south; the lower course swings in a great eastern bend before Azov. Slavic nomads once ranged much of the catchment. The name Don tracks Avestan and Rigvedic dānu, "river," a root shared across Indo-Iranian hydrology.
A Greek text once credited to Plutarch, though not with certainty, placed the legendary Amazons on its banks. In the early Middle Ages the Khazar Khaganate held much of the lower river and built Sarkel, a large limestone fortress on the left bank, to guard a vital portage to the Volga. The Don Cossacks, who settled its fertile valley in the 16th and 17th centuries, took their name from it, and Mikhail Sholokhov, a Nobel laureate from the stanitsa of Veshenskaya, set And Quiet Flows the Don there.
Maps long lagged behind the river: its middle and upper course were poorly charted, and 16th-century cartographers such as Blaeu and Mercator, following Giacomo Gastaldo's map of 1551, showed it flowing out of a great lake. The princes of Ryazan founded the fort of Donkov in the late 14th century; Crimean Tatars destroyed it in 1568, and after a move in 1618 it appears as Donkagorod on Blaeu's map of 1645. Today the river bends to within 100 kilometres of the Volga, and the 101-kilometre Volga–Don Canal joins them for vessels as large as oil tankers. Below the Tsimlyansk Dam a chain of three lock complexes keeps 130 kilometres navigable, and authorities plan one or two more low dams in the lower reaches.
Source: Don (river)
