Norman Davies thinks all southern Poles are
undercover Celts :) Well, there may be a grain of truth in that. At the time
when the southern two-thirds of modern Poland was Vandal territory, there were
still Celtic enclaves in the south, one of them in the area round Kraków. The
local Celts had their own distinctive culture, which only partly absorbed
Przeworsk culture influences (they even struck their own gold coin, which
suggests the existence of a political centre) and maintained contacts with
the Boii and other peoples on the other side of the mountains. The
enclave seems to have been engulfed by the Przeworsk culture in the early Roman
period (1st c.).
Kraków occupies a very convenient location
on the upper Vistula and has attacted human settlers since the Palaeolithic;
it has an almost continuous record of settlement since the fifth millennium
BC. It is also a place easily reached by cultural and political trends from the
south. The Slavs (White Croatians?) possibly reached it about the 5th c., and by
the 8th it had become a fortress of the Vistulans and a local political
centre.
Several questions can be asked at this
point: What language was spoken in the area of Kraków when the Slavs
arrived? Truth is, we don't know. It could be some form of Germanic, or a
residual Carpathian language related to Dacian, or (improbably) unassimilated
remnants of a Celtic language. Did the Slavs rename the place or adopt an old
name? Again, we don't know. Kraków (also older feminine Cracco(uu)a = "Krakowa")
looks like a possessive adjective, but the base *krak- is enigmatic. Place-names
in *-ov- can sometimes be formed from words denoting natural features, and one
very outstanding natural feature of Kraków is Wawel, the site of the Royal
Castle, a limestone hill overlooking the Vistula. Now, a Gaulish reconstruction
*cracos 'limestone rock' has been proposed on the basis of placenames in
Western Europe (only Chris Gwinn can tell if there is any substance to it), so
maybe "the Krak" was the original Celtic name of the hill, inherited by whoever
replaced the Celts and passed on to the Slavs. The failure of *a (unless
originally long) to become Slavic *o is paralelled by the name of the
Carpathians -- Slavic Karpat-, adopted in this version very late, after the
metathesis of liquids, and probably of southern (Dacian?) origin, cf. Albanian
karpë 'rock', so the plural of *karp-at- = the Rockies).
Another local enigma is the name of the
Tatra mountains (Pol. Tatry, the highest range of the Carpathians, forming
the border between Poland and Slovakia, just south of Kraków). Old versions of
the name include <Tritri>, which suggests the reconstruction *trtr-(o-)
with branch-specific vocalisations like West Slavic *tartr- > *tatr- by
dissimilation or *tritr- (with syllabic *r > *ri as in Albanian). A hill
range in Ukraine is called Toutry (< *toltr- < *tortr- < *trtr- with
East Slavic vocalism). There are Balkan connections (the Trtra upland in
Herzegovina, perhaps Greek mythological Tartaros), and maybe Celtic ones if
French tertre 'hill' is of Gaulish origin.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2001 9:22 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Odin as a Trojan
Prince
Any theories about the real etymology of Kraków
(Norman Davies seems to favour a Celtic origin, but he does not
elaborate)?