Incredibly, it's a fact: The Dnieper begins in the Smolensk region
Description:
“Dnieper in calm weather, when freely and smoothly rushes through forests and mountains full of its waters. It won't stir, it won't thunder. You look, and you do not know whether its majestic width is coming or not, and it seems as if it is all poured out of glass, and as if a blue mirror road, without measure in width, without end in length, soars and winds across the green world. It is good for the hot sun to look around from the height and immerse the rays in the cold of glass waters and coastal forests to shine brightly in the waters. Green-curly, they crowd with the flowers of the field to the waters, and leaning over, look into them and do not look, and do not admire their bright eyes, and laugh at him, and greet him, nodding branches. In the middle of the Dnieper, they dare not look: no one except the sun and the blue sky looks into it. A rare bird will fly to the middle of the Dnieper! Lush! he has no equal river in the world, – these lines once wrote about the Dnieper Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, and they are so firmly entrenched in the people’s memory that the Dnieper is associated exclusively with Kiev and Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the Dnieper, aka Borisfen in the Greeks, flows through the territory of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine at the same time. Yes, it is in Ukraine that it is large and wide, the territory of Ukraine accounts for more than half of its length, but it is pleasant to note that about a quarter of the length of the river is the Smolensk region. It is in the Smolensk region that the great river originates.
It originates from a swamp in the Sychevsky district of the Smolensk region, between the existing village of Bocharovo and the extinct village of Dudkino, far from the major cities. It is in the Smolensk region that the Dnieper gains its strength, to then admire the eyes of travelers and writers.
When ancient travelers reached the Dnieper, it meant that they had a direct road to the Black Sea. And today, despite the political difficulties, the Dnieper is the connecting thread of the three states, the river that gives life.
Photo: Denis Maksimov