The Dnieper rapids and why Putin does not belong in Ukraine

Za in Ukrainian – and other Slavic languages – means ‘Beyond’, and porohi means ‘the Rapids’; so Zaporizhia stands for ‘the place beyond the rapids’. It a nice irony that the place, whose threatened nuclear power plant has put it in the headlines, is connected to one of Europe’s most venerable historico-geographical sites.

The Dnieper rapids rank with other spots, like the Bosphorus or the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ at Gibraltar, where pre-historic travellers were presented with an emotional rite of passage from one sphere of the world to another. At the start of the Viking age, the rapids still constituted the main obstacle to primitive voyagers, who aimed to transit from the Baltic to the Black Sea – through the heart of continental Europe to the Mediterranean. Two hundred miles above the Dnieper’s mouth, nine separate rows of massive granite outcrops interrupted the flow of water, creating a series of lakes, rocky ridges, defiles and waterfalls that made navigation near-impossible.