Polesian

The Polesians, or Poleshuks, were the East Slavic people of the Pripyat Marshes, the vast forest-and-swamp country around Pinsk. Their name comes from the Slavic word for forest.

Long before them the wetlands held the Neuri of the Milograd culture, and in the first millennium the East Slavic Dregoviches settled the lower Pripyat, their tribal name deriving from a word meaning swamp. The Dregoviches had their own prince at Turov, and from the tenth century their lands formed the Principality of Turov and Pinsk, which passed briefly under the kings of Galicia-Volhynia and entered the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fourteenth century.

With the Union of Lublin of 1569 the marshland became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century assigned it to the Russian Empire. Its isolated wetlands kept the local Ruthenian speech and marshland ways separated from those of the surrounding peoples.