Архив статей журнала
The article deals with several placenames that occur in Old Norse texts denoting waters and territories outside the inhabited lands north of Norway. The combination of real knowledge and geographical discoveries with the idea of the North that seemed to be the abode of hostile forces and mythological creatures, led to the fact that the North Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean appear in a wide range of Old Norse sources of different genres and written down at different times in the form of a large sea bay that consisted of separate seas and was surrounded by lands stretching from the European North through Greenland and North America all the way to Africa, where both real and marvelous peoples lived.
On the basis of archaeological data, toponymy, and written sources the cultural zones of medieval villages that constituted the centre of the Kiryazh (Kurkijoki) Pogost are localised in today’s Kurkijoki village of the Republic of Karelia. A historical and archaeological study made it possible to identify the main stages in the development of this important ethno-cultural center of medieval Karelia and show the continuity of the 10th-14th centuries settlements, known from archeology and toponymy, with the 15th-17th centuries settlements.