For me, the Russian Don River is a new and old symbolic border between Europe and Asia.
I was inspired to write this post thanks to the “Ocean: Exploring the Marine World” (published by Phaidon). While reading it, I realized that a medieval illuminated manuscript (by Bartholomew the Englishman and Evrard d’Espinques) showed a medieval concept of Earth. Authors divided our planet into three parts, continents of the inhabited lands. Asia and Africa were separated by the Nile River, the Mediterranean Sea split Europe and Africa, and the Don River separated Europe and Asia. Why do I write about it? Undoubtedly, most of us know that the official border between Asia and Europe is in the Ural Mountains.
Still, since the Russian orcs invaded Ukraine on the 24th of February, 2022 (I know Ukrainians would say they were already attacked in 2014. They would be right. Thus, I must change my narration in this case.), I think the borders between Europe and Asia changed once again in human history.
They returned to the old concepts of the world. To clarify, Don is the river that flows in Western Russia’s part and is relatively close to the Ukrainian borders. I am not convinced whether Russia belongs to Asia mentally. What I know is that they mentally are not Europeans. For many years, I imagined myself traveling through Russia to get to see the homeland of one of my favorite writers, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (I omit the fact Dostoyevsky did not like Poles because of their religion, willingness to become part of the Western world and two Polish uprisings that took place in 1830-1831 [“November Uprising”] and 1863-1864 [“January Uprising”]). Today (I wrote this text on the 14th of August, 2023), I think I will never cross the Russian border. Don River will remain only in my imagination as a river where Europe ends.
