Neris is a river arising in
BelarusBelarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the north and east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the north. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel , Mahilyow and Vitebsk...
, flowing through
VilniusVilnius Vilnius Vilnius as of 2008. It is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality. It is also the...
(
LithuaniaLithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the southernmost of the three Baltic states. Situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, it shares borders with Latvia to the north, Belarus to the southeast, Poland, and the Russian exclave of...
) and becoming a tributary of the
Neman RiverNeman or Niemen or Nemunas, is a major Eastern European river rising in Belarus and flowing through Lithuania before draining into the Curonian Lagoon and then into the Baltic Sea at Klaipėda. It is the border between Lithuania and Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast in its lower reaches...
(Nemunas) at
KaunasKaunas Kaunas Kaunas and Vilnius-Klaipėda (A1)...
(Lithuania). Its length is 510 km.
275 km of the river runs through Belarus, where it is called
Vilija, and 235 km runs through Lithuania, where it is called
Neris.
The Neris connects two old Lithuanian capitals -
KernavėKernavė , a medieval capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, today is a tourist and archeological village in Širvintos district municipality in southeast Lithuania...
and
VilniusVilnius Vilnius Vilnius as of 2008. It is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality. It is also the...
.
Neris is a river arising in
BelarusBelarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the north and east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the north. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel , Mahilyow and Vitebsk...
, flowing through
VilniusVilnius Vilnius Vilnius as of 2008. It is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality. It is also the...
(
LithuaniaLithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the southernmost of the three Baltic states. Situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, it shares borders with Latvia to the north, Belarus to the southeast, Poland, and the Russian exclave of...
) and becoming a tributary of the
Neman RiverNeman or Niemen or Nemunas, is a major Eastern European river rising in Belarus and flowing through Lithuania before draining into the Curonian Lagoon and then into the Baltic Sea at Klaipėda. It is the border between Lithuania and Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast in its lower reaches...
(Nemunas) at
KaunasKaunas Kaunas Kaunas and Vilnius-Klaipėda (A1)...
(Lithuania). Its length is 510 km.
275 km of the river runs through Belarus, where it is called
Vilija, and 235 km runs through Lithuania, where it is called
Neris.
The Neris connects two old Lithuanian capitals -
KernavėKernavė , a medieval capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, today is a tourist and archeological village in Širvintos district municipality in southeast Lithuania...
and
VilniusVilnius Vilnius Vilnius as of 2008. It is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality. It is also the...
. Along its banks are burial places of the
pagan LithuaniansLithuanian mythology is an example of pagan mythology containing archaic elements, developed by Lithuanians throughout the centuries.-History of scholarship:The information about Baltic paganism in general is very sketchy and incomplete...
. 25 km from Vilnius are the old burial mounds of Karmazinai. There also are many mythological stones, and a sacred
oakAn oak is a tree or shrub in the genus Quercus , of which about 400 species exist. "Oak" may also appear in the names of species in related genera, notably Lithocarpus...
.
Dual naming
The issue of the dual naming of the river as
Neris by the Lithuanians and
Vilija (formerly
Velja, meaning "big, great" in Slavic) by the Slavs is complex. Even in
VilniusVilnius Vilnius Vilnius as of 2008. It is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality. It is also the...
, there are toponyms including both names, e. g.
Neris remains in the riverside names of
PaneriaiPaneriai is a suburb of Vilnius, situated about 10 kilometres away from the city center. It is the largest elderate in the Vilnius city municipality. It is located on low forested hills, on the Vilnius-Warsaw road...
and
Paneriškės while
Velja is a part of the name
Valakampiai, which means "an angle of Velja" in Lithuanian.
Although it has been suggested that
Neris is the primeval name of the river, while name
Vilija is of a secondary extraction, the dual naming most probably emerged from the confluence of rivers Neris (now known as Narach River, leaving Lake Narach) and Velja, in the historical Slavic/Baltic borderland, each ethnos choosing their own name for the river starting at the confluence. It is moreover evidenced by the fact that the name
Neris was never used to name the river Velja up to this confluence. Therefore it has been proposed that the Narach River had in fact been considered the upper reaches of Neris by the Balts in ancient times.
Etymology
The name
Neris is of
BalticThe Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Indo-European language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe...
origin, a
cognateCognates in linguistics are words that have a common etymological origin.An example of cognates within the same language would be English shirt and skirt, the former from Old English scyrte, the latter loaned from Old Norse skyrta, both from the same Common Germanic *skurtjōn-. Words with this type...
of the Lithuanian
nerti generally meaning "to dive, swim downstream" as well as "to net,
crochetCrochet is a process of creating fabric from yarn or thread using a crochet hook. The word is derived from the Middle French word croc or croche, meaning hook. Crocheting, similar to knitting, consists of pulling loops of yarn through other loops...
". It is likely that the name had a more general meaning of "flow" or particularly "swift and swirling flow" in early times.
Etymologically, the name is one of a class of
hydronymA hydronym is a proper name of a body of water. Hydronymy is the study of hydronyms and of how bodies of water receive their names and how they are transmitted through history...
s, widespread in the modern and prehistoric Baltic ranges; e. g. Lithuanian Narotis, Narasa (rivers), Narutis (lake), Old Prussian
NarusThe river Narew , in western Belarus and north-eastern Poland, is a tributary of the Vistula river...
,
NaraNara River is a river in the Moscow Oblast and Kaluga Oblast in Russia. It is a left tributary of the Oka River. The length of the river is 158 km. The area of its basin is 2030 km². The Nara River freezes up in November-December and stays under the ice until April. The cities of Naro-Fominsk and...
near
MoscowMoscow is the capital and the largest city of Russia. It is also the largest metropolitan area in Europe, and ranks among the largest urban areas in the world. Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a...
. These are related to Lithuanian
narus, "deep", and
nerti, "to dive".
More remote connections are obscure, although the root is believed to be
Indo-EuropeanThe Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and there have been many attempts at reconstruction...
. There are a number of possibilities:
- Pokorny
Julius Pokorny was a scholar of the Celtic languages, particularly Irish, and a supporter of Irish nationalism....
's 2nd *ner-, "under" (Indogermanisches etymologisches WörterbuchThe Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch was published in 1959 by the Austrian-German comparative linguist and Celtic languages expert Julius Pokorny...
, pp765–766);
- Derksen's *nerH-, o-grade *norH- (Slavic Inherited Lexicon);
- A relation to the Greek god Nereus
Nereus , in Greek mythology, was the eldest son of Pontus and Gaia , a Titan who fathered the Nereids, with whom Nereus lived in the Aegean Sea. In the Iliad the Old Man of the Sea is the father of Nereids, though Nereus is not directly named...
, which may be from *snau-, "to give milk to", in the sense of "flow" (Partridge, Origins (1983)).