What Did Our Ancestors Think of Those Who Drink Their Own Urine and Eat Beavers?

One of the oldest monuments of Russian polemical writing, the eleventh-century Epistle of Theodosius of the Caves to Prince Izyaslav Yaroslavich on the Latins, counsels not merely abstaining from intercourse with the Latins and not giving them one's daughters in marriage, but also, mark this, neither drinking nor eating with them from the same vessel.

3, 2, 1! From the year 2022 we are transported straight to the 1070s...

Among the many charges of heresy and unseemly conduct levelled at the Latins, the most outrageous appears to be that

they "live unclean: for they eat with dogs and cats, and drink their own urine and ...eat turtles, and wild horses, and asses, and strangled meat, and bear's flesh, and carrion, and beaver's flesh, and they eat the beaver's tail...".

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Alexander I as King of Poland and the Incorporation of the Duchy of Warsaw into the Russian Empire in 1815

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A 1930 photograph showing the eviction of a kulak and his family during dekulakisation.

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Alexander I as King of Poland and the Incorporation of the Duchy of Warsaw into the Russian Empire in 1815

How Many Suffered in Dekulakisation: Estimates by Zemskov, Ivnitsky and Conquest

Félix Bonfils, photographs of a dragoman and guide for travellers in Syria

The Fire at the Miller Mansion in Saint Petersburg, and Building Bans After Fires in the Laws of Different Countries