Col_Pladoh said:
The Magyars settled into the Hungarian plain, pretty much as did the Bulgars. I suspect those peoples that came and then left were forced out by competing folk.
As an aside, check out this website regarding very early Rhine river civilizations:
http://www.xenite.org/features/rhine-canyon/
Cheers,
Gary
Great find, Gary! It makes me wonder how technologically advanced previous cultures were without us giving them just recognition for their abilities.
You've talked about fallen civilizations that we don't study much about today. One day, I would like to do a map of Eurasia that changes every generation and goes from ancient Greek times to the present, to better visualize how much borders have been radically adjusted; maybe with a change of every 20-50 years years or so a map. I went to the anti-Communism museum in Budapest, and their presentation on how much the borders of countries like Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslavakia (now Czech and Slovak) have changed in just the last 100 years was amazing. It goes year by year, and also uses arrows to show invasions from both the Germans and Russians.
And the Hungarians, I found, still call themselves Magyar. I met a nice, older gentleman who told me tales of dropping Molotov cocktails into Russian tanks during the failed Budapest Revolution of 1956 when he was a teenager.
Here is a site you may like:
http://www.eliznik.org.uk/EastEurope/History/history-10thAD.htm
Also, there are a lot of castles along the Moselle (Mosel in Deutch) River in eastern France and Germany. I took a motorcycle trip along it once, and would stop to tour the castles and towers, most of which are still in great condition.
My favorite locale for castles though is on the Rhine near a certain cliff that I had the pleasure to take a train ride along on my first day in Germany. This is one location along the river where the water turns sharply by a cliff called the Lorelei. This area claimed the lives of quite a few sailors during the day, and legends had it that a siren-like woman named Lorelei would stand on the top of the cliffs and enchant the men so that they would run aground and drown. I wonder if the Germans picked this up from the old Greek legends or if this kind of tale is universal to sailors throughout the world.
Here is the site that discusses that:
http://www.loreley-rhine.com/