Don River (Russia)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the river in Western Russia. For other rivers with the same name, see Don River (disambiguation).

Don River, Russia
Don River watershed
Origin	Russia
Mouth	Sea of Azov
Basin countries	Russia, Ukraine
Length	1,950 km (1,212 mi)
Avg. discharge	935 m³/s
Basin area	425,600 km² (164,324 mi²)

The Don (Russian: Дон) is one of the major rivers of Russia. It rises in the town of Novomoskovsk 60 kilometres southeast from Tula, southeast of Moscow, and flows for a distance of about 1,950 kilometres (1,220 mi) to the Sea of Azov.

From its source, the river first flows southeast to Voronezh, then southwest to its mouth. The main city on the river is Rostov on Don, its main tributary, the Donets.

In antiquity, the lake was viewed as the border between Europe and Asia.^[1] In the Asian Book of Jubilees, it is mentioned as being part of the border, beginning with its westernmost point up to its mouth, between the allotment of Japheth to the north and that of Shem to the south, sons of Noah. During the times of the old Scythians it was known in Greek as the Tanaïs, and has been a major trading route ever since.

Tanais appears in ancient Greek sources as the name of the river and of a city on it, situated in the Maeotian marshes. The name derives however from Scythian (Iranian) Dānu "river", akin to modern Ossetic don "river".

At its easternmost point, the Don comes near the Volga, and the Volga-Don Canal (length ca. 105 kilometres (65 mi)), connecting both rivers, is a major waterway. The Khazar fortress of Sarkel used to dominate this point in the Middle Ages. This part of the river saw heavy fighting during Operation Uranus, one of the turning points of the Second World War.

The Don has given its name to the Don Cossacks who settled the fertile valley of the river in the 16th and 17th centuries. In modern literature, the Don figures centrally in the works of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, a Cossack from the stanitsa of Veshenskaya.