The Word “Slave” Came From My People
By: Martina Petkova
Tags: Slavery, Equality, History, Racism, Europe

The Word “Slave” Came From My People

“Living of East Slavs” by Sergey Ivanov | Public Domain

Slavs are proud people with a rich history spanning 13 centuries. In Slavic languages, slava means “glory.” Slovo means “word.”

And then there is the English word “slave.”

It goes back to the 9th century when Slavs were frequently targeted and enslaved by tribes from the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa. And so the Latin word sklava — meaning both “Slavonic” and “captive” — was born.

Sklave in German, esclave in French, esclavo in Spanish, slave in English.

The word is interchangeable with us.

Etymology of the word “slave” | Screenshot from Google

But it’s not fair

As a Slav, I bristle at the sentence, “The Slavonic peoples had been reduced to a servile state by conquest in the 9th century.”

The 9th century happens to be when Slavic tribes across Central and Eastern Europe started forming the first Slavic states.

In the 9th century, my country was called The First Bulgarian Empire and was experiencing its Golden Age that included our biggest territory expansion, the creation of the Cyrillic alphabet, and the birth of the Bulgarian Church.

Yes, Slavic tribes were getting attacked, captured, and enslaved. But they also formed their own countries, nations, culture, alphabet, and branch of Christianity.

“Reduced to a servile state?” Give me a break.

So why was this time in history, when Slavs started forming their identity and experienced a massive cultural boom, also the time when they became equal to the word “slave?”

Why did Germanic and Romanic nations take the name we had for ourselves — Slavyani — and turned it into one of the most dehumanizing labels?

The answer is simple and universal. This is how they saw us. In their minds, Slav and slave were the same thing.

Eastern Europe or “Not-Quite Europe”

In Europe, where classism, feudalism, and all kinds of enslavement have a rich history, Eastern Europeans — the majority of which are Slavs — are at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Already seen as inferior throughout the Middle Ages, by the 1800s Slavs were subjected to expulsions and massacres by Germanic groups. This anti-Slavic sentiment followed the predictable trajectory of Germanic racism and, a century later, reached its natural conclusion: almost 11 million Slavs joined Hitler’s long list of murdered “subhumans.”

Why were Slavs targeted by the Nazis? They were seen as intellectually inferior and not really white but invaders who were living on stolen Germanic land. The plan was to eliminate 30 million Slavs, create room for the expanding Aryan race in the Eastern territories, and enslave the remaining Slavic population.

Today, nobody is trying to kill or enslave us. But we are still perceived as inferior. We are still seen as not-quite-white.

In 2013, the UK suffered a collective meltdown over the expiration of a rule that prohibited free movement from Bulgaria and Romania.

Newspaper headlines claimed that “29 million Bulgarians and Romanians” will flood the UK borders. The combined population of Bulgaria and Romania in 2013 was 27 million.

Headline from UK tabloid | Screenshot by author

Were we angry? Yes. Did we feel dehumanized? Yes. Did we feel we are being unfairly stereotyped? Yes.

A couple of years later, around the Brexit referendum, I had a performance review with my English boss. In that same conversation, after praising me for having done a great job managing my team and my project, he also said:

“I don’t mind people immigrating from Bulgaria. Who else will pick our strawberries?”

Did that make my blood boil? Yes.

Slavs are occupying a unique space in the convoluted power-structures of human beings. As white people, we know first-hand how other white people treat those they deem inferior.

Has this expanded our understanding of racism or made us more compassionate to the people it targets?

Hell no.

Slavs are among the worst racists you’ll meet.

What’s the deal with Slavs?

If you talk with an average Slav, you’ll get a whole laundry list of our glorious history. We’ve felt the burn of hate, persecution, and genocide. We’ve seen “superior,” “first world” countries play down our culture. So, most of us are eager to set the record straight, to explain just why we deserve respect.

Then we turn around to people of color and do to them what other white people do to them.

After five centuries of enslavement by the Ottoman Empire, many Slavic countries gained their independence around the same time slavery was abolished in America. Decades later, Slavs who were escaping persecution and fleeing to the Northern States crossed paths with Black communities who had fled Jim Crow.

If you’re looking for a sense of kinship between these two groups who were set back by centuries of violence and tried to forge a new path to a better future, don’t look among the Slavs.

In The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson relays a story of a Black family that purchased an apartment in the all-white town of Cicero, “filled with first- and second-generation immigrants — Czechs, Slavs, Poles, Italians.” The residents of Cicero immediately tried to stop the newcomers from moving in. And when they couldn’t do that, they made sure to send them fleeing. And then made sure they won’t come back.

“A mob stormed the apartment and threw the family’s furniture out of a third-floor window as the crowds cheered below. The neighbors burned the couple’s marriage license and the children’s baby pictures. They overturned the refrigerator and tore the stove and plumbing fixtures out of the wall. They tore up the carpet. They shattered the mirrors. They bashed the toilet bowl. They ripped out the radiators. They smashed the piano Clark had worked overtime to buy for his daughter. And when they were done, they set the whole pile of the family’s belongings, now strewn on the ground below, on fire.” — Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns

As a Slav, I was heartbroken but not surprised to read those lines.

Racism — from racial slurs to forced sterilisation — is ingrained in the culture of Serbia, Ukraine, Croatia, Russia, Slovenia, Ukraine again, the Czech Republic, Poland, Russia again, Ukraine again, the Czech Republic again.

Over here in Bulgaria, we run annual Neo-Nazi get-togethers and, just like the English lost it over the impending tsunami of millions of Bulgarians, people have been losing it over Syrian refugees and the Romani population — so we’ve made our streets hostile and dangerous enough.

Slavs are great at racism. We take it and run with it. We really make it our own.

And why is that?

In The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson describes how Slavic immigrants to the US simply westernized their last names in order to blend in. With that tweak, and just by virtue of their white skin, they put themselves above the Black communities who had been living in the country for generations — and immediately started looking down.

And here it is. We hate being oppressed, enslaved, or massacred, obviously. We’d much prefer to be the oppressors, enslavers, and murderers.

In my home city, Sofia, you will see countless residential buildings with Swastika graffiti or signs about keeping our nation “pure.” Bulgarians are proud of having saved our Jewish population in the face of mounting pressure from Hitler. At the same time, it’s common to hear a Bulgarian wistfully wish Hitler had “finished the job” when it came to the Roma genocide.

Of course, if Hitler had truly finished the job he set out to do, Bulgarians would have followed the Jews and the Romani into the concentration camps.

The sign “Ariiski” meaning “Aryan” written above the number of a Sofia residential building. No Aryans live there. | Photo by author

A prideful article on a website called “Russia Beyond” tackles the deeply offensive connection between the words Slav and slave.

First, the author sets the record straight about who’s who.

Historians, such as the famous Soviet and Russian researcher Igor Froyanov, emphasized that many slaves were taken by the Slavs.

The Slavs invaded territories, plundered, and took other people captive. With that out of the way, our heart can rest easy and we are free to speculate further.

One starts to wonder how then to explain this similarity of “Slav” and “slave” in Byzantine Greek? One explanation is that the two are just homonyms; they sound similar but have different meanings. But then, where does the Greek “slave” come from? It is argued that it originated in the word for plunder or taking war booty (skyleuein).

To paraphrase, Slavs will only accept the connection with the word slave if it signifies that we enslaved others — not that others enslaved us.