page_title: Lech, Czech, and Rus
section_title: Legend versus reality
hierarchical_section_title: Lech, Czech, and Rus / Legend versus reality
caption_attribution_description: Linguistic Area of Baltic-Slavic languages
context_page_description: Lech, Czech and Rus refers to a founding myth of three Slavic peoples: the Poles, the Czechs, and the Rus' people. The three legendary brothers appear together in the Wielkopolska Chronicle, compiled in the early 14th century. The legend states that the brothers, on a hunting trip, followed different prey and thus travelled in different directions; Lech in the north, Czech in the west, and Rus in the East. There are multiple versions of the legend, including several regional variants throughout West Slavic, and to lesser extent, other Slavic countries that mention only one or two brothers. The three also figure into the origin myth of South Slavic peoples in some legends.
context_section_description: In the Bohemian chronicles, Čech appears on his own or only with Lech. Čech is first mentioned in Latin as Bohemus in the Cosmas' chronicle of 1125. The earliest Polish mention of Lech, Čech, and Rus is found in the Chronicle of Greater Poland written at the end of the 13th or the beginning of the 14th century.
  The legend suggests a common ancestry of the Poles, Czechs and possibly Rus people, and illustrates the fact that as early as the 13th century at least three different Slavic peoples were aware of being ethnically and linguistically interrelated and, indeed, derived from a common root stock. The legends also agree on the location of the homeland of the Early Slavic peoples in Eastern Europe. This area overlapped the region presumed by mainstream scholarship to be the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the general region of the Pontic-Caspian steppe. In the framework of the Kurgan hypothesis, "the Indo-Europeans who remained after the migrations became speakers of Balto-Slavic".
  The most well-known version of the legend is seen to be somewhat Polocentric, as it mentions a national symbol (the white eagle) only for Lech and the Polish nation, while relegating the two other brothers Czech and Rus to secondary characters. Furthermore, this particular version does not address the origin of the South Slavic peoples.
  The legend also attempts to explain the etymology of the ethnonyms: Lechia (another name for Poland including Silesia), the Czech lands (including Bohemia, Moravia, and also Silesia), and Rus'. Jan Kochanowski, a prominent Renaissance Polish man of letters, in his essay on the origin of the Slavs, makes no mention of the third "brother", Rus. Moreover, he dismisses the legend entirely, stating that "no historian who has taken up the subject of the Slavic nation [...] mentions any of those two Slavic leaders, Lech and Czech". He goes on to assume that "Czechy" and "Lechy" are quite probably the original names for the two nations, although he does not dismiss the possibility that there might have been a great leader by the name Lech whose name replaced the original and later forgotten name for the Polish nation.
caption: Area of Balto-Slavic dialectic continuum (purple) with proposed Bronze Age material cultures in white. Red dots indicate archaic Slavic hydronyms
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