Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/28

22 military adventurer—again of low grade (the Turks and Tatárs belong to the same Ural-Altaic stock, along with the Hungarians and the Finns),—with shades of meaning indicating a vagabond, a partisan, a homeless roamer, a nomad. Altogether, it seems to describe the kazák of the early periods very thoroughly. With the status of the kazák as an agriculturist, with a fixed home, a soldier of the Russian Army, and with the divisions into kazáks of the Don, the Ural, the Terek, the Kuban and so forth, and the conditions of his service, it is not necessary here to deal.

The one appellation which is lost in the present divisions is precisely the historic one of the Zaporozhtzi. Zaporozhe, the domain of the kazáks of our story, is somewhat difficult to delimit (without entering into too much detail) on the present map of Russia. A large slice—practically all of the present Government of Tauris (not counting the Crimea), starting from the lagoon of Ochakov at the southwest point, bounded on the south by the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and, in a curving line, northeast, east, south again, by the Dnyeper, the Konskaya and the Berda rivers—was the territory of the Nogai Tatárs. Zaporozhe lay to the west, north and east of this Tatár territory. Beginning with Ochakov, at the western point of the Dnyeper lagoon, Zaporozhe was enclosed on the