That's an amazing piece of history I was not familiar with. I have recently travelled around the area between Belarus, Czech Republic, Lithuania and Austria and

That's an amazing piece of history I was not familiar with. I have recently travelled around the area between Belarus, Czech Republic, Lithuania and Austria and their history is obviously complex and interlinked, but I only saw in the museums the history starting from around 1000 years ago... I didn't consider that much of this region, which today includes mostly slavs, had not actually been populated by slavs just a few centuries before the history I was looking at (literally) which starts more or less with the Rus, Vikings (which apparently initially ruled Kievan Rus[1], despite the region being already slav at around the time ~800AD!), Bavarians and Balts to the north (which became the Grand Duchy of Lithuania later - which for some time actually extended to now-Russian Smolensk, covering most of today's Belarus and a part of today's Russia!) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27_people