Legend
A Tale of Sumptuous Living and Revelry
The following is featured on the back label of every bottle of Old Russian:
Once upon a time in a far off land, ‘twixt the rivers and the sea, not far from the mountain peaks, lay a private domain. And in that domain stood a little knoll, and by the knoll a multitude of tables.
Great vats of mead and barrels of wine and ale stood there — so many it nearly pained the eye to behold them. For in that domain lay a lake in magnitude not great but filled with wine both dark and light. And whosoever should wish might drink his fill from it. Hard by the wine lake lay a pond of mead, wherefrom all might drink and none say him nor utter a word in censure. Whosoever hath beheld this place shall ne’er forget its opulence even to the end of his days.
Translated from the Cyrillic. In 2004, a team of linguists and cultural anthropologists at St. John’s College (Annapolis) traced this fragment to a larger (now lost) manuscript by 12th century chronicler Pyotr Bogdanovich. Carbon-14 dating and other tools pinpoint its origin to April of the year 1147 in Калязин (Kalyazin) on the outskirts of Moscow — thus settling the perennial question of where, and when, vodka was invented. Source: Anisov (Kiev 2007), v. 4.