Oka River - Name and History

Name and History

Max Vasmer connects the name of the river to the Gothic аƕа, Old High German aha, Latin aqua, which all mean either "water" or "river" (cf. Aa River). Oleg Trubachev traces the origin of the name to the Baltic languages: it was the Baltic tribe of Galindians that lived in the western part of the Oka basin prior to the arrival of the Slavs.

Historically, the river gave its name to the Upper Oka Principalities, situated upstream from Tarusa. One of the largest Russian cities, Nizhny Novgorod, was founded to protect the Oka's confluence with the Volga. The Qasim Khanate, a Muslim polity, occupied the middle reaches of the Oka (around the city of Kasimov) in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Before the construction of the railways in the mid-19th century, and the Moscow Canal in the 1930s, the Oka, along with its tributary Moskva, was an important transportation route connecting Moscow with the Volga River. Due to the Oka's and Moskva's meandering course, the travel was not particularly fast: for example, it took Cornelis de Bruijn around 10 days to sail from Moscow down these two rivers to Nizhny Novgorod in 1703. Traveling upstream may have been even slower, as the boats had to be pulled by burlaks.