Bashkortostan (Башҡортостан; Башкортостан), officially the Republic of Bashkortostan, also known as Bashkiria, is a republic of Russia located between the Volga and the Ural Mountains in Eastern Europe. It covers and has a population of 4 million. It is the seventh-most populous federal subject in Russia and the most populous republic. Its capital and largest city is Ufa.
Bashkortostan was established on . On 20 March 1919 it was transformed into the Bashkir ASSR, the first autonomous republic in the Russian SFSR. On 11 October 1990, it adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty. In the Constitution of Bashkortostan and Constitution of Russia, Bashkortostan is defined as a state.
The name "Bashkortostan" derives from the name of the Bashkir ethnic group. While the root of the name is Turkic (being a combination of 'baş', which in Turkish can mean head, chief, main, principal and "qort" meaning wolf, one of the animals regarded as sacred to Turkic peoples); the suffix -stan is Persian, common to many Eurasian territorial names. The Bashkirs speak the Bashkir language, which belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic language group.
History of Bashkortostan
The first settlements in the territory of modern Bashkortostan date from the early Paleolithic period, but the Bronze Age spurred an upsurge in the population of this territory. When people of the Abashevo culture started settling here, they possessed high skills in manufacturing bronze tools, weapons and decorations. They were the first to establish permanent settlements in the Southern Urals.
Bashkortostan takes its name from its native people, the Bashkirs. The Slavonic name of the country, Bashkiriya, formed at the end of the 16th century. Originally it appeared in the forms Bashkir land, Bashkir, Bashkirda and Bashkir horde. The ethnonym Bashkirs first became known in the 7th century. In the 10th century, Al-Balkhi wrote about Bashkirs as a people, divided into two groups, one of which inhabited the Southern Urals, while the other lived near the Danube River, close to the boundaries of Byzantium.