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Oka ((ロシア語:Ока́), ) is a river in central Russia, the largest right tributary of the Volga. It flows through the regions of Oryol, Tula, Kaluga, Moscow, Ryazan, Vladimir, and Nizhny Novgorod and is navigable over a large part of its total length, as far upstream as to the town of Kaluga. Its length exceeds . The Russian capital Moscow sits on one of the Oka's tributaries—the Moskva River. == 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).〔Vasmer's Etymological Dictionary, trans. by Oleg Trubachev, vol. 3, p. 127.〕 Oleg Trubachev traces the origin of the name to the Baltic languages: the Baltic tribe of Galindians 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. In 1221 Grand Duke Yuri II of Vladimir founded Nizhny Novgorod, later to become one of the largest Russian cities, 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 building of the Moscow Canal in the 1930s, the Oka, along with its tributary Moskva, served as an important transportation route connecting Moscow with the Volga River. Due to the Oka's and Moskva's meandering courses, 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Oka River」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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