The invasions came and subsided, each time leaving traces: ideas about architecture and literature and religion, words and idioms, boys with black eyes or girls with blonde hair. The pagan, Lithuanian names for rivers and forests stuck; so did the love of Turkish carpets and German tools. Sometimes there were larger changes. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian nobility had abandoned their older languages in favour of Polish. In the thirteenth century, the Teutonic Knights completed the region's first holocaust, destroying the indigenous people of Prussia and replacing them with Germans.

But most of the time, the Polonizations and Prussifications and Russifications, the drives to win Catholic converts, the crusades to build Orthodox churches, the plans to change churches into mosques came to nothing. The borderlands were simply too wide and too empty, it was too difficult for any invading nation to maintain permanent rule. Instead of uniformity, the waves of invasion created odd hybrids: the cathedral with a minaret in Kamenets Podolsky, or the town of Trakai, where five religions (Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Moslem, Karaim) once set up their houses of worship around a single lake. Throughout most of the borderland's history, the borderland peoples — the peasants and the woodsman and even the nobility — remained various. From town to town the local legends changed; from village to village the people sang different folk tunes with different melodies.

Because of the invaders' failure to bring about change, it could even be said that there were, until recently, no nations in the borderlands — or at least no nation-states in the sense that we know them now. There were the nobility and the invaders — the Poles and Russians and Germans and Tatars and Turks — who sometimes changed roles, defeating one another only to be defeated in turn.