Who are the Cossacks? Descendants of runaway serfs, one of the classes of old Russia, as academic science usually claims? Or did their ancestors (at least some of them) from time immemorial live in the same regions - on the Don, in the Kuban?.. This is precisely the position taken by the author of this book - Cossack historian, writer and local historian Evgraf Petrovich Savelyev. Drawing on a colossal amount of factual material, with the passion and conviction of a true patriot, he proves that the culture of the Cossacks in many of its manifestations goes back thousands of years, that the Cossacks are not random strangers on their land.