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74Besides the drone and heterophonic styles of polyphony, a later style ofpolyphony based on third parallelism has also been distinguished in Belarus traditionalsongs (Kutireva, 1985:38).With the survey of Belarus we have completed the survey of three Slaviccountries of the Eastern Europe – Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Vocal polyphony plays amajor role in traditional musical culture of all three countries. Without going into thedetails, we may say, that heterophonic polyphony, and the connected to heterophony aspecific style of functional two-part (sometimes three-part) polyphony, known mostly aspodgolosochnaia polifonia is widely distributed on the territory of these countries. Muchmore specific is the distribution of the drone polyphony, which is mostly concentrating inthe bordering region between the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, region known asPolissia/Palessie/Polesie. This region is well known among the ethnographers andlinguists of the Slavic world, as scholars have long noted the greatest concentration of themost ancient elements of the material and spiritual culture of the Eastern Slavic peoplesin Polesie. The third style of polyphonic music on the territory of the Eastern Slavs hasobvious traces of the late influence by the European professional polyphony with parallelthird and triadic harmonies.GeorgiaAlthough the main focus of my first book on traditional polyphony (Jordania,1989) was the international distribution of the polyphonic cultures of the World, the focuson Georgian polyphony was obvious, and a good half of the book (more than 150 pagesout of 300 pages total) represented a detailed description and analyses of different aspectsof Georgian polyphony. This book does not focus so much on Georgian polyphony, butas the tradition of Georgian polyphony represents one of the most complex polyphonictraditions known in ethnomusicology today with uniquely rich live traditions and localstyles of village and urban polyphonic singing, we will be covering several importantaspects of Georgian traditional polyphony. Therefore this section will be divided intoseveral sub-sections.Georgia (in Georgian “Sakartvelo”) shows an array of important signs ofunbroken cultural ancestry. Autochthonous residents of the Transcaucasia, Georgians stillspeak the Georgian language, which survives from the epoch of the pre-Indo-Europeanlanguages. The only possible relationship of Georgian language outside the Caucasusseriously discussed by linguists is that with the Basque language, the only survivor of thepre-Indo-European languages in Western Europe. Geographically Georgia is part of theregion known as “Transcaucasia”, situated on the southern slopes of the Great Caucasianmountain range, stretching from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea (more correctly – theCaspian lake, the world’s biggest lake). Being surrounded by the highest mountains ofEurope (reaching at several points more than 5.000 meters), the Caucasian mountaingorges represent the ideal “hiding spot” from outer influences for isolated populations.Even today for a big part of the year the only way to reach some of the populated regions