2016 : WARTHA becomes VOJSTRAU

Belarus band WARTHA has taken the decision to end this year, and begin the new year with a new bandname.Their new band name is now VOJSTRAU (pronounced Voystrau), that is an old form of a belarusian word востраў\vostrau, that means "island".

I asked them why that change and actually, I focused my questions on everything around that decision.
This is their reply :

"Our previous name "Wartha" is a very strange latinization of a belarusian word "Варта" = "Varta". Meaning "guard", "guardians", "protectors". We have choosen this strange latinization of a word because original word "Varta" in latin letters is the same to a firm from Poland. Varta is a poland brand name for batteries and acсumulators. Not so good for pagan metal and other activities. So, we decided to make it evil and blackish. Well, not so fast - "Wartha" is a name for a town in eastern Germany. And for many other things. Sometimes, very strange things.

We were looking for something connected to nature or folk culture. It is quite difficult, because in latin alphabet many of our words will have specific symbols. No matter we translated it from cyrillic - most people will not be able to read and spell it properly anyway. So, it tooked us some time in libraries with some old books to find something interesting, something we can write in latin alphabet without big troubles for people reading it".