The city is named after the river (old , which means "the city next to the Moskva River"). The beginning of the name is not known, but some people have a few ideas. One is that the name might be from a very old Finnic language, in which it means "dark" and "cloudy". The first Russian reference to Moscow is from 1147 when Yuri Dolgoruki called upon the prince of Novgorod-Severski to "come to me, brother, to Moscow."