Slavs

No pagan Slav wrote about Slavic religion, so everything known comes from outsiders and converts. The sixth century Byzantine historian Procopius reported that the Slavs worshipped a maker of lightning above all other gods. The Russian Primary Chronicle records that Prince Vladimir of Kyiv, before his conversion, set up idols of Perun the thunderer with a silver head and golden mustache, alongside Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl and Mokosh, the one goddess of the list; eight years later he had Perun dragged to the Dnieper and thrown in. German chroniclers describe the temple towns of the Baltic West Slavs, Arkona on Rugen with its four-headed Svantovit and oracular horse, destroyed by the Danes in 1168.

From these fragments scholars have built reconstructions of very different confidence. The structuralist school of Ivanov and Toporov read a single storm myth beneath the scraps, the thunderer Perun in endless combat with the serpentine Veles, lord of cattle, wealth and the waters below; others, including Judith Kalik and Alexander Uchitel, warn that the chronicle pantheons may be bookish constructions and that little about actual cult can be recovered. Svarog, often presented as a fire or smith god, rests on a single chronicle gloss.

What the texts do agree on is a religion of springs, groves and household spirits, oaths sworn by Perun and Veles in Rus treaty documents, and a dead who had to be feasted and remembered, themes that lived on for centuries in village custom long after the idols fell.

Slavic Christianization came ruler by ruler: Boris of Bulgaria in 864, Mieszko of Poland in 966, Vladimir of Kyiv in 988, with the Baltic West Slavs holding out into the twelfth century. Its greatest instrument was language. The brothers Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, sent from Byzantium to Moravia in 863, devised the first Slavic alphabet and translated scripture and liturgy into what became Old Church Slavonic, the first written Slavic language and still the liturgical tongue of Orthodox Slavs. Their disciples, expelled from Moravia, carried the work to Bulgaria, where the Cyrillic alphabet that now serves the East and most South Slavs took shape.

Conversion did not empty the countryside of older practice. The festival year kept pre-Christian bones under Christian names: Kupala night bonfires and river wreaths at midsummer, Maslenitsa pancakes before Lent, remembrance meals at graves. Clerical writers denounced this piling of custom on doctrine as dvoeverie, double belief, though modern historians treat that term cautiously, as polemic rather than description, and read the customs as folk Christianity rather than a surviving pagan church.

From the nineteenth century, Romantic folklore collecting turned the fragments into national heritage, and from the late twentieth century Rodnovery, Slavic Native Faith, has rebuilt a worship of Perun, Veles and Mokosh from chronicle, custom and conjecture. It is a new religious movement drawing on an old inheritance, and its communities now exist across the Slavic countries and their diasporas.