Slavic Folklore

Slavic folklore is the body of traditional belief, story, and ritual that grew up among the Slavic-speaking peoples of central and eastern Europe. It encompasses the traditions of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, the Czech lands, Slovakia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and the western Balkans, and it carries a recognisable shape of its own: a deep reverence for the household and the forest, a rich world of nature spirits, a heroic cycle of bogatyrs and dragons, and a calendar of fire festivals that has survived the overlay of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity with remarkable strength.

This page is part of the wider survey of European Folklore. Within it, two further articles explore particular aspects of the Slavic tradition: the origins of Baba Yaga, the witch of the Russian forest, and the rusalka water spirits, the maidens of the rivers and the lakes.

The Slavic World

The term “Slavic” describes a family of languages and cultures that once stretched across a vast territory of central and eastern Europe, from the Elbe and the Sudetes in the west to the Volga and the Dnieper in the east, and from the Baltic coast in the north to the Balkan peninsula in the south. By the early medieval period the western Slavs (Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and the now-disappeared Polabian Slavs of the German lands) had been absorbed into Latin Christendom, while the eastern Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians) and the southern Slavs (Serbs, Bulgarians, Macedonians) were converted, in due course, to Orthodox Christianity.

The result is a cultural map of two great orthodoxies, one Catholic and one Orthodox, with a common Slavic substrate beneath them. The substrate is what we are concerned with here. The household spirits, the forest spirits, the hero-tales, the fire festivals — these are recognisably the same across the whole Slavic world, and they show how much the older religion survived the Christian overlay.

The Older Gods

Beneath the Christian surface, the older gods of the Slavs can still be discerned. The most important of them was Perun, the thunder god, the lord of the storm, the sky-father. His cult was centred on oak groves and on high places, and his name survives in many place-names (Perun, Perunov, Perunica) across the Slavic lands. He has been compared to the Norse Thor and the Celtic Taranis, and he is the figure of the sky and the lightning.

Below him stands Veles (also called Volos), the god of the earth, the cattle, the dead, and the underworld. Perun and Veles are the two great antagonists of the older Slavic pantheon, and the struggle between them — the sky god against the chthonic god, the storm against the serpent — is the older version of the fight between the bogatyr and the dragon. The cult of Veles is preserved in the figure of the Volos patron of the cattle, who is still venerated in some rural districts.

The third great figure of the older Slavic pantheon is Mokosh, the goddess of the moist earth, of fertility, of spinning, and of the household. She is the great female figure of the older religion, and she has been compared to the Scandinavian Frigg, the Germanic Holda, and the Baltic Laima. Her name survives in Russian mokroy (wet) and in many place-names, and she is still venerated in some rural districts as a household protector.

The Forest and the Household

The Slavic world, like the rest of pre-modern Europe, was a world of small villages surrounded by vast forests. The forest was at once the source of timber, of game, of mushrooms and berries, and the home of the older spirits. The leshy was the lord of the forest, a wild and often malevolent figure who could lead travellers astray and who had to be propitiated. The poludnitsa was the lady of the noon, who might be encountered in the grain fields at the height of summer. The rusalka lived in the rivers and the lakes, and the figure is examined in detail in its own article.

The household, too, had its own inhabitants. The domovoi, the “grandfather of the house”, was the spirit of the household, who lived behind the stove and who was responsible for the welfare of the family. The kikimora was a smaller spirit, often associated with the spinning and the cellars, and she could be helpful or troublesome. The dvinnik and the gumenik lived in the stable and the granary. All these spirits had to be propitiated with the appropriate food at the appropriate time, and the catalogue of the household is one of the great monuments of Slavic folk religion.

Baba Yaga and the Forest Witch

Among the most striking figures of the Slavic tradition is Baba Yaga, the witch of the Russian forest. She lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs, she flies through the air in a mortar, and she carries a pestle as her broomstick. She is at once a helper and a threat, and she has given her name to a whole archetype of the wise old woman of the forest. Her story is examined in detail in her own article.

Baba Yaga belongs to a wider family of forest witches: the Czech Baba (also called Ježibaba), the Slovak Jaga baba, the Ukrainian Baba Yaha. The Slavic word baba is the same word that is used for “old woman” in many Slavic languages, and the figure of the forest witch is part of the same figure of the older wise woman of the village. The Baba Yaga archetype is one of the great folkloric figures of the world, and it has passed into modern fantasy and children’s literature in many forms.

Bogatyrs and the Heroic Cycle

The Slavic heroic cycle is the world of the bogatyrs, the great champions of the Russian steppe, and of the vily (or rusalki) of the forest and the water. The most famous of the bogatyrs are the three champions of Kiev: Ilya Muromets, the peasant hero who could not walk or sit upright for thirty years and who then became the champion of the poor; Dobrynya Nikitich, the noble champion, the dragon-slayer, the warrior of noble birth; and Alyosha Popovich, the cunning hero, the trickster in bogatyr form. These three are the great champions of the Russian byliny, the long narrative poems that preserve the older heroic tradition.

The bogatyrs are not only warriors. They are also the defenders of the holy Russia of the steppe, the land of the Orthodox church, against the infidel and the witch. The cycle of tales is rich in dragons, witches, and the older pagan figures, all of which are recast, in the byliny, as the enemies of the Christian land. The Zmey Gorynych, the many-headed dragon, is a clear cousin of the European dragons of the wider tradition, and his defeat by the bogatyrs is part of the older Indo-European pattern of the hero and the serpent.

Koschei the Deathless and the Firebird

Two other figures of the Slavic byliny deserve particular mention. Koschei the Deathless (Koshchei Bessmertny) is the great villain of the cycle, the figure of the older death-priest who keeps his soul hidden in a needle that is hidden in an egg that is hidden in a duck that is hidden in a hare that is hidden in a chest that is buried under an oak tree. The pattern is one of the most elaborate “hiding-places” in world folklore, and the only way to defeat Koschei is to find the needle and break it. The hero who does so is usually one of the bogatyrs, often Ilya Muromets, and the story of his quest is one of the most beloved in the Russian tradition.

The Firebird (Zhar-ptitsa) is the other great figure. The bird of fire, whose feathers glow and whose flight lights the night, is the goal of many a bogatyr’s quest. The story of Ivan Tsarevich and the Firebird is one of the most popular tales of the Russian repertoire, and it is a clear cousin of the Simurg of the Persian and the Phoenix of the wider European tradition.

The Calendar of the Year

The Slavic year was marked by a calendar of fire festivals and seasonal observances. The most important of them were Koliada (the winter solstice, celebrated in late December), Maslenitsa (the butter week before Lent, the Slavic Carnival), the Feast of Elijah (the great midsummer saint of the Orthodox calendar), and Kupala Night (the night of 23-24 June, the great fire festival of midsummer). Each festival was an occasion for the gathering of the community, for the lighting of bonfires, for the ritual singing of songs, and for the renewal of the older religious sense.

Kupala Night is especially striking. The young people of the village go into the forest on the eve of St John’s Day, weave garlands of flowers, light bonfires, and jump over the flames in pairs. They float wreaths on the river to see if the current will be their fortune. The night is one of the great celebrations of the older Slavic year, and it has been preserved with unusual strength in Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Poland. The festival is sometimes compared to the Celtic Beltane and the Norse Midsummer, and it shows the same older pattern of the fire festival at the turning of the year.

The Wise Woman and the Witch

The Slavic village had a recognised figure of the vedma (witch) and the znakharka (wise woman). The two were often the same person, and the distinction between them was a matter of reputation. The wise woman knew the herbs, she could read the signs of the body, she could set a bone, and she could help a woman in childbirth. The witch was feared: she could send a curse, she could take the milk from the neighbour’s cow, she could cause a man to die of a wasting sickness. The two were often bound together in the popular imagination, and the Baba Yaga is the supreme figure of the witch-woman in the forest.

The wise woman of the Slavic village is one of the great folkloric types of the world, and she has her cousins in the cunning woman of the Celtic lands, the hex of the German villages, and the strega of Italy. She is part of the wider pattern of the older female religious specialist, the figure who stands between the village and the older powers of the earth.

The Lubok Print and the Visual Tradition

The Slavic tradition has a particularly rich visual side. The lubok is a Russian popular print, made by woodblock or by copper engraving, that circulated in enormous quantities from the seventeenth century onwards. The prints show heroes, saints, monsters, and scenes of daily life, and they are an extraordinary resource for the student of folk culture. The lubki of the bogatyrs, the Firebird, the Koschei, and the Baba Yaga are among the most popular, and they have fixed the visual image of the Russian folk-hero for centuries.

The lubok is part of a wider European tradition of the popular print, and it is closely related to the English chapbook, the German Bilderbogen, and the French image d’Épinal. In the Slavic world the lubok has an unusual importance, because it preserves, in a relatively cheap and popular form, the older visual memory of the folk tradition.

Orthodoxy, Saints, and the Christian Overlay

The Christian overlay of the Slavic world is, in many places, an Orthodox overlay. The saint of the Orthodox calendar often takes the place of the older god or spirit: St Elijah the Thunderer takes the place of Perun; St Paraskeva the place of Mokosh; St George the place of the older dragon-slayer. The result is a folk culture in which the older religious sense is preserved, in many cases, beneath the Christian name.

The Orthodox feast of St George’s Day (23 April / 6 May) is an example. The day is marked by the gathering of the cattle for the first time after the winter, by the blessing of the fields, and by the ritual driving of the cattle between two bonfires. The pattern is the same as the older Slavic fire festival, and the saint is, in many readings, a Christian name for the older sky-god of the spring.

Survivals and Modern Echoes

The Slavic folk tradition has been an extraordinary source of inspiration for modern culture. The Russian fairy tales of Afanasyev, the operas of Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky, the ballets of Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky, the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the paintings of Bilibin and Vrubel — all draw on the older tradition. The Slavic world is alive with the older stories, and the rural districts of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Balkans still observe the older festivals, in many cases in their original form.

The Slavic tradition is, in this sense, one of the great living folkloric traditions of Europe, and it continues to add new material to the older body of tales.

In this section

Baba Yaga Origins

Rusalka Water Spirits