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Type
TempleMythology
Slavic Pantheon
Coordinates
54.6811°N, 13.4342°E
Arkona stood on the chalk cliffs at the northern tip of Rügen, fortified by earthen ramparts that still survive as an archaeological site today. It was the principal shrine of the Rani, a West Slavic tribe, and housed the four-faced idol of Svantevit described in detail by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus in Book 14 of his Gesta Danorum: a wooden temple within the fortress, a great carved image holding a horn and a sword, and a sacred white horse used to divine the outcome of wars.
Saxo reports that the Danish king Valdemar I, guided by Bishop Absalon of Roskilde, besieged and took Arkona in 1168, forcing the Rani to accept Christianity and surrender the idol, which was reportedly cut apart and burned before the assembled army. The event marks the effective end of organized paganism among the Baltic Slavs and is one of the best-documented single episodes in the whole corpus of Slavic pagan history, precisely because the Danish side had every reason to record its own victory in detail. Archaeological excavation at the site since the 19th century has confirmed the fortress ramparts and settlement layers, though coastal erosion has since destroyed part of the original promontory.
“The city of Arkona [...] stood on a high cliff [...] within its rampart there was a wooden temple, skillfully built, but honored less for its craftsmanship than for the majesty of the god it enshrined.”
The hill outside Prince Vladimir's palace in Kiev where, per the Russian Primary Chronicle, six idols — Perun, Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl, and Mokosh — were raised in 980 and pulled down again in 988.
The Pomeranian city where Bishop Otto of Bamberg's mission of 1124–1128 destroyed the temple of the three-headed god Triglav, according to the near-contemporary Lives of Otto written by Ebbo and Herbord.
An open-air sanctuary south of Novgorod on the Volkhov river, identified by archaeologists as a likely Perun cult site and named by the First Novgorod Chronicle as the place where his idol was thrown into the river in 989.