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Type
Sacred SiteMythology
Slavic Pantheon
Coordinates
50.4547°N, 30.5238°E
The Russian Primary Chronicle records that in 980, before his conversion, Prince Vladimir of Kiev set up six wooden idols on a hill just outside his palace: Perun given pride of place with a silver head and golden moustache, alongside Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl, and Mokosh. This was, as far as the chronicle records, a deliberate act of state religious policy by a newly established prince, drawing together gods from across the peoples he ruled rather than a single inherited local cult site. The hill is generally located in what is now the historic Starokyivska ("Old Kiev") Hill area of the city, near the later Desyatynna Church.
After Vladimir's baptism and the mass conversion of Kiev in 988, the chronicle reports the same idols being torn down: Perun's image was bound to a horse's tail, dragged down the hill and beaten with sticks, then thrown into the Dnieper and, per the chronicle's account, escorted downstream past the rapids by men posted along the bank to make sure it did not wash ashore and be venerated again. The episode is one of the most vivid and specific passages in the whole chronicle, and is read by historians as much for what it says about Vladimir's political theater of conversion as for what it says about the gods themselves.
“And Vladimir began to reign alone in Kiev, and he set up idols on the hill outside the palace [...] and the people sacrificed to them, calling them gods.”
“And they dragged Perun down to the Dnieper [...] and he ordered men to push it off with poles until it had passed the rapids.”
The temple of Svantevit on Cape Arkona, the northern tip of the island of Rügen, the last great pagan shrine of the Baltic Slavs before its destruction by the Danes in 1168.
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.