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Type
TempleMythology
Slavic Pantheon
Coordinates
53.4285°N, 14.5528°E
Szczecin (German Stettin) was a major Pomeranian town and, per the biographers of Bishop Otto of Bamberg, home to a temple of the three-headed god Triglav, along with several other lesser shrines that Otto's mission targeted. Ebbo's Vita Ottonis (c. 1151) and Herbord's Dialogus de Vita Ottonis (c. 1158) both describe Otto's arrival in 1124–1128, sent at the request of the Polish duke Bolesław III to convert recently subjugated Pomerania, and both give Szczecin's temples the fullest individual treatment of any site in the mission.
The biographers describe the Szczecin temples being emptied of their treasure and dismantled after negotiation with local elites rather than by force alone, in contrast to the violent Danish conquest of Arkona forty years later. A golden image of Triglav's three heads was reportedly sent to Rome as a gift to Pope Honorius II, framed by the biographers as proof of the mission's success. As with Arkona, the account comes entirely from the converting side, writing to celebrate Otto's later canonization; the temple's internal religious meaning to the Pomeranians themselves is filtered through that lens.
“In the city of Stettin there were four temples [...] but one, the greatest and most splendid, was built with wonderful skill [...] in it stood the triple-headed image called Triglav.”
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 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.
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.