CHAPTER I
PERUN
THE chief god of the pagan Russians was Perun, whose wooden idol, set by Prince Vladimir on a hill before his palace at Kiev in 980, had a silver head and a golden beard. Vladimir's uncle, Dobrynya, erected a similar image in Novgorod on the river Volkhov, and the inhabitants of the city sacrificed to it.1
Perun was held in high honour by the Russians. In his name they swore not to violate their compacts with other nations, and when Prince Igor was about to make a treaty with the Byzantines in 945, he summoned the envoys in the morning and betook himself with them to a hill where Perun's statue stood. Laying aside their armour and their shields, Igor and those of his people who were pagans took a solemn oath before the god while the Christian Russians did likewise in the church of St. Iliya (Elias),2 the formula directed against those who should violate the treaty being, "Let them never receive aid either from God or from Perun; let them never have protection from their shields; let them be destroyed by their own swords, arrows, and other weapons; and let them be slaves throughout all time to come."3
In many old Russian manuscripts of the twelfth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries mention Is made of Perun in connexion with other Slavic deities, such as Chors, Volos, Vila, Rod, and Rožanica,4 but nothing certain is known about his worship.
When Prince Vladimir received baptism in 988, he went to Kiev and ordered all idols to be broken, cut to pieces, or thrown
