The thunder god who was thrown in the river
In 980, according to the oldest chronicle of Kyiv, Prince Vladimir set up wooden statues of his gods on a hill outside his palace. The grandest was PERUN, god of thunder, with a head of silver and a golden moustache. Beside him stood Khors, DAZHBOG, STRIBOG, SIMARGL and MOKOSH.
Eight years later Vladimir became a Christian and changed his mind with some force. PERUN was pulled down, tied to a horse's tail, beaten with sticks on the way to the river and thrown into the Dnieper, while people who still believed in him wept on the bank. That short passage is one of the very few places these gods' names were written down at the time. Most of the rest survived in songs, customs and fairy tales.
Where to hide your death
KOSCHEI the Deathless cannot be killed in the ordinary way, because his death is not kept in his body. In the best-known version of the tale it is hidden in a needle, the needle is in an egg, the egg is in a duck, the duck is in a hare, the hare is locked in an iron chest, and the chest is buried under an oak on an island. The hero has to get through every layer, usually helped by animals he was kind to earlier. Snap the needle and KOSCHEI dies — a villain built like a set of nesting dolls.
A witch who is not always the villain
Baba YAGA lives deep in the forest in a hut that stands on chicken legs and only turns round to face a visitor who asks it properly. She flies about in a giant mortar, the heavy bowl used for grinding grain, steering with the pestle and sweeping away her tracks with a broom. Her fence is topped with skulls.
She is frightening, but not simply wicked. In the tale of Vasilisa the Beautiful, the girl sent to her hut completes every impossible task she is set and goes home with the fire she came for, glowing inside a skull. Polite visitors often get help from Baba YAGA; rude ones rarely get out.
Spirits behind the stove and in the trees
Old Slavic belief filled ordinary places with spirits. The DOMOVOI lived behind the stove and looked after any household that treated him well. When a family moved, they might carry embers from the old stove or put out an old shoe for him to ride in, so that he would come along. The LESHY of the forest led travellers round in circles, and the traditional escape was to turn your clothes inside out and swap your shoes onto the wrong feet, which muddled him into letting you go.
Winter gets drowned every March
One custom has outlasted the old religion entirely. Around the first day of spring in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, children still make a straw doll of MORANA, the goddess of winter and death, dress her in rags and ribbons, and carry her to a river to throw in or to a bonfire to burn — sending winter away for another year. Schools organise it, and nobody seems to feel sorry for her.