Peryn

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The river leaves the lake without hurry. Where the broad sheet of Lake Ilmen narrows and begins to run north as the Volkhov, toward Novgorod and eventually toward the sea, a low tongue of sandy ground reaches out into the water. In spring it floods; for part of the year it is nearly an island. The Russians who later built a monastery there called it Peryn, and the name is older than the monastery, older than the Christianity that raised it. It keeps, in its first syllable, the name of a god — Perun, the thunderer, whose idol once stood on this spit above the moving water, and was thrown from it into the river when the gods of the Rus were renounced.

The spit at the source of the Volkhov

Peryn lies some six kilometers south of Veliky Novgorod, on the left bank at the point where the Volkhov flows out of Lake Ilmen. The geography is itself a kind of argument. The Volkhov was the artery of the northern Rus: downstream stood Novgorod, the great trading city of the north; upstream the lake opened toward the river roads that led, with portages, to the Dnieper and so to Kiev and Byzantium. A shrine placed exactly at the river’s source — at the threshold where the still water becomes the running road — sat at the hinge of that world. Travelers passed it leaving and returning. It commanded the water the way a fortress commands a pass.

The name does the genealogical work. Peryn is a possessive formation on Perun, the high god of the Slavs, the wielder of thunder and lightning and the storm. Across the Slavic and Baltic worlds the same divine name recurs — the Baltic Perkūnas and Latvian Pērkons, the thunder-god of the Balts, are his near-twins, and behind both stands a reconstructed Indo-European storm-deity of the striking blow. The root is bound up with the oak, the tree most struck by lightning and most sacred to thunder-gods from the Baltic forests to the Greek Zeus. To call a place Peryn was to call it Perun’s: the god’s ground, marked off and named for him.

When that ground became a sanctuary is not recorded in any text. Archaeology suggests a date in the ninth and tenth centuries for the cult-installation found there — broadly the era when the Norse-Slavic Rus state was consolidating around Novgorod and Kiev. But Slavic religion left no scriptures of its own. The Slavs wrote nothing of their gods; nearly everything known of Perun comes from outsiders — from the Byzantine treaties the Rus swore, from the Christian chroniclers who recorded the cult in the act of destroying it, and from much later folklore. The reconstructed mythology that surrounds Perun in modern handbooks — his cosmic duel with the serpent-god Veles, the tidy pantheon, the named consorts — is largely a scholarly and Romantic edifice built over a very thin documentary floor, and one notorious twentieth-century source for it, the so-called Book of Veles, is a forgery. What can be said of Peryn itself rests on two firmer things: a date in a chronicle, and a ring cut into the earth.

The god’s ground and the idol above the river

The chronicle date is 980. In that year, according to the Primary Chronicle (the Tale of Bygone Years), Vladimir — Volodymyr, prince of Kiev, whom the church would later canonize as the baptizer of the Rus — set up over Kiev a row of idols of the chief gods, with Perun foremost among them, his head of silver and his moustache of gold. This is the Kiev pantheon of 980, the prince’s short-lived state cult. In the same passage the chronicle turns north: Vladimir’s uncle and governor Dobrynya, sent to rule Novgorod, “set up an idol of Perun above the Volkhov river, and the Novgorodians offered him sacrifices as to a god.” Uncle and nephew raised the thunderer over the two poles of the realm at once — Perun above the Dnieper at Kiev, Perun above the Volkhov at Novgorod. Peryn is, in the documentary record, that northern idol’s ground.

Within the frame of the religion it served, the meaning of the place follows from the nature of Perun. He is the god of the high air and the storm, the lord of thunder and the striking bolt, and the sky-god of war and of the sworn word. His instrument is the lightning, which the older peasants of the Slavic countryside read as a thrown weapon: the small polished flint axes turned up in the fields, the prehistoric “thunder-stones,” were kept as the god’s spent bolts, charms against fire and storm, fallen from his hand. His tree is the oak, the tallest of the forest and the one the lightning seeks. To stand on an open spit above the widest water in the region, under the most open sky, was to stand in Perun’s element entirely — the place where the storm gathered over the lake and broke, and where the god of the storm could be met without a roof between.

When the Rus made their treaties with Byzantium — in 907, again in 945 — they swore by their weapons and by Perun, laying down sword and gold ring and circlet before him, and by Veles the god of cattle besides; to break the oath, the formula ran, was to be cut down by one’s own blade, to become yellow as gold, and to be cursed by the god one had named. Perun is the guarantor of the bond between fighting men, the witness who stands behind the oath the way the thunder stands behind the cloud. A sanctuary of Perun at the gate of Novgorod was thus a sanctuary of the city’s war-band and the city’s word — the place where the thunder-god watched the warriors of the north and held them to what they had sworn. It is fitting that the chronicle gives the founding of this shrine not to a priest but to Dobrynya, a war-leader and a prince’s governor: Perun’s house at Peryn was raised by a soldier, for a city of soldiers and traders, over the river they fought and bargained along.

The Zbruch idol, a four-faced limestone pillar from the Zbruch river in western Ukraine, often read as a cosmic image of several Slavic gods. The carved figure suggests the kind of pillar-idol that may once have stood at Peryn. From E. H. Lewinski-Corwin, Political History of Poland (1917); public domain.

A ring in the earth

In 1951 and 1952 the Soviet archaeologist Valentin Sedov excavated the spit at Peryn, and found there something that has shaped every account of the site since. Beneath the later monastic ground lay a circular installation: a flat platform some twenty-one meters across, ringed by a shallow ditch about a meter deep. The ditch was not a plain circle. It bulged outward in a series of bays — eight of them in the reconstruction, set at the points of the compass, each a rounded petal-shaped recess. In the bays Sedov found charcoal and traces of burning, which he read as the remains of ritual fires kept along the ring. At the center of the platform was a pit about sixty-five centimeters wide, holding rotted wood — the socket, he proposed, in which the great idol of the god had stood. Seen from above, the plan resembled an eight-petaled flower with the idol at its heart — and it is in Sedov’s reconstruction drawing that the sanctuary entered every later survey of the Slavic gods.

This is why Peryn matters out of proportion to its size. The Slavs built, so far as the record shows, almost no roofed temples in the eastern lands; only on the western Baltic, at Arkona and Wolin, did the chroniclers describe great timber temple-houses with their idols shut inside. In the east the cult seems to have been an open-air affair — a god set on a hilltop or a spit or beside a spring, under the bare sky that was the sky-god’s own dwelling. Such a place was called a kapishche, from the word for an idol, kap; but no one had a plan of one. The texts gave the idol and the sacrifice and the destruction; the ground itself was silent. Sedov’s reading made Peryn the type-specimen of the thing scholars had long inferred but rarely held in their hands: a Slavic open-air sanctuary, the high god’s ground laid out as a wheel of fire around a central post. Here, it seemed, was the architecture of the cult the chronicles described only in the moment of its ruin — a circular precinct, an idol on its axis, fires burning at the rim of the world’s directions. The fit with the texts was close: a Perun-idol above the Volkhov, set up in 980, thrown down in 989 (the year after Kiev’s own conversion of 988), and beneath the spit a circular fire-sanctuary of the right age. Sedov went further in reconstruction, proposing that the bays might have held not only fires but subsidiary idols, a ring of gods around the thunderer.

Schematic plan of the Peryn sanctuary after Sedov’s excavation — a central idol-socket within a ring-ditch bulging into eight bays at the compass points. Diagram by Wikimedia user Sterndmitri; CC BY-SA 4.0.

The reading has not gone unchallenged, and the challenge belongs to the record as much as the reconstruction does. Other scholars — among them Vladimir Konetsky and the archaeologist Lev Klein — have argued that what Sedov uncovered was not a sanctuary at all but a kurgan, a burial mound, its ring-ditch the ordinary trench of a grave rather than a wheel of ritual fires; the “petals,” on this view, are an over-reading of an irregular ditch, and the central pit a feature of the burial. Sedov’s interpretation has remained the prevailing one, defended on the grounds that the graves found nearby were of later date and that his plan agreed so well with the written cult of Perun. But the disagreement is genuine and unsettled. The famous eight-petaled kapishche of Peryn — the image reproduced in every survey of Slavic religion — is a strong reconstruction resting on contested ground, and an honest account names both the ring in the earth and the doubt about what it was.

An artist’s reconstruction of the Peryn sanctuary, following Sedov’s plan: a wooden idol on a raised platform within the ring of fire-bays. Illustration by Wikimedia user Віщун; CC BY-SA 4.0.

The idol in the river

What the chronicles record without ambiguity is the end. In 988–989 Vladimir, baptized and turned to Constantinople, ordered the gods of the Rus pulled down. At Kiev he had his own Perun — the one with the silver head and golden moustache — torn from its place, bound to a horse’s tail, dragged down to the Dnieper through a gauntlet of men beating it with sticks, and thrown into the river; servants were posted along the bank to push it off wherever it tried to come ashore, and to let it pass only beyond the rapids. The same campaign reached Novgorod. There it was Dobrynya — the very governor who in 980 had raised the idol above the Volkhov — who now had it brought down. Archbishop Joachim presided; the image of Perun was hewn from its place, bound with ropes, dragged through the mud, beaten with rods, and cast into the Volkhov, the river at whose source it had stood.

Around that drowning grew the most enduring story Peryn left behind. In the morning, the folk tradition runs, the idol came floating up the river toward the bank by the Pidba stream, and a man there pushed it back into the current with a pole, telling it that it had eaten and drunk its fill in Novgorod and could go now. And as it drifted under the great bridge of Novgorod — so a later chronicle, the Fourth Novgorod, has it — the floating Perun flung his staff onto the bridge and called out that the Novgorodians should remember him by it. Ever after, the people of the city were said to brawl on that bridge, the men of the two sides of the Volkhov coming to blows there, as though the god’s parting gift had been the discord of the place — his thunder reduced to the fistfights of a divided town. The story is folklore, not chronicle-fact, and it carries the smile of a later age; but it preserves something true about how the memory of Perun survived the river — not as worship, but as a curse lodged in a bridge.

The shape of that ending repeats, with variations, across the Slavic conversion, and Peryn sits inside a wider pattern. At Kiev the idols of the pantheon of 980 went into the Dnieper; far to the west, on the island of Rügen, the four-headed Svetovit of Arkona would be hacked apart and burned by a Danish king in 1168; at Wolin on the Baltic the three-headed Triglav was carried off. In each the same gesture recurs — the god is not argued with but manhandled, dragged and beaten and drowned or burned, treated less as a false belief to be refuted than as a captured enemy to be humiliated and disposed of. The beating with rods is the point: an idol that could be made to “cry out,” in the chroniclers’ telling, was a demon being driven from a body, and the river that carried it away was a kind of exorcism. Peryn’s distinction within that pattern is the water. Where Arkona’s god was given to fire and Kiev’s to the rapids, Novgorod’s was given to the river at its very source — set adrift on the Volkhov exactly where the Volkhov begins — and so the drowning became a journey, and the journey became the legend of the floating idol and its parting curse.

The site did not stay empty. A wooden church rose on the spit soon after the idol fell, and around 1226 the stone Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God was built there, one of the smallest and most perfect of Novgorod’s medieval churches. In time a skete — a small, austere monastic settlement — grew around it, revived in the nineteenth century under the archimandrite Photius, and Peryn passed wholly into Orthodox keeping. The dam works of the 1960s, raising the water, joined the old islet more firmly to the shore. Yet under the monastery’s quiet ground lay Sedov’s ring, and over the whole place lay the name. Christianity took the spit, built on it, and prayed on it for a thousand years — and went on calling it, without quite meaning to, by the name of the thunder-god it had thrown into the river. The same instinct that gave Novgorod its dvoeverie, its long double faith in which St. Elijah rode the thunder-cloud where Perun once had, kept Perun’s syllable alive in the ground that was meant to forget him.

What remains at Peryn is a low green spit, a small white church, the lake on one side and the river beginning on the other, and a faint circle in the soil that may be a sanctuary or may be a grave. The thunder-god is not worshipped there. But the place still answers, when asked, to his name.

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