Alkonost

Somewhere off a cold shore, in the shortest week of the year, the wind stops. Sailors who have spent a fortnight being flung about find the water gone flat, the rigging quiet, the spray no longer freezing on the ropes. The old books told them why. A bird had laid her eggs, and the sea had been ordered to behave itself until they hatched.

In Greek that bird was the alkyon, the kingfisher, and the calm was called the halcyon days. Basil of Caesarea preached about her in the fourth century, in a sermon on the fifth day of creation, and the detail he chose to dwell on was the arithmetic of it: seven days of stillness while she sits, then seven more granted afterwards because the chicks need feeding. His point was not ornithological. If God will flatten the winter sea for a bird that cannot pray, Basil asked his congregation, what will he not do for you.

That sermon travelled. It was folded into the Slavonic Hexaemeron, the six-day compilation that carried Greek natural philosophy into the Slavic book world, and somewhere in the long chain of hand-copying a scribe ran two words together. Alkionŭ estĭ, “the alkyon is”, became alkonostŭ. The sentence had been an explanation. It came out the other side as a name.

She is, in other words, a clerical accident with a very long career. Nobody worshipped her. She was born in a margin.

Russian lexicography puts her on the page from the fourteenth century, in the Palaea, and from there she passes into the azbukovniki, the alphabet-books and glossaries where medieval Russian readers looked up hard words, and she becomes common from the fifteenth century onward. The compilers who copied her had no kingfisher in mind at all by then. They had a woman.

What she became is easiest to see on paper. From the mid-eighteenth century she is everywhere in the lubok, the cheap printed sheet that hung in peasant houses, and in the hand-drawn wall sheets the Old Believers made for themselves. The body is a bird’s, heavy and bright, the tail feathers laid out like a fan of coloured glass. The head is a young woman’s, and above it sits a crown, or a disc of light borrowed straight from the icon painters. And she has hands. That is the whole trick of telling her apart from the Sirin, the other paradise bird who shares her branch in almost every picture: the Sirin has wings where her arms should be, and the Alkonost has arms. In one hand there is usually a flower out of paradise, or a scroll rolled open, and what is written on the scroll is a promise about what the righteous get when they die.

The couplets printed under the sheets say where she lives and what she does. She keeps close to paradise and is sometimes seen on the river Euphrates, which is Eden’s river out of the second chapter of Genesis and not any Slavic otherworld. When she lets her voice go in song she stops feeling herself. And whoever is standing near will forget everything in the world, the mind going out of him and the soul going out of the body.

That last line deserves reading slowly. She is routinely described as the gentle one of the pair, the bird who means no harm, and the promise on her scroll is a promise of reward. The verse still says the soul leaves. Nothing in the tradition resolves that.

Her one repeated act is the nesting. The Slavonic bestiary tradition kept Basil’s seven days and moved the eggs: instead of laying them on the shore or in the sand as the Greek kingfisher does, the Alkonost drops them into the deep water and sits out on the surface above them, and for those seven days she keeps the storms down. Then the eggs come up. The days themselves acquired a name in Russian book usage, the alkonost days, and the whole business was cited, exactly as Basil had cited it, as a worked example of providence.

Everything else attached to her is younger than it looks. In 1896 Viktor Vasnetsov painted the two birds side by side on a single long canvas and called it Sirin and Alkonost: The Song of Joy and Sorrow, and from that moment the pair had emotions. The Tretyakov Gallery, which has held the picture since 1908, says plainly in its own annotation that Russian folklore gave the paradise birds no such thing; in the medieval texts the two of them stand for divine wisdom and divine mercy, and nothing about them is sad. The specialist literature on the drawn lubok reached the same verdict and pushed harder, finding no earlier example anywhere of the two being set against each other, and concluding that the opposition came out of professional art rather than out of the people.

Even the assignment refuses to stay put. The popular account of the painting makes the dark bird the Sirin, grieving for a paradise already lost, and the bright bird the Alkonost, promising one still to come. Three years after the canvas was finished Alexander Blok wrote a short poem with the painting’s own subtitle at its head, and in it the happiness belongs to the Sirin, who throws her head back with a look full of blessings from somewhere else, while the other bird sits under a black wing with a heavy tear on a bloodied eyelash. The picture had been public for three years and the two most-quoted readings of it already disagreed about which bird was which.

Her powers follow from what she is, which is a promise with feathers. The song works because she comes from the place everyone is trying to reach, and it takes the listener’s attention completely because attention is what paradise is supposed to do to you. The stilling of the sea is not hers either, strictly; the whole point of the story, from Basil onward, is that the calm is granted to her and not generated by her. Which is also her limit. She can hold the water down for seven days and not an hour longer, she cannot leave the edge of the garden for anywhere but a river that runs out of it, and she is powerless to be recognised: strip the hands out of the picture and she becomes her own opposite, the bird whose song is said to kill.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Alkonost?

The Alkonost is a paradise bird of Russian and Slavic legend with the body of a brightly feathered bird and the head, torso and arms of a young woman, usually shown crowned. She appears in Old Russian book culture from the fourteenth century and became a favourite subject of printed lubok sheets and Old Believer wall pictures from the mid-eighteenth century onward.

Where does the name Alkonost come from?

It comes from a copying mistake. The Church Slavonic sentence алкионъ есть, “the alkyon is”, describing the Greek kingfisher, had its first two words run together by a scribe into a single word, алконостъ, and later readers took that word for a name. The underlying Greek is ἀλκυών, kingfisher, the bird of the halcyon days.

What happens if you hear the Alkonost sing?

According to the verses printed beneath her picture on lubok sheets, anyone standing nearby forgets everything in the world, the mind leaves him and the soul leaves the body. She is generally described as the harmless one of the two paradise birds, in contrast to the Sirin, but the wording of her own caption is not reassuring.

Is the Alkonost the bird of joy and the Sirin the bird of sorrow?

Not in folklore. That opposition dates from Viktor Vasnetsov’s 1896 painting Sirin and Alkonost: The Song of Joy and Sorrow. The Tretyakov Gallery’s own annotation states that Russian folklore gave the paradise birds no such emotional roles, and specialists on the drawn lubok have found no earlier example of the two being contrasted at all; in the medieval texts they stand for divine wisdom and mercy.

How do you tell the Alkonost from the Sirin in a Russian picture?

By the hands. The two birds are drawn almost identically, but the Alkonost always has human arms, generally holding a paradise flower or an open scroll, while the Sirin has wings in their place. The scroll in the Alkonost’s hand carries a saying about the reward in paradise for a righteous life on earth.

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Sirin, Gamayun, Fire Bird, Rusalka, Alcyone and Ceyx, Siren, Harpy, Caladrius, Phoenix, Simurgh, Ziz, Kinnara, Karura