Jarilo

By midsummer the straw man was already coming apart at the shoulders. The women carried him out past the last standing rye, keening as they went, and laid him in a shallow pit at the field’s edge with all the seriousness of a real burial. He had been made crudely and on purpose, exaggerated in the one place that mattered, because what they were burying was fertility itself and fertility was finished for the year. They filled in the hole. They went home. Next spring they would want him back.

That rite is solid ground. Almost nothing else about Jarilo is.

The earliest hard record of him is not a myth but a complaint. In 1765 Tikhon, bishop of Voronezh and later canonised as Tikhon of Zadonsk, moved to stamp out an annual festival in his diocese that ran from the week after Pentecost into the start of the Peter fast, and that the people called after a figure named Yarilo. Tikhon described what a bishop would describe: drinking, brawling, a crowd out of hand. He also recorded that the thing had been going on since before there were Christians in Voronezh to object to it. Similar summer rites, with the same straw figure and the same theatrical mourning, were noted across Russia, Belarus and Ukraine through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and comparable spring festivals in Serbia carried Jarilo’s name outright.

The physical description everyone repeats comes from one document. In 1846 Pavel Shpilevsky, writing under the name P. Drevlyansky, published a collection of Belarusian folk legends containing a vivid Yarilo: a young man in a white robe, barefoot, mounted on a white horse, a wreath of wildflowers and spring grain on his head, stalks of rye in his left hand and a severed human head in his right. In the villages the part was played by a girl dressed as a man and put on horseback. It is a superb image, and it has been reproduced in every popular account of Slavic religion since. It is also the weakest link in the chain. Drevlyansky’s collection has been examined by Russian folklorists as a case study in the manufacture of what one of them called mythological phantoms, deities assembled from words and half-heard customs and presented as inherited tradition. Elena Levkievskaya’s analysis of it appears in a 2002 Moscow volume about forgeries in Slavic folklore, which tells you the company it keeps.

There is one genuinely medieval thread, and it belongs to a different people entirely. When Otto of Bamberg went north to convert the Polabian Slavs, his biographers came back with a war god. Ebo, writing around 1151, says that when Otto reached Havelberg in April 1127 the whole town was decked in flags for a god called Gerovit. Herbord, writing a few years later, calls him Gerovit too and adds the Latin gloss: this is the one they call Mars. The temple was at Wolgast, and inside it hung an enormous shield plated in gold that no ordinary man was permitted to touch and that left the building only in wartime. A clerk named Dietrich, cornered in the shrine by a crowd who thought the Christians had come to burn it, grabbed the shield off the wall and walked out holding it in front of him. The crowd took him for the god arriving in person and went down on the ground. Dietrich dropped the shield and ran. Herbord also preserves a speech the local priest is supposed to have made while impersonating the god, and it is not a warrior’s speech at all: I am your god, the one who clothes the meadows in grass and the woods in leaves, who raises the crops in the fields and the fruit on the trees, who gives increase to your herds.

Gerovit is almost certainly Yarovit in Slavic, since German scribes regularly wrote Slavic jar- as ger- or her-. The root is the same *jarъ that sits inside Jarilo, meaning green and young in one direction and violent and rutting in the other, and the festival Otto stumbled into fell around the middle of April, close to the season of the Jarilo rites. That is the whole case for identifying them: a shared syllable and a shared time of year.

Plenty of serious scholars have accepted it. Aleksander Gieysztor treated Yarovit as a Polabian face of Perun and connected him to the eastern Yarilo; Andrzej Szyjewski, Michal Téra and Roman Zaroff have all argued for the link. Plenty of others have refused it. Henryk Łowmiański, Stanisław Urbańczyk and Jerzy Strzelczyk all judged the connection unproven, and several of them doubted that Yarilo was ever a god rather than the name of a festival puppet. Judith Kalik and Alexander Uchitel put it bluntly in their 2019 study of the Slavic pantheon: the identification is unsupported, Yarilo surfaces only at the end of the eighteenth century, his image was built on Saint George, whom the Slavs call Yuri, and Gerovit is most likely a local Slavic Saint Vitus, a Fierce Vitus, which suits a god of war rather well.

No medieval writer ever wrote the name Jarilo.

What he does have is a body of song. In northern Croatia and southern Slovenia the spring processions are held for Zeleni Juraj, Green George, nominally the saint but behaving like something older, and the Croatian scholars Radoslav Katičić and Vitomir Belaj spent decades reading the surviving verses as the wreckage of a lost narrative. They found the same formula turning up across Slavic languages, built on a rhyme between walking and giving birth: where Juraj walks, there the field bears. They noticed that the songs insist he comes on horseback and also that he has walked a very long way and his feet hurt, and concluded that the horse and the rider were once the same creature. From those fragments, and from comparison with Baltic material, they reconstructed a story. Jarilo is the tenth son of Perun, stolen on the night he is born and carried into the wet world below to be raised by Veles, Perun’s enemy. He comes back across the sea each spring, green and limping. He courts and marries his own twin sister Morana, and their wedding at midsummer buys a season of peace between the thunder god and the god of the dead. Then the grain is cut, which is to say he is murdered, and Morana turns into the winter that has to be drowned in effigy before he can return.

It is elegant and it is a reconstruction, assembled in the twentieth century from folk songs rather than read out of any text. Katičić and Belaj were open about the method. The trouble is that the reconstruction has since been quoted back as though it were the myth.

His powers are the ones the rites credit him with and no more: greenness under his feet, rye that fills out, cattle that take, and in the Polabian version a shield that hangs untouched on a wall until there is a war worth carrying it into. His limits are stranger than his powers. He can be built out of straw by anyone with an afternoon and a field. He dies every single year, on schedule, at the hands of the people who made him. And he is vulnerable in a way few gods are, because take away one dubious Belarusian book and one contested syllable and there may be no god there at all, only a doll, a hangover and a very old habit of burying summer so that it will come back.

The villagers were not wrong about anything that mattered to them. They put a straw man in the ground and waited for the rye, and the rye came.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Jarilo?

Jarilo is a Slavic figure of spring, vegetation and fertility, known mainly from folk festivals recorded in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Serbia from the eighteenth century onward. Whether he was ever worshipped as a god in pre-Christian times is disputed, because no medieval source names him. Some scholars link him to Yarovit, a Polabian war god attested in the 1120s.

Is Jarilo a real ancient Slavic god?

The evidence is thin and contested. The first documentary mention of Jarilo is from 1765, when Bishop Tikhon of Voronezh moved to suppress a festival held in his name, and the detailed description of his appearance comes from an 1846 Belarusian collection that folklorists have since treated as partly fabricated. Aleksander Gieysztor and Roman Zaroff accepted him as an old deity; Henryk Łowmiański, Stanisław Urbańczyk and Judith Kalik and Alexander Uchitel argued he was a festival figure built on Saint George.

What did the Jarilo festival involve?

Villagers made a straw effigy of Jarilo, often with exaggerated phallic features, then carried it in procession with loud ritual weeping and buried or destroyed it at the end of the season. In some places a young woman dressed as a man and rode a white horse in the role. The rites clustered around late spring and midsummer and were repeatedly condemned by church authorities for drunkenness and disorder.

How are Jarilo and Yarovit connected?

Both names contain the Proto-Slavic root *jarъ, meaning vernal and also vigorous or fierce, and their festivals fell at a similar point in April. Yarovit, recorded in Latin as Gerovit, was worshipped at Wolgast and Havelberg, kept a gold-plated shield in his temple, and was equated with Mars by the monk Herbord. Many scholars treat them as the same god under eastern and western names, but others regard the identification as unproven.

Who was Jarilo’s wife?

In the reconstruction proposed by Radoslav Katičić and Vitomir Belaj, Jarilo marries his twin sister Morana at midsummer, and her transformation into the goddess of winter and death follows his killing at harvest. This narrative was assembled in the twentieth century from Croatian, Slovenian and other Slavic folk songs rather than taken from any surviving ancient text.

Related Entries

Perun, Veles, Marzanna, Sventovit, Triglav, Svarog, Mokosh, Simargl, Rod, Rusalka, Saint George, Green Man