Simargl

Also Known As: also Sěmargl, Semargl; Old East Slavic Симарьглъ, recorded in the genitive as Simarĭgla in the Laurentian Codex, Sěmarĭgla in the Hypatian and Semarĭgla in the Radziwiłł Chronicle; possibly not one god at all but two, Sěm and Rgel
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Slavic Mythology, Ukrainian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Named among the six gods of the Kyivan state cult of 980 and credited in later scholarship with the keeping of seed, sprout and root, though no medieval text says so.
Role in Mythos: One of the wooden idols Vladimir set on the hill above his court in Kyiv, and one of the fire-and-grain powers invoked at the drying barn in a twelfth-century sermon against pagan practice.
Relation to Humans: The only worship recorded for him is agricultural and domestic, offerings made beside a low fire under the barn where sheaves were dried. Whatever he was asked for, he was asked for it by people whose harvest had to survive a winter underground.

In the year 980 a row of new gods went up on the hill outside the prince’s court at Kyiv, on the high ground above the Dnieper where the wind comes off the water all year. The chronicler who recorded it took the trouble to describe exactly one of them. Perun stood in wood with a head sheathed in silver and a moustache of gold. The others he simply listed: Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl, Mokosh. Five names, no faces, no attributes, no stories. One of those names has been argued over ever since, and it is not the one with the golden moustache.

The entire medieval record of Simargl amounts to two passages. The first is that line in the Primary Chronicle, the Kyivan compilation put together in the early twelfth century, which goes on to say that the people brought their sons and daughters to the hill and sacrificed them there, and that the ground was defiled with blood. The second is a sermon from the second half of the same century, known as the Sermon of One Who Loves Christ, which scolds Christians for exactly the practices that would not die. They still pray to fire under the drying barn, it says, and to the vily, and to Mokosh, and to Sim and Rgl, and to Perun, and to Volos the cattle god, and to Rod and the rozhanitsy, and all the rest of them. Picture the setting the sermon is complaining about: the ovin, the low timber barn where wet sheaves were stacked over a smouldering pit to dry before threshing, the air thick with chaff and smoke, the grain warm to the touch. That is the only place in the whole record where anyone is shown actually worshipping him.

Then the hill was cleared. Vladimir accepted Christianity in 988, and the idols came down after eight years standing. Perun was tied to a horse’s tail and dragged down the Borichev slope to the water with twelve men walking alongside beating him with rods, a public humiliation staged for a crowd. The rest were cut apart or burned. A church dedicated to Saint Basil was raised on the ground where they had stood, and the chronicler notes this with satisfaction, as a scar properly healed. Nobody recorded which of the stumps had been Simargl.

So there is no myth of Simargl. Not one story, not one encounter, not one line of dialogue, not one description beyond the bare name. Everything the internet will tell you about him, that he was a winged dog with fangs who guarded the seed through winter and carried messages between heaven and earth, comes from the twentieth century, and mostly from one man.

The chain begins in 1933, when the orientalist Kamilla Trever published a study of a composite dog-bird figure in Iranian art and connected the Slavic name to the Persian Simurgh, in Middle Persian Sēnmurw. The creature she was describing is real enough as an image: a beaked head, or a dog’s head, on a bird’s body with a lion’s forepaws and a peacock’s tail, worked in gilded silver and woven into roundels on late Sasanian textiles, spreading west and north from Iran until it turns up on objects from the Atlantic to Siberia. Boris Rybakov, the most influential Soviet archaeologist of Slavic paganism, took the identification and built on it hard. In his hands Simargl became a lesser deity with a defined portfolio, the guardian of seeds, shoots and roots, the intermediary between the high gods of the sky and the soil, identical with a shadowy figure called Pereplut and eventually replaced by him. Rybakov also pointed at the winged dogs engraved on Old Rus silver bracelets and declared that these were pictures of Simargl, which is how the god acquired a face.

The counter-argument is patient and it is damaging. Mikhail Vasilyev accepts the Iranian borrowing as the least bad option available while noting that the vowels do not behave and the final consonant does not fit at all. Beyond that he takes Rybakov apart. No Iranian or Indian source makes the Simurgh a protector of plants, so Simargl cannot have inherited a competence his supposed parent never had. The dog-headed form of the creature is a late Sasanian development, and there is no evidence that the eastern Iranians from whom the Slavs are supposed to have taken the name pictured it that way rather than as a large bird of prey. As for the bracelets, the winged beasts on them look rather more like Romanesque dragons of the sort travelling east through Western European ornament from the tenth century onward. Matteo Compareti has since gone further back up the chain and questioned whether the Sasanian dog-bird is the Senmurv at all.

The other line of attack refuses the single god entirely. Aleksander Brückner pointed out that the Chronicle also runs Khors and Dazhbog together without a conjunction, and nobody doubts those are two gods, so the same courtesy should be extended here. That gives Sěm and Rgel, and the sermon, which names them separately with a conjunction between, agrees. In 1841 Piotr Preys read them as the Old Testament idols Ashima and Nergal, smuggled into a Slavic list by a scribe with the Book of Kings in his head. Alexander Famitsin thought the text had been garbled from Sim and Yarilo. Ivanov and Toporov once reconstructed a seven-headed original. Martin Pitro and Petr Vokáč wondered whether Sěm and Rgel were divine twins, Slavic cousins of the Dioskouroi. Michał Łuczyński, working the names rather than the theories, derives Sěm from the Slavic verb to sow and Rgel from a verb meaning to cut, which would make them two field gods with jobs named after the work.

Whatever powers he had, they were agricultural and they were domestic, exercised over the part of the year when a farmer can do nothing but wait and hope the seed does not rot. The limits are harder to state, because his real weakness is not mythological. He was a state god for eight years and a heresy for a few centuries after that, and by the time anyone wanted to know what he had been, the people who could have said were long gone. He survives as a name with a hole where the god should be, and the hole has been filled repeatedly, each time in the fashion of the age doing the filling. In September 2023 the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence approved a new sleeve badge for the 71st Separate Jaeger Brigade: a walking Simargl on a red field, holding a flaming sword pointed down.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Simargl?

Simargl is an East Slavic god named in the Primary Chronicle as one of the six idols Vladimir the Great erected on a hill in Kyiv in 980, alongside Perun, Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog and Mokosh. He appears in only one other medieval text, a twelfth-century sermon against surviving pagan practice. No story about him survives, and no medieval writer describes what he looked like.

Is Simargl one god or two?

Scholars disagree. The Primary Chronicle writes the name as a single word, but the twelfth-century Sermon of One Who Loves Christ names Sim and Rgl as two separate recipients of offerings, and Aleksander Brückner argued that the Chronicle’s list runs other pairs of gods together without a conjunction too. Michał Łuczyński’s onomastic study derives Sěm from the Slavic verb for sowing and Rgel from a verb meaning to cut, making them two agricultural deities rather than one.

Why is Simargl depicted as a winged dog?

The winged dog comes from a 1933 study by Kamilla Trever, who linked the name to the Iranian Simurgh or Sēnmurw, a composite dog-bird in late Sasanian art, and from Boris Rybakov, who identified winged dogs engraved on Old Rus bracelets as pictures of Simargl. Mikhail Vasilyev has argued that the eastern Iranians did not depict the creature with a dog’s head, and that the beasts on the bracelets are more likely Romanesque dragons. The image is a modern reconstruction, not a medieval description.

What did Simargl do?

The only worship recorded for him is agricultural and domestic. The twelfth-century sermon describes people praying to fire under the ovin, the barn where sheaves were dried before threshing, and naming Sim and Rgl among the powers invoked there. The idea that he specifically guarded seeds, sprouts and roots was proposed by Boris Rybakov in the twentieth century and is not stated in any medieval source.

What happened to Simargl?

The idols on the Kyiv hill stood for eight years. When Vladimir accepted Christianity in 988 they were pulled down, cut apart or burned, with Perun dragged by a horse’s tail to the Dnieper and beaten with rods along the way, and a church dedicated to Saint Basil was built on the site. Simargl survived only as a name in two texts, though he has been revived in modern Ukrainian heraldry, appearing on a brigade insignia approved in September 2023.