Sirin

First light in a Russian apple orchard, the grass cold, the fruit still beaded with wet. Something in the branches is singing. The dew on those apples is not ordinary dew: on the morning of the Apple Feast of the Saviour, the nineteenth of August, a bird was said to come out of paradise into the orchard and shake living dew from her wings, and every apple she touched turned medicinal. That is why the first apple of the day was eaten with a wish attached to it. The bird was the Sirin, and getting her out of an orchard was easier than getting her out of a man’s head.

She is a bird with a woman’s face. In the cheap printed sheets and the hand-drawn pictures that carried her image across Russia for three centuries, the body is a bird’s, often owl-plumed, heavy in the breast, and the head that turns on the neck is a young woman’s, hair loose, sometimes crowned, sometimes ringed with the light that painters gave to saints. She has no hands. That absence is the fastest way to tell her from Alkonost, her usual companion in these pictures, who holds a flowering branch and an unrolled scroll. The older Russian reference books are less tidy about it, and describe her as human in form from the head to the waist and bird below, which leaves the arms unaccounted for and the two traditions quietly at odds.

Her name is a loan. The Old Russian form comes straight from the Greek plural for sirens, and she arrived in the north through translated Byzantine books rather than through anything ancestral and Slavic. Bird-women turn up early on Kyivan metalwork, on enamelled gold pendants and temple rings and on clay ware from the tenth to twelfth centuries, and Russian scholarship reads those figures as sirins. The written record is later and firmer: the tales of her sweet and ruinous singing sit in seventeenth-century Physiologi, in the alphabet books used to explain hard words, and in the chronographs, where she and Alkonost appear as a pair for the first time in the 1617 redaction of the Russian Chronograph.

The prints are blunt about what she does. If a man hears her voice, one inscription runs, he is taken captive in his thoughts, forgets everything temporal, and walks after her until he falls down dead, and even then does not stop hearing her. She was said to live in the Indian lands, which the sheets place next to the blessed place of paradise, or else somewhere along the Euphrates. She sang to the saints, foretelling the joys ahead of them. Mortals were another matter, and the remedy for her was volume: ring the bells, blow the trumpets, fire the cannon. Startled, she went up faster than an eagle and was not seen again. By the eighteenth century she had softened into a figure of heavenly happiness that only a happy person could hear at all, and that nobody could catch, being as quick and slippery as happiness itself.

The Church could not decide whether she was good news. In the Old Russian bestiary tradition her singing stands for the word of God entering a human soul, and also for heretics leading the weak astray, which is a considerable range for one bird. Both readings were in circulation at once. She flourished, oddly enough, in the most conservative hands available: after Peter the Great’s reforms the trade in didactic religious pictures passed to Old Believer communities, who drew rather than printed them, in the sketes of Vyg and Leksa, at Guslitsy, along the Northern Dvina, and Sirin and Alkonost were among the commonest subjects they produced.

From there she went everywhere a Russian peasant could put a bird. She was embroidered on linen towels in Kostroma province, one of them carrying a stitched legend calling her the glorious paradise bird Sirin. She was moulded into clay whistles in Yaroslavl, painted on chests and spinning wheels, cut into the frieze boards of wooden houses. The sound she was famous for could be bought as a toy.

Then in 1896 Viktor Vasnetsov painted the two birds on one canvas, two and a half metres wide, and called it Sirin and Alkonost: The Song of Joy and Sorrow. The picture is the reason most people have heard of her, and it is also the reason most of what they have heard is wrong. Russian folklore did not sort the paradise birds into joy and sorrow; the medieval books gave them divine wisdom and mercy and left the emotions alone. Vasnetsov set them against each other because it made a better painting. Worse, his own contemporaries could not agree which bird got which mood. Alexander Blok wrote a poem about the canvas within three years, and in it the Sirin is the radiant one, head thrown back, drunk on a spring out of some other world, while the other bird sits under a black wing with blood on her eyelashes. The gallery that owns the painting describes it the other way round, with Sirin as the dark messenger of grief. The most repeated fact about the Sirin is barely a hundred and thirty years old and was never settled.

Her name confused people even before the painters got to her. Sirin is also the Russian byname of Ephrem the Syrian, the fourth-century poet-theologian, so the bird and the saint blurred into each other in folk usage, and peasant lyricists like Nikolay Klyuev used Sirin to mean simply the poet. Vladimir Nabokov signed his Russian novels with it.

What she can do follows from what she is: a creature of the garden with a voice built for a place humans are not in yet. The song carries prophecy, real information about coming bliss, and it also strips the listener of memory, will and finally life, because a mortal nervous system cannot hold that much of paradise at once. What she cannot do is contend with noise, which is a strange weakness in a singer and a very practical one for a village to exploit. She cannot be caught. She cannot compel anyone out of earshot. And in her later, gentler career she cannot even be heard by the unhappy, which turns the whole encounter into a test the listener has already passed or failed before the first note.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Sirin in Russian mythology?

The Sirin is a bird of paradise from Russian legend with the body of a bird and the head of a young woman. Her name comes from the Greek word for sirens, and she reached Russia through translated Byzantine books rather than from native Slavic tradition. She sang to saints about the joys awaiting them, but her song was lethal to ordinary people.

What happens if you hear the Sirin sing?

According to the inscriptions on Russian folk prints, anyone who hears the Sirin is captured in his own thoughts, forgets everything of this world, and follows her until he collapses and dies. The traditional defence was noise: ringing church bells, blowing trumpets and firing cannon frightened her off, and she was said to fly away faster than an eagle.

What is the difference between the Sirin and the Alkonost?

In Russian folk art the Sirin has no arms, while the Alkonost has hands and holds a flowering branch and an open scroll. The two are usually pictured together and first appear as a pair in the 1617 redaction of the Russian Chronograph. The idea that one is a bird of joy and the other a bird of sorrow comes from Viktor Vasnetsov’s 1896 painting, not from folklore.

Is the Sirin a bird of joy or a bird of sorrow?

There is no agreed answer, and the question itself is modern. Medieval Russian books credited the paradise birds with divine wisdom and mercy and did not assign them emotions. After Vasnetsov’s 1896 canvas the pairing became standard, but Alexander Blok’s poem on the painting makes the Sirin the radiant bird of joy while the Tretyakov Gallery reads her as the dark bird of grief.

Where does the Sirin live?

Russian folk prints place the Sirin in the Indian lands, described as lying next to the blessed place of paradise, and other accounts put her near the Euphrates. She was believed to leave paradise only briefly, appearing in orchards and gardens before returning. On the Apple Feast of the Saviour she was said to shake living dew from her wings onto the apples, making them healing.

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