Vyrai

By the last week of September the sky over the eastern marshes starts to empty. Cranes go over in ragged Vs, high enough that the sound arrives a moment after the shape, a thin creaking bugle that carries for miles across cut fields already stiff with frost at dawn. Belarusian villagers had a word for that wedge of birds. They called it the vyraj. It was also the name of the country the birds were flying to, and the two meanings never quite came apart, because the flock and its destination were understood as one continuous thing: the road and the place at the end of it.

That place was warm. Every version agrees on the warmth. Vyrai lay somewhere south or west, past a sea, at the far end of the Milky Way, which the Belarusians knew as the Goose Road because the geese followed it. There it was always daylight and always summer, a green garden where nothing died and nothing froze, and the year’s cold had no purchase at all. It was also shut. The garden stood behind an iron gate that kept the living out, and only the dead and the birds, who were frequently the same thing, went through.

The word is old enough to surface in writing before anyone got around to explaining it. Vladimir Monomakh, prince of Kiev, wrote his Instruction to his sons somewhere around the turn of the twelfth century, a Christian document full of psalms and campaign lists, and in a passage marvelling at the works of God he noted how the birds of heaven come out of iriy. He did not gloss the word. He did not need to. A baptised prince could use it in a devotional text and expect to be understood, which tells you how thoroughly the idea had bedded into ordinary speech long before the churches went up.

The garden is often placed in the crown of a great tree, the branches nested by birds who are human souls wearing feathers for the season. The image is economical. It explains where the dead go, where the birds go, why they leave together and come back together, and why spring should be understood as something that arrives from elsewhere rather than something that happens locally. Souls were thought to leave for Vyrai in the smoke of the pyre. They did not stay forever. After a time a soul came home, carried into the womb of a pregnant woman by a stork or a nightjar, which is why in a great many Slavic households the stork on the roof was left strictly alone.

Getting in required keys, and the keys belonged to a bird. The cuckoo held them, which is why the cuckoo left first, going ahead to open the gate for everything that followed. The stork came last and shut it. One strand of the folklore hands the keys instead to Veles, who took the shape of the raróg, a fire-falcon, and hung the keys of the otherworlds from his claws. Both accounts want the same thing, which is a doorkeeper who can fly.

Snakes complicated it. Vipers also vanish in autumn, and the same logic that sent the birds to a warm country sent the snakes to one as well, so the folk tradition of Ukraine, Belarus and eastern Poland gave them their own vyrai underground: a pit in the forest where the adders gathered and knotted into a single cold ball to wait out the winter. They set off on the eve of the Exaltation of the Cross in late September, and on that day nobody sensible went into the woods.

Two Vyrais, one above and one below, one for feathered souls and one for serpents. When Christianity arrived it found the scaffolding already built. The bird garden in the branches slid into place as heaven, the snake pit as hell, and the transition cost the new religion almost nothing in the way of explanation. Andrzej Szyjewski has argued that the doubling came second, and that the earliest Slavic picture had only one Vyrai, tied to the deity Rod and set far beyond the sea. That is a modern reconstruction rather than a recorded belief, and it should be read as one.

The name itself has resisted everybody. It gets linked to rai, the Slavic word for paradise, but Max Vasmer treated that as folk etymology, a tidy after-the-fact guess. Proposals connecting it to Persian rayí, to Greek éar for spring, to Sanskrit áranyas, or to a Proto-Indo-European root for water have all been floated and none has stuck. Boris Uspenskij, working through the ethnographic material in the early 1980s, concluded that iriy was never a location in the first place but a general term for the otherworld, which would explain why it can sit across the sea, underground, and in a treetop without anyone noticing a contradiction.

What Vyrai does is regulate the year. It holds the warmth through the dark months and gives it back, it stores the dead and returns them, and the whole traffic runs on wings. What it cannot do is admit anyone in a body. The iron gate is the hard limit, and the old accounts put the route to the otherworld through water, down through a whirlpool, which is not a journey with a return leg. Nobody walks to Vyrai. The keys are held by a bird that will not lend them, the gate opens on a schedule set by migration rather than by need, and the only way any human being was ever thought to make the crossing was to stop being one first.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Vyrai in Slavic mythology?

Vyrai is the Slavic otherworld, a warm land of eternal summer where migrating birds and the souls of the dead spend the winter. It is described as lying beyond the sea, at the far end of the Milky Way, or as a garden in the crown of the world tree, shut off from the living by an iron gate. The name also appears as Vyraj, Vyriy, Iriy and Wyraj across the Slavic languages.

Who guards the gates of Vyrai?

The cuckoo is said to hold the keys, which is why it migrates first and opens the gate for the other birds, with the stork arriving last to close it. Another strand of the folklore gives the keys to Veles, who takes the form of the fire-falcon raróg and carries them in his claws. Either way the doorkeeper is a bird, and the living are never let through.

How old is the idea of Vyrai?

The word appears in writing by the early twelfth century, when Vladimir Monomakh used it in his Instruction to his sons, remarking on how the birds of heaven come out of iriy. He offered no explanation of the term, which suggests it was already common knowledge among East Slavs at the time.

Why do snakes go to Vyrai?

Because snakes disappear in autumn just as birds do, folk tradition in Ukraine, Belarus and eastern Poland gave them a Vyrai of their own, located underground as a forest pit where vipers gathered and coiled together for the winter. They were believed to set off around the Exaltation of the Cross in late September, a day on which people avoided the woods.

Is Vyrai the same as heaven?

Not originally, but the two merged. After Christianisation the bird Vyrai above and the snake Vyrai below supplied a ready-made framework for heaven and hell, which helped the new doctrine settle quickly. Boris Uspenskij argued that Vyrai was never a fixed place at all but a general Slavic name for the otherworld.

Related Entries

Veles, Rod, Raróg, Nav, Sirin, Alkonost, Gamayun, Gagana, Simargl, Marzanna, Zmey Gorynych, Perun, Mokosh, Zhar-Ptitsa