Zilant

The hill above the Kazanka was a dry island in flood country, sun-baked and waterless, and in the cold months every crack in it was packed with snakes. They came up when the ground warmed, thick as fence rails, and the people who wanted to put a city on that hill had to decide what to do about them. What they decided was fire.

A wizard gave the plan. Straw and brushwood were heaped at the foot of the slope in early spring, and the snakes, coming out of their winter burrows stiff and slow, crawled into the pile because it was warm and dry and exactly what they wanted. A rider was sent to set it alight. The stack went up fast, and the snakes died in it, and by every account they went on being lethal after death: the smoke off them was foul enough to kill men and horses standing downwind.

One did not die. The king of them lifted out of the burning and flew, and the hill has carried his name ever since, Yılantaw in Tatar and Zilantova gora in Russian, both of which just mean Snake Mountain. What happened next depends on who is telling it. In the version the Tatar Encyclopaedia records, the serpent settled nearby and terrorised the new city until a powerful sorcerer named Hakim killed it by conjuration, and the townspeople put its likeness on their emblem to mark the day. In the retellings gathered around Lake Qaban, it never died at all but went down into the water and is there still, surfacing when it feels owed something. A third telling has it turn on the rider who fired the straw, catching him fifty versts out and cutting him into six pieces before the man’s poisoned pike finished it. A fourth brings it back to a cave under the hill, where it took tribute from the city and flew down at intervals to drink from the Black Lake, until a wizard was found who could end it.

The sheer number of endings is the point. Nobody in Kazan agreed on how the story finished, only on how it started.

Underneath the local legend sits a much older creature. The Tatar name for the thing is ajdaha, and that word comes out of Iran, from Aži Dahāka of the Avesta, the demon who killed the righteous king Yima and ruled a thousand years of evil, and who becomes Zahhak in the Shahnameh. It reached Turkic writing early: Saif Sarai, working in the fourteenth century, has it as azhdarkha. In Tatar belief the ajdaha is not born but accumulated. A snake that survives a hundred years turns into one, and a snake that survives a thousand turns into a yuxa, which is worse. It belongs to water, and in the folk tales it lies beside a river or a lake and demands unmarried girls from the nearest town until a hero arrives, or it climbs to the nest of the Simurg to eat the chicks and gets carried out of the underworld by the grateful bird. Among the Mishar Tatars it comes as a fiery serpent, entering a widow’s house wearing the face of her dead husband, and she sickens and dies.

What it looked like is a harder question than it seems, because the detailed descriptions all come from the wrong side. The 1766 decree describing the Kazan seal calls the creature a basilisk, crowned, with gold wings and a gold-tipped tail. The grant of 18 October 1781 gives a black serpent under the golden crown of Kazan, red wings, white field. The 1856 blazon upgrades it to a black crowned dragon with red wings and tail, gold beak and claws, and a red tongue. That is a Russian chancery writing in Russian heraldic terms, and it is the closest thing to a portrait anyone has.

The dragon everyone in Kazan can draw was drawn by the people who took the city.

Historians have said so plainly. Mikhail Khudyakov argued that the arms were composed by Moscow heraldists trained in Metropolitan Macarius’s school in the years after 1552, and that the dragon was there to represent a hostile state, the beast under Saint George’s spear rather than any emblem the khanate chose for itself. Nail Khanzafarov made the folkloric case in 1997: a winged serpent is a negative figure in old Turkic tradition, so it is unlikely ever to have stood for the Tatar people. The khans of the Golden Horde sealed their documents with a dynastic trident, not a snake. Against that sits one awkward piece of evidence, a 1705 book by the Amsterdam publisher Carel Allard describing a flag of the Caesar of Tartary, yellow, with a black dragon lying with its head turned outward and a basilisk’s tail; winged snakes also turn up on sixteenth-century Russian seals of the region and in drawings from the Bulgar period, though none of them is known to have been authorised as arms.

The hill itself was taken as thoroughly as the emblem. Ivan the Terrible founded a monastery in October 1552 on the spot where his tent and field church had stood and where his dead lay, and when the Volga undercut the walls in 1559 it was moved up onto the serpent’s hill, where it became the Zilantov Monastery of the Assumption. A Russian cloister on Snake Mountain, keeping the snake’s name.

Set out plainly, the creature’s powers are the powers of an accumulated snake. Age gives it size and then wings. It flies, it dens in caves and lake beds, it can take tribute from a walled city, and its venom works at a distance and after death, in the form of a stench that drops horses. What it cannot do is change its habits. It has to come out of the ground in spring and it has to go back in, and a heap of dry straw laid at the right moment turns that necessity into a trap. Iron will kill it only if the iron is poisoned first, which is to say only if the man carrying it expects to die too. Words work better than blades, and in most tellings it is a wizard’s conjuration that finishes the thing.

There was one more limitation nobody in the old stories anticipated. Argument over the emblem ran through the 1990s, some Tatar voices refusing a dragon that had been chosen for them by a conqueror, and the settlement reached at Kazan’s millennium in 2005 was to keep the beast and read it as Aq Yılan, the white snake of Turkic story who advises heroes and gives them gifts. The state register now blazons it in flat, unarguable colours: a black dragon with red wings and red tongue, gold paws and claws, a gold crown, standing on green earth.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Zilant?

Zilant is a winged serpent from the founding legend of Kazan, in the Volga region of Russia. The Russian name is a rendering of Tatar yılan, meaning simply “snake,” and Tatars generally call the creature ajdaha or ajdaha-yılan. It is the king of the snakes that infested the hill where the city was to be built, and the only one to escape when they were burned out.

Why is Zilant on the coat of arms of Kazan?

Legend says the emblem commemorates the killing of the serpent that terrorised the new city. Historians are more sceptical: Mikhail Khudyakov argued the arms were designed by Moscow heraldists after the conquest of 1552 to depict Kazan as a hostile, dragon-ruled state, and Nail Khanzafarov pointed out that a winged serpent is a negative figure in Turkic folklore and so an unlikely self-chosen symbol. The arms were made official in 1730 and granted in their familiar form in 1781.

Is Zilant a Tatar creature or a Russian one?

Both, at different stages. The underlying being is the Tatar ajdaha, which descends from the Iranian Aži Dahāka and appears throughout Tatar folk tales, while the proper name Zilant, the dragon iconography and the heraldic career all belong to the Russian period after 1552. Kazan reclaimed the figure at the city’s millennium in 2005 by identifying it with Aq Yılan, the benevolent white snake of Turkic story.

How was Zilant killed?

The endings disagree. In the version recorded by the Tatar Encyclopaedia a sorcerer named Hakim destroyed it by conjuration; in another it fought the rider who had fired the snakes, cut him into six pieces, and died of his poisoned pike; in a third it escaped to Lake Qaban and was never killed at all. Weapons alone are rarely enough in these tellings, and it is usually a magician who ends it.

How does a snake become an ajdaha?

By surviving. Tatar belief holds that a snake which lives a hundred years becomes an ajdaha, and one which lives a thousand becomes a yuxa. The creature is tied to water, and in the folk tales it is usually found beside a river, a lake or the sea.

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Yuxa, Äbädä, Basty, Tulpar, Verechelen, Shahmaran, Zahhak, Simurgh, Div, Zmey Gorynych, Basilisk, Cockatrice, Wyvern, Lindworm, Dragon