God of Thunder and War
Perun was the god of thunder, lightning and war, head of the pantheon of Kievan Rus. The Primary Chronicle records that in 980 Prince Vladimir set up idols on a hill outside his palace in Kyiv, Perun standing first among them, carved of wood with a silver head and a moustache of gold. The oak was sacred to him, and his weapons were the axe and the arrow: peasants across Eastern Europe long called the bullet-shaped belemnite fossils turned up by the plough "Perun's arrows," the residue of lightning strikes.
When Rus concluded treaties with Byzantium in 907 and 971, the pagan party swore on its weapons by Perun and by Volos, god of cattle. After his baptism in 988 Vladimir had the idol tied to a horse's tail, beaten with staves by twelve men and thrown into the Dnieper, with men posted along the bank to push it off the shallows until it had passed the rapids. The sanctuary of Peryn outside Novgorod was destroyed in the same years. Already in the sixth century Procopius had noted that the Slavs held the maker of lightning to be lord of all things and sacrificed cattle to him.
Under Christianity most of Perun's functions passed to the prophet Elijah, whose fiery chariot was said to rumble across the sky in a storm. His name is cognate with that of the Lithuanian thunder god Perkunas, which allows scholars to trace the figure back to a common Indo-European stratum.
