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Next up we have a far more wicked creature: the Aspid, a winged draconic monster with a bird's head. It lives high up in the mountains, but periodically raids the villages, kills the people with its highly toxic breath and steals the livestock. There's a very good reason why it lives so high up: it can never land on soil, its mere touch causes it pain. Instead, it lands only on bare rocks.

This doesn't sound too much worse than your regular dragon until you learn that aspids are completely invulnerable to physical damage. Weapons just do nothing to them. The only substance that can hurt them is fire, but setting a flying dragon on fire is exactly as difficult as it sounds. Thankfully, it has a very exploitable weakness: its very delicate and sensitive hearing. Loud sounds irritate aspids, and trumpeting in particular sends it into a berserker rage. Heroes use trumpets to lure aspids into their traps, and then restrain them and burn them to death, as depicted in this illustration.

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Now we come to the most ubiquitous evil spirit of the Slavic folklore - the Chort. Christianity co-opted them into its own terminology as low-ranking demons, but chorts are older than Christianity. They're small humanoid creatures covered in wiry, black bristle with clawed hands, hoofed legs, long tails with a tuft on the end, goat horns and pig snouts instead of faces. Sometimes they even sport bat wings that allow them to fly. Chorts can be found anywhere, but most commonly in swamps, near crossroads and other god-forsaken lonely places.

They live to harm and torment humans, although usually in minor ways: they hardly even kill or maim anyone, it's more fun for them to humiliate people, break up their families or ruin them financially. To this end, they're equipped with very potent shapeshifting, which they use to turn either into small black animals to travel inconspicuously or into humans to trick random strangers. However, their shapeshifting is not perfect: they always retain one significant detail of their original appearance, usually the tail (as it's trivial to hide), but it can also be hooves or horns.

While in their human form, they're fond of seducing wives, having sex with them and fathering illegitimate children. A child born from a chort is bound to have congenital deformities and turn into a vampire. Aside from living creatures, chorts can turn into whirlwinds that knock down fences, ruin the crops and tear the roofs off of houses. To get rid of such a whirlwind, you need to throw a knife into it. If it's a chort in disguise, the whirlwind will bleed and quickly go away.

For all their maliciousness, the chorts are very arrogant and never expect to be tricked themselves, which the heroes are eager to exploit. There are lots of faerie tales where the hero tricks a stupid chort into doing his job for him. To the point where they have turned from genuinely malicious and spooky figures into bumbling and incompetent buffoons in the modern perception.

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I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the Chort's amphibious cousin, the Anchutka. Twice smaller than its better known relative, it's a hybrid between a chort and a duck. Anchutkas usually live in swamps, but can also be encountered on the banks of rivers and underneath the floorboards of saunas. However, their natural habitat is not important, because they can instantly teleport to any person who said their name aloud.

They're just as malicious as chorts, but lack their shapeshifting and cunning, so their tricks are much more crude. If a person inadvertently summoned them, they would usually just gang up on him and beat him. When encountered in a swamp, they would usually try to drag their victim into a quagmire. There's a lesson here about not drinking before going to a swamp. Finally, they like to sneak up on people in saunas and lull them to sleep with their wailing, resulting in heart attacks and death.

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Genuinely interesting, I haven't heard of any of these before! Good thread OP, keep going

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>>84621426
Thanks, I always appreciate pictures of cute elfs. Speaking of cuteness: meet the Arys-pole, one of the cutest Slavic mythological creatures. It's usually depicted either as a lynx with a girl's head or a centauric creature with the lower half of a lynx and the upper half of a lynxgirl, which I find cooler because it has boobs. It's not a natural creature, but rather the result of a curse that a wicked witch put on a young mother to get her husband to marry her own daughter instead. Turned into a monster, the arys-pole is forced to run into the woods.

Every night she sneaks back into her house, drops down her lynx skin, turns back into a girl and breastfeeds her baby. If the father catches her doing that and burns her lynx skin, the curse is lifted and she turns back human forever. The witch and her daughter are either killed or driven away at this point, depending on whether you're reading the original version of the tale or the one adapted for the kids.

Incidentally, regular lynxes also have mythological traits in Slavic folklore. Ancient Slavs didn't believe them to be regular animals, nor to have any males. Instead, it was believed that a she-wolf who brings five litters of cubs turns into a lynx and becomes immortal. Unless you kill it, of course, but lynxes are notoriously difficult to track down and shoot, which has contributed to their mythical status. Lynxes were thought to be the patrons of little babies and guard them from malicious spirits. As you can see, there's a clear connection between the figure of lynx and motherhood.

I like to draw a parallel between the Slavic views on lynxes and the Native American views on jaguars, another species of big cats that was ascribed mythological properties.

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>>84621619
That artwork hardly makes it look cute, looks like something between Thundercats and a weird centaur that some dude in the centaur supremacy thread would draw. The background is interesting though, I guess lynxs would be absolutely hellish to hunt in the old days.

Didn't you make this thread last month

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>>84621880
I never did you faggot, go back to your stale westshit and animu.

>>84621772
>That artwork hardly makes it look cute
Okay, then here's something that is undeniably cute, though in a completely different way. Some of you might have heard of the Leshy, the mighty forest guardian, but I don't think anyone here knows about its tiny cousin, the Auka. It's a child-sized creature with green hair, puffy cheeks and a pot belly. It never sleeps, instead wandering around the woods day in, day out in search for travellers to trick.

Instead of conflicting them personally, aukas use their voice to play cruel tricks. They can perfectly imitate the voice of any animal or human and use this ability to make people believe that there's a stranger nearby, lost in the woods and in need of their help. It leads them further and further away from the path, until they're properly lost themselves. So I guess the lesson here is to never attempt to help anyone in the woods? Sounds kind of dumb, but it might have been a solid advice back when brigands were a real danger.

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Alphabetically, Baba Yaga is next, but she's gotten so stale that I don't want to write about her. Maybe at the very end. For now, I'm going to focus on lesser known creatures, such as the Babay. That's the monster used to scare children into obedience, chiefly into staying in bed at night. He lives in the reeds and is usually described as a monstrous, deformed old man with a hessian bag slung over his shoulder.

He puts the bag to a good use when he wanders the streets at night. Whenever he sees a kid, he stuffs them in a bag like a Bloodborne kidnapper and carries them back into his hut, presumably to eat them, but probably to turn them into one of his own kind. Alternatively, he can hide directly under the bed and kidnap children as soon as they get out of it at night. How does he know which bed to hide under? He wanders the backstreets and listens closely for children's whining. Whenever he finds a house where too much whining comes from, he knows naughty children live there who are likely to disobey their parents.

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Next up we have the Bagan, the spiritual patron of cattle. It was believed that every herd had a bagan attached to it that took care of it, even the small ones kept by the peasants. Usually described as small men with the head and legs of a ram, bagans lived unseen in the roof beams of the stables and fed on what little hay the owners set aside for him. And it was imperative to befriend your bagan, for he held the keys to your cattle's prosperity.

If the bagan was treated with due respect, he could put additional calves into a cow's belly and ease her afterbirth recovery with the healing herbs he gathered. Otherwise, though, he could strangle the newborn calves and the mother cow herself, or just render her infertile to begin with. As with all house spirits, it paid well to treat him well.

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Bagan's best friend is Vazila, who only takes care of horses. Broadly similar to bagans, vazilas are men with horse ears and legs. They live in haystacks, but can generally follow their herd wherever it's taken. To make it easier for him to find his herd, horse drivers stick a tall pole into the ground near a place where they leave their herd for the night and put a horse skull on top of it to serve as a way marker of sorts to the vazila. The spirit can sense the skull of one of its deceased charges and travels to it to protect the horses while the humans sleep or drink.

If treated well and given enough food, vazilas are known to put a magical weed into the horse fodder that makes them stronger, healthier and improves their endurance. However, if he's neglected or disrespected, he can take them for a ride at night and wear them out, making them sleepy and lazy on the next morning. He's not above strangling the foals, either.

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Now you may wonder: what is it that vazila protects the horses from at night? Surely it can't just be wolves and gypsies, I mean, horse thieves? Indeed you're correct, for apart from these mundane dangers, horses also have a supernatural enemy: the Kumelgan. Much like his arch-nemesis Vazila, he's a hybrid between a man and a horse, only in his case, the horse is the dominant part. So dominant it is, in fact, that he's basically a bipedal horse with a human-like posture.

Don't let his horse-like appearance fool you: he despises horses like you wouldn't believe. Thankfully, he's even weaker than a regular human, so horse owners have nothing to fear when vazila is around. Even if vazila is busy elsewhere, horses can usually fight back a kumelgan on their own well enough, so he refrains from hurting them outright. Instead, he mixes poison herbs into their fodder than weaken them, make them ill and kill the foals of pregnant horses. He can also use delicious treats to lead horses into the woods, where they're killed by wild animals.

Also, I think I should mention that I saw an art of Kumelgan drawn as Ludwig the Holy Blade while searching for this image and thought that it was hilarious.

>>84620887
I wasn't going to post because your OP pic is too coomer, but then good info about slavic countries...
>>84621276
I think in Spain they did the same they did to the chort with the trastorlillo, minor spirit than then was co-opted as a demon.

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>>84620887
Nice thread my guy. Going to post some less well-known stuff from my region.
My favourite is probably Chuhaister - a guy cursed to become a large human-shaped creature covered in fur. He wanders forests and hunts nyavkas, women-like monsters who lead young men into forests and are indistiguishable from normal humans apart from the hole in their back through which you can see their insides.
He is friendly to humans and can sometimes approach your campsite to talk or challenge you to a dance off. If you agree, you're in for a hell of a time, as some men are said to have collapsed dead after intense dancing.

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>>84623249
There's no protestant prudery in the Slavlands. And you're Spanish, too. You bring shame upon your motherland with this attitude.

Anyway. Many of the Slavic supernatural creatures lurk in the swamps, including chorts and anchutkas, but they all bow to the great bagnik, known also as the swamp tsar. It's an immense, morbidly obese humanoid creature that lurks at the very bottom of a lifeless quagmire, too lazy to even move a finger. A corporeal manifestation of sloth and complacency, he's too confident that prey will come to him without any effort on his part, and it usually does.

Only frequent bubbles on the surface caused by his farting can warn a traveller of his presence. Laugh all you want, but his fart gas is very toxic: in small doses it causes weakness, nausea and hallucinations, causing people to stumble into the quagmire where bagnik is eagerly waiting for them. In high doses it can kill even horses, let alone men. As you might have guessed, this is how the ancient Slavs explained methane.

>>84623440
There is also Potercha - a spirit of a dead, unbaptised child dressed in white. They live in swamps and lure unaware travellers with small lights they can conjure out of their hand to try and drown them. They stay on earth for seven years in this state, after which they are sent to hell.
It is possibe to save the spirit by tossing it a piece of cloth and giving it a name. After which the child's soul is set free and it becomes an angel

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>>84623440
Believe it or not, I was going to mention Nyavkas/Mavkas later. As far as I understand, Mavkas live in the woods and Nyavkas in the mountains?

Next up, we have the Badzula - a rare malicious spirit that seems to be very active even in our enlightened age. Simply put, she pushes men to drink themselves to death, or, at the very least, to destitution. She looks like a filthy alcoholic hag with blueish skin caused by excessive drinking and saggy tits hanging all the way down to her navel. Her face is equally repulsive, with bulging eyes, potato-shaped nose, fat lips and uncouth hair. She only wears a filthy rag wrapped slovenly around her body.

Like many spirits, she's very good at hiding and can even become invisible for a while, which she uses to make trouble for her victim. Secretively, she ruins any business he may attempt until he gives in to his frustration and begins to drink. Badzula waits patiently for him to start selling off his property to pay for more alcohol, and only leaves him when his descent into debauchery is complete.

Sounds like a drunk's attempt to justify his lack of self-control, really.

>>84623449
If you try to atract coomers, you would get a coomer thread, and there isn't a more brainded thing in the www. And because i'm not a prude it irks me so much, even the smallest shit can derail a thread.
>>84623576
In the Roman tradition they were usually interred under the"canals" for rain water in the houses, did they place them in such places?

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>>84623661
I'm just a man with a healthy libido, and you seem to be a prude of noldorfag's calibre.

Anyway, it's a happy coincidence that now it's time to discuss the main coomer of Slavic folklore - the Balamuten. Like his much better known cousin the Vodianoy, balamuten inhabits all kinds of bodies of fresh water, from rivers and lakes to large ponds. However, he tends to pick places where beautiful girls come to wash clothes, as he spends his entire life chasing human pussy. As soon as he sees a cute girl, he emerges from the water and begins flirting with her boisterously like an overconfident macho man.

His appearance doesn't support his attitude. Balamutens are extremely ugly, with jar-shaped bald heads, tiny rodent eyes that are barely visible, pale and warty skin, short feeble extremities and an enormous belly. Usually he just plays with girls, pinching and slapping them on the ass, but when he's especially infatuated, he may use his magic to charm a girl and take her into his underwater harem. Pretty soon he grows bored of every acquisition and allows her to go back home, and even casts a spell on her as a parting gift that protects her from drowning for life. Even if she's tied up and thrown into water, her body would simply float back up like a log.

He's also known to play tricks on fishermen and tear up their nets, but he never threatens their lives. He's a rather friendly spirit, all things considered. Just an extremely horny one.

>>84622106
The Leshy/Auka stuff reminds me to the Basajaun (literally forest lord) and the Busgoso/treanties, smaller forest protectors. I wonder how many of those critters are common around the indo-european peoples and similars.

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Back to the house spirits for now. Time to discuss the most malicious one of them all - the Bannik, the spirit of a sauna. Why malicious? Because of all the buildings on an ancient Slav's property, the sauna was by far the most dangerous. People still die there from heart attack every now and then, especially if they drink before going there. The reasons are self-explanatory, extreme heat is no joke.

But the ancient Slavs believed that the smell of alcohol was so offensive to banniks that they would strangle to death anyone who reeked of it. In spite of its small size, a bannik is as strong as a horse, so it's useless to wrestle with him. It's better to avoid pissing him off in the first place, and then he might make your experience in a sauna much more enjoyable by regulating the heat and making it more comfortable.

Like most house spirits, bannik is a very hairy knee-tall man with a bushy beard who wears a sauna broom as a hat. For those of you living outside the Slavlands, sauna brooms aren't used to sweep the floor of a sauna. It's used to flog those taking a sauna to make them more receptive to the heat. I've never visited the place, so don't ask me if it really works or it's just a ridiculous old tradition.

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>>84623874
Indo-European legends are very closely related. Not too long ago, I wash shocked to find out that the Slavic faerie tale about Koschei the Deathless exists in Spain as well. I don't remember its name, but the plot is basically the same.

Speaking of copycats, here we have a really obvious one. The White Maiden is a Slavic banshee of sorts, only her modus operandi is far more dramatic. Whereas the original Irish spirit just screamed for her victim, the White Maiden has a far more dramatic entrance. She emerges from the ground in front of her victim, a slender and cute young girl in a bridal gown with a white veil covering her face. Before the victim can react to her appearance, she tears the veil away, showing him the shrivelled, withered face of a dead hag. Sometimes it's implied to be a skull. That, naturally, means that the victim is soon going to die. Once she's delivered the news, she takes the elevator back underground.

As she's never been seen outside of these circumstances, nobody is sure where she originally comes from. Some say, based on her attire, that she's a vengeful ghost of a bride who killed herself instead of being forced to marry a man she hated. Others insist that it's a spirit of nature who just assumes the form of a human bride for the spookiness. It's a mystery.

uh oh schizo thread

>>84624243
Comte Arnau? We have a few like that. Ghosts like the white maiden are also common, specially in castles (some seem to be recent invention to atract tourist tough).

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>>84624266
Uh oh, talking piece of shit.

Thus far all of the creatures I've described have been generic spirits. Not this one: Bash Chelik is a unique character, an evil wizard made of steel. Once upon a time, a dying tsar told his sons to marry their sisters off to the first one who asks for their hand in marriage. They were perplexed, but agreed. On the very next night, a thunderous voice at the gates asked for the youngest princess. The same eventually happened with the middle and eldest princesses as well.

The princes got butthurt that they never even got to meet the suitors and went looking for them. While on his quest, the youngest prince met a beautiful princess and married her. In her castle he found a secret room, where there was a man of steel chained to the wall. He asked for a drink, which our friendly prince was only too happy to give him. Huge mistake: after drinking three chalices of water, the steel man recovered his strength, tore his chains to pieces, sprouted a pair of dragon wings, grabbed the princess and flew away.

While looking for his wife, the young prince accidentally found his sisters and their new husbands. What luck! It turned out that they married the kings of dragons, eagles and falcons respectively. The three kings teamed up with the prince, helped him to track down Bash Chelik and kick his ass. The end.

>>84624266
How is a lore dump schizo?

>>84624491
Thanks anon, still lurking, awesome thread.

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>>84624351
No, that's not it. It was a really obscure faerie tale, one that featured an old wizard who his his soul inside a needle inside an egg inside a duck. Basically Koschei the Deathless in all but the name.

Enough talking about assholes, time to tell you about one of the kindest Slavic mythological creatures - the Belun, a patron of reapers. Perhaps a kindly male counterpart to a much better known Noonwrath, belun looks after the field workers, restoring their strength when they get tired. As they head to their families in the evening, he prevents them from straying off the road home and leads those already lost in the woods back to safety. He looks like a tall, kindly old man with a bushy beard of pure white hanging all the way down to his chest.

However, his most conspicuous feature is his large, meaty nose. Whenever he sees a poor man working hard in the fields, he approaches him and asks him to wipe his nose. If this man manages to overcome his disgust and wipes the old man's nose, golden coins will rain down from it before the belun disappears. If he wipes the nose with his hand, he gets enough gold to carry in his hands, if he uses his hat, enough to fill the hat, and so forth. This legend teaches us, I feel, not to be afraid to get our hands dirty.

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How would you create a slavic fantasy race.

Let's say for warhammer fantasy.

You need a slavic themed army that is not kislev. Not human.

How would you do it?

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I mean... this technically still counts.

Unlike the gorillion of "some evil nasty shit that drowns/kills you via sex/fucks you then drowns you" East Slav stuff, you've got vodník of Czech and Slovak (and Sloven, too, which is weird, but I guess I can see the logic). A dude that lives in your nearby pond, is cool as fuck, smokes pipe and just chilling. If you want, you can go play some cards with him or amuse him with a funny story and he will in turn help you with what you are doing. Mistreat him and forget about ever catching any fish in his pond or if you are a miller - that there will be enough water to power your wheel.

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>>84624810
It's actually really easy, you take the Chuds. Not the American neologism, but the white-eyed Chuds of slavic legend, the local elves. They lived somewhere in the north until the slavs came and brought Christianity there, then they migrated underground and built an artificial sun for themselves in the caves.

>>84624810
Wouldn't.
And I don't mean it to be snide or whatever, I just genuinely don't see a point, reason nor a way to achieve it. What for, given that for the starter, you have East, West and South Slavs. It's like asking "how do you want to make your Asian race" and the first question that pops out - "which part of Asia?"

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>>84624895
You literally have an east Slavic water spirit who flirts with girls and makes them unable to drown described above, and still you had to show your butthurt.

>>84624898
And this is a good example of what I'm talking about - unless you are Rus or a Balt (so not even a Slav), you will never hear about Chuds at all, because they are purely local thing.

>>84624956
Every thing thing is local, get out of here with your insular mindset.

>>84624922
... what butthurt? Are you all-right, anon?

>>84625003
The butthurt that makes you start your messages with uncalled for passive aggression.

>>84624991
I'm not the person who asked for "slavic fantasy race", which by default assumed that there is some bigger, unified whole.

>>84625023
Anon, I will repeat my question: are you all-right? What are you even trying to imply?
>Complains about passive aggression
>Third post in of doing some weird attack about nothing in particular, but not stating what it is about
You sure you aren't just projecting some issues you've got on your own?

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>>84625064
I couldn't be more clear what my attack is about. Anyway, feel free check out of this thread, I can just as easily talk about Czech and Slovak creatures myself without your confrontational attitude.

Case in point - beskud (known in Czech as paškudlo). These are very unique vampires originating from the western Carpathians. As the legend goes, the local barbarians used to bury their chiefs in the caves where salty water was constantly dripping from the stalactites, converting the corpses into salt-encrusted mummies. When they were driven out by the Slavs, a part of them willingly underwent a curse that would bring them back from the dead to punish the invaders. After that, they were ritually murdered and placed into the caves.

Little by little, they began awakening and breaking free of their cocoons of salt. For the first few years, they're forced to stay inside and regain their strength by drinking the blood of bats and the few travellers who enter the caves for one reason or another. Any kind of natural light, even moonlight, immediately turns a fresh beskud into stone.

Finally, when they've reach their peak form, they begin venturing out and attacking the locals. They aren't afraid of the light any more at this point, but their monstrous shapes force them to only move out at night. Unlike the normal vampires, beskuds completely drain their victims of all liquid, leaving them as little more than desiccated mummies.

Killing a beskud is very difficult. Driving a stake through his heart won't do, not least of all because their skin is rock hard due to all the salt and mineral residue it's imbued with. Irjék Kulik recommends incapacitating a beskud, and then using an axe with a silver blade to decapitate it.

>>84624917
It means you can steal from 3 cultures instead of one.

I'm just curios if you manage to fit your slavic mythos into a battle army list.

>>84624898
first time hearing of those guys. They sound like scandinavian elves/dwarves. what makes them different from human that live underground?

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After describing such a terrifying monster, it's only natural to move on to something small and cute. For instance, the Bzionek, a guardian spirit of hedges. It looks like a small humanoid creature and lives under an elderberry bush - a natural choice, since these bushes were widely used in hedge building. In order to avoid incidentally harming or angering a bzionek, it was strictly forbidden to chop elderberry bushes down, dig them out or even use their branches for firewood.

A grateful bzionek could repay the humans in kind. After each burial, the house owners collected some of the water used to wash the corpse and watered the elderberry bushes with it. It was done in order for bzionek to bless the soul of the departed and keep it safe from evil spirits that might want to snatch it on its way to heaven. And when a baby got sick, the parents could put it under an elderberry bush as well in hope that the kindly spirit would heal their child. I wonder how often that worked.

>>84624898
That's some awesome lore

>>84625390
They live underground too? The gentilak/Mourous did the same once christ entered Spain.

>>84625390
>what makes them different from human that live underground?
Not much, really - mostly, they just lack pupils in their eyes, they're like Batman that way. According to different sources, they might be much shorter or much taller than humans, depending on whether the source is friendly or hostile towards them. They're wizards and masterful craftsmen, if the artificial sun wasn't a good enough indication of that. What makes them really similar to elves, though, is that they also kidnap human children to raise as one of their own. They don't leave a changeling, though, not to my knowledge anyway.

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Enough spirits, let's have us some Wild Men. The Berendei are a legendary tribe of pre-Slavic people who retreated into the deepest woods while the Slavs were colonising the fields. Accordingly, they're far more primitive and backwards, but also connected to the mother nature on the spiritual level. They can talk to trees and animals, predict the weather accurately by just looking at the flight of bugs, that kind of thing. Basically, they're spiritual noble savages, only instead of the bluffs of the Midwest, they live in the Slavic forests.

What they're best known for, however, is their ability to turn into brown bears when threatened. This was used to explain the lack of encounters with them - apparently, they just turned into bears and attacked as soon as they saw a threat to their way of life (which, naturally, included all civilised humans). Apparently, their name was stolen from a real tribe assimilated by the ancient Slavs, and later on they were romanticised in XIXth century plays.

I also find it very conspicuous how incredibly similar they are to the Beornings, even though there's no way Tolkien could've known about them.

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We come now to a spirit with one of the most metal names in this whole bestiary, the Blud. The creature itself, however, is not all that metal. It merely leads people astray, which, admittedly, can be a deadly danger in certain circumstances. As a masterful shapeshifter, it can assume any form to trick people into walking off the road. Alternatively, it can create a magical fog so thick that people can't help but get lost.

So how you get rid of a blud? The most effective method is taking all your clothes off, turning them inside out and putting them back on. This is guaranteed to entertain the creature enough for it to leave you alone. (It also works on Leshys). Alternatively, you can pray to Jesus or use the harshest swears that you know, both methods have been reported to scare bluds off. Apparently, stating the date of your birthday and of your christening day also helps for some reason. If all that fails, just wait until the morning: bluds can't stand sunlight.

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All of these creatures have been intelligent, now let's talk about a fantastic animal - the Bovesh. Okay, this one may sound a little funny to a modern reader, but medieval scholars seemed to believe that it was an actual beast. So basically, it's a bull-like creature that lives in India... only it has five legs. If this didn't make you smile, you're a much more intelligent and mature human being than I am.

Now, it has some interesting qualities aside from its bizarre number of extremities. As you'd expect from a five-legged animal, they're extremely fast and very ferocious, too. Their skin is rock hard, with javelins ricocheting off of it like pebbles. And it can also turn its head a full 360 degrees like an owl. Frankly, it sounds like some scribe got perplexed with the cow worship of India and decided to give their bulls all those weird superpowers to justify it.

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So as you should already know, lynxes were believed to protect babies. But what did they protect them from? Amongst other things, from the Boginkas - some of the most evil and disgusting creatures of Slavic folklore. These spirits usually travel in groups of three or twelve, looking for a pregnant woman to beat her up, tear a baby out of her belly and turn it into one of their own. Alternatively, girls who died in childbirth are said to turn into them after death.

They look like gaunt ugly women with saggy breasts, pot bellies and very long, untidy hair. Their legs resemble those of geese, chickens or dogs, their mouths are filled with pig teeth and their noses are long and crooked (hmmm...). Add to that unnaturally long arms with only three clawed fingers and you get a really repulsive monster. That being said, they're adept shapeshifters who can assume the form of beautiful young girls.

Although they much prefer stealing unborn children, they can also give birth regularly. Apparently, there are also male boginkas called bohynars, although it's not clear where they come from or what their function is, aside from having sex with hags for the purpose of procreation. If they can't find a bohynar, they're just as happy to fuck a mind controlled man or a chort (see above). A chort can impregnate one by turning into a whirlwind and flying into her vagina. They almost always give birth to girls who become new boginkas, but if a boy is born, he becomes a vodianoy.

They can also curse people and cattle, cause nightmares and illnesses, lead travellers astray. Complete assholes.

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Not all spirits of unchristened children in Slavic folklore are evil like this one: >>84623576 There are also kind and helpful ones like the Bozatka. In fact, it acts much like a brownie: finds a household to settle down in and helps its owners with the chores in exchange for some food left on the porch.

Those of you who already know a thing or two about Slavic folklore might have noticed that it sounds suspiciously similar to the behaviour of the Domovoi, a much better known household spirit. I cannot help but wonder what the local domovoi thought of a bozatka who came into his house and began competing with him, whether they fought for food or what not. Probably not, though.

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Op are you into Shin Megami Tensei?

I know the demons in it aren't necessarily Slavic, but it might be a fun video game to play if you're knowledgeable of world folklore.

>>84626582
I have played Persona 5 and I disliked it. I generally don't like anime.

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>>84625769
>beastfolk
I'll have to mention one of my GOAT personal favorites from slavic myth
>Psoglav ("Dog-heads")
A chimeric humanoid, most probably begotten by demons. They have a human body, goat or horse-like legs and sometimes tail, sharp teeth of cold iron and a dog's head where a single giant eye glares with malice. Some say they only have one eye, others that they have three, but look only through their third eye while keeping the other two intentionally closed, no doubt in order to utilize some foul power. They practice anthropophagy (they eat people), or even dig out corpses from graves to eat them - and have a behaviour of a vulture to match their apetite. Their realm is a land that exists in eternal darkness (it's not clear whether it is underground or above), devoid of all sunlight, where ground is littered with priceless gem stones and where they live in dungeon like structures and cages.

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>>84626747
here's a few more pics, they apparently come in all sorts, from armor-clad brigands to beggars and feral beasts

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>>84626762

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>>84626784
great as npcs and mobs imo

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>>84626797

>>84626762
>they apparently come in all sorts, from armor-clad brigands to beggars and feral beasts
That's because "psoglav" can mean both the specific creature that you described and any kind of human with a dog head.

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>>84626824
not sure imo, psogs are pretty specific

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>>84626905

I'm off for today, please don't let the thread die while I'm away (but also please don't post too many pictures or I won't be able to post illustrations later)

>>84627091
BUMP

>>84620887
Im running a fantasy slavic folklore inspired game so this id very useful thank you anon

>>84625769
>even though there's no way Tolkien could've known about them.
What makes you say that?

>>84627091
If it does die you can always just do another. These kinda of threads are one of the few good reasons to still go on /tg/

>>84624898
So when they call you chud, they are that? The girl even has the boomer beverage.

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>>84621047
I remember those guys from Heroes of M&M III
They are Slavic?

Anyway from your description it sounds like just a dragon In all cultures there is a mix between a bird and a snake and it is usually translated as dragon.

>>84623614
Yeah, pretty much, different regions - same ideas.

Gonna bump the thread with another local creature - zlydni. They are small evil spirits who inhabit people's houses. Whenever they enter a new household - the family inside will lose all their wealth
through unfortunate accidents and will be unable to get out of poverty. If you try to leave your house and settle in a new one, zlydni will follow you by hiding in your posessions. The only way to remove the curse is to entrap the spirits in a small container - a bottle, chest, etc. and throw them away. If someone else accidentaly releases the spirits, they will enter their house instead, continuing the cycle. Zlydni are also less likely to enter houses of hard-working people.
There's a cartoon about them from my childhood, not english, but it has subtitles: https://youtu.be/y08YBVRC6yQ

Any cute fairy girls?

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>>84621276
it looks like an imp.
I'm not familiar with the historical origin of the western Imp but I would guess it is the same as Chort: it is from greek Pan.
Hooved legs and desire to be malicious.

I'm curious if before Christianity they were also seen as positive creatures.

>>84621619
A witch steals your wife to force you to marry her daughter?
Sounds like that time a prince saved a rabbit from a trap and the rabbit guided him to the Waifu-Tree. Where he must snap a branch to summon a dying dryad, that can only be saved with water.
He fails twice but succeeds with a redhead. He plans to take her back home and make her Queen. Unfortunetly the Prince's cook, a sunburned hag has other plans and kidnaps his tree-wife swapping it with her ugly even more sunburned daughter. When the prince returns the imposter claims she got sunburned (in the visual version of this story the Sun visibly cringes at her comment, signifying he would never stare at her enough for that to happen.)
The Prince is suspicious but he takes her home; back at the castle the hag has somehow convinced the tree spirit to be a kitchen assistant.
Highjinks inssue and somehow it's the dryad that ends up delivering the meal to the Prince, he instantly recognizes her.
For the punishment of trying to cuck his wife the prince mangles the limbs of the hag and her daughter, shoves them into two walnut filled sacks and ties them to two rampaging horses. By the time the horses calm down there's only mush left of the lowborn.
And so the prince and his Waifu have a three day-long wedding and live happily ever after

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>>84624898
For south Slavic, specifically Romanian you could use the Blajin (the Kind, the Pure-hearted). We believed the Earth was flat, but that the other side was occupied as well. Inhabited by short-statured rodent-headed agrarians. That's the Blajin, same as Tolkien's Elves, the Kind are the ideal Christian being quite respectful of God and even those who are brazen and questioning of His teachings still fast the entire year.
As thanks for their sin-less lives humans let their dyed Easter Eggs float downriver to the Other Side, since the stars are strange there and there's no way of knowing when it's Easter Time.
They are one of the few decent folk of the Other World although I suspect them to be related to Căpcăuns, who are sometimes dog-head ogres with many limbs, signs of sin-based mutation. They just do the same thing Zmei do which is kidnap people, but usually they do it to eat them

>>84625328
An ancient Pricolici/Vârcolac. The Christian version were murderers that were resurrected by Devils to hunt the living for nights on end.
Red skinned, utterly hairless and Wolf-headed, naturally they are also far taller and broader than a man

>>84626762
Yeah I think this guys are the basis for the Dog-headed version of the Căpcăun.
More rabid and poorer than a Zmei. A warlord instead of a prince

>>84630234
Ileana Cosanzeana. From cute village girl to Fairy-blooded beauty, as the story demands. The dream girl of all Zmei.
One time got swapped with a hot shape-shifting witch, since Harap-Alb only settled for creating new icons, instead of relaying on old ones

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>>84630234
You've got Zazovka, a Belarusian elf/succubus. Is that cute enough?

>>84631503
Not bad at all

>>84628860
He never attempted to learn any Slavic languages and never showed any interest in Slavic culture. To put this into perspective, he spoke 35 languages fluently, including a few dead ones. He couldn't care less about the Slavs.

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>>84630175
>I remember those guys from Heroes of M&M III
>They are Slavic?
I had to google it. The developers are Slavic, so it's possible. However, it doesn't look like an aspid, it's just a giant snake.
>Anyway from your description it sounds like just a dragon
That's not it, aspids are human-sized and only dangerous because of their toxic breath. Dragons are called zmei, they're much larger, smarter and more majestic.
>pic related: a fire breathing statue of a Slavic dragon

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speaking about cute girls:

Rusalka. pretty well known but still

Are spirits of drowned girls. They appear wearing white clothing, and sometime have greenish hair (effect of growing algae)

As far as I remember they do nothing. Mostly harmless, sometimes they are in service ov Vodyanoi.

>>84630243
It's a daemon, not an imp. Imp is usually translated as Bies.

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>>84631129
Got a much better art for your creature. Them Balkan peoples really love their cynocephali.

>>84626905
He's right, psoglav literally means dog head

Im still found of the idea of making a warhammer FB battle list with slavic monsters.

So far I have seen
Chuds
Chort
Psoglav

I I believe it will be neough.

Chuds will act as the rulesrs being underground Drow masters

The other two will be the foot soldiers.

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>>84621619
>Arys-pole
>>84621772
>That artwork hardly makes it look cute

I'm getting banned for this, but this thread's more worth it than an entire board of generals and coomthreads, so here goes. A more cutesy rendition of the same creature (don't forget to save the pic before it gets purged):

>the Sun visibly cringes at her comment, signifying he would never stare at her enough for that to happen.
god damn

Based anon posting slavic mythology.
I'll just note that due to the massive area covered by slavs as they migrated, a lot of the local populaces (and as such their myths and folklore aswell) got integrated into the slavic myths.
I'm not really sure if there is a viable way to determine what is slavic and what is preslavic in some regions that were populated even prior to the slavic migrations, since a lot of the myths probably got merged, adopted or mixed, but I imagine some way of finding the common/shared mythologies and comparing them to find the standouts might be a way to determine which mythologies draw more upon the pre-slavic lines of thought.

>>84632872
You can always throw in zmyi bogatir (pardon if spelling is wrong), the "heroic" half dragon men, since they were described at times as monstrous humanoids or things with dragon heads, they might fit in well in role of troll/ogre sized monster if we go by rules of WHF.
And you could probably get one of the forest spirits in role of giants if they appear as their largest size.

Also as I suspected, most russian takes on fantasy people are just their shit talking of people whom they were neighbors of, since chuds are just what russian's called estonians and fins...Guessing the beastmen type things described proto-baltic people of the region since the description did seem rather accurate to their ideas, and timing and places do match up.

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>>84630201
Zlydens aren't actually local to Western Ukraine. They're also very popular in Belarus, but they aren't exactly the same. They're small, goblin-like shaggy creatures wearing oversized hats and boots. Instead of living in people's homes, they live in the swamps and only sneak into houses while the master's gone. Once there, they pour sand into his grain, dilute his milk with water, steal the eggs from under chickens, make holes in bread, etc. They don't attack people at random, they usually target those who are negligent and lazy.

They also have wives - Zlydnias. They're somehow even uglier than their husbands, as they don't have tongues, eyes of ears. They carry around pots filled with disgusting stuff, which they put into human food and personal belongings.

>>84625769
I can't find any sources that talk about the Berendei in this context, can you throw a few links our way?

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>>84634009
Euhemerist, please go and take your brainlet take with you. Chuds are a very common myth in Northeastern Europe, widespread not only amongst the Slavs, but also amongst the Sami and Komi peoples. Slavs see them as elves, Komi as their legendary ancestors and heroes, and Sami as their ancient enemies, or, perhaps, orcs. They even based a movie on one of their chud legends: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinder_(1987_film)

Since they seem to interest so many people and so few actually understand them, I will post my summary. They are, in many respects, very similar to the Irish myth of the Tuatha - a previous, more magical generation of people that was displaced by the current inhabitants of the land and relocated underground. The tumuli of ancient peoples are usually pointed out as the exact locations where they descended into the underworld. As these tumuli often contained jewellery and relics, chuds were assumed to have been rich beyond belief. They used to have so much gold that coins were simply scattered on the ground in their towns, left in the dirt because nobody needed them.

As it was correctly pointed out, they made an artificial sun for themselves in the caves, where they now have seasons just like above the ground. Sometimes they leave their underground world, chiefly to kidnap human children and turn them into new chuds, which is also suspiciously similar to the Irish faeries. Apparently, they suffer from a pretty bad case of infertility. Perhaps radiation from their fake sun is to be blamed? Regardless, they're invisible on the surface, and instead of human tracks they leave behind those of birds or little children. Yet I don't believe that the actually have bird legs, they're typically just described as giants or dwarves with pure white eyes.

>>84635194
In English? Don't suppose I can. If you can find a translation, read "The Snow Maiden" by Ostrovski, it's set in the Berendei kingdom.

>>84635221
I am just saying, the term itself was used by russians before to describe people in the territory of Finland, and we know that it's not uncommon for them back then and now to compare their neighbors to monsters or weird mythological things.

>>84635241
Thank you so much anon, this was a really interesting thread.

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>>84631503
Elf/succubus is such a vague description, it begs to be elaborated on. I feel that its closest and best known mythological analogue would not be a succubus, but a Huldra, a Scandinavian elf girl who stalks lonely male travellers in the mountains, ambushes and rapes them. Yes, this is supposed to be a very scary story that is somehow meant to dissuade young Scandinavians from travelling alone. Seriously? Come on...

Back to the topic at hand. Zazovka is a gorgeous young girl who lives in the woods and seduces lonely young hunters and shepherds. For that purpose she doesn't just use her beauty, but also her songs, which are supposed to be hypnotic. Once deep in the woods, she has sex with her victim, and then leaves him. It's unclear whether she steals the life force from him this way, of if she's just very horny.

Regardless, any man who had sex with her is charmed for life. He could never have sex with other women, not even his own wife, and will always dream about Zazovka. Eventually he will leave home and head back into the woods to seek his mistress once again, never to return. Some say that she never shows herself to the same person twice, driving these poor fools to commit suicide.

Though she's drawn with horse legs, I couldn't find a source to support that. However, she's known to turn into a swan in the winter and leave for the warmer countries with the rest of the birds.

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>>84635247
Not the territory of Finland, but the territory of Northern Rus and also wherever migrants from this region settled down. At least try to follow real geography with your brainlet takes.

Anyway, back to galaxy brain takes, and I mean that literally. Meet the Boli-boshka, the spirit of headache. He looks like a sick old man half as tall as a human, but with a head twice the normal size. Actually quite similar to Marvel's Watcher for you zoomers out there, except really old and dressed in patched-up Slavic clothes. The only thing he watches for are random travellers in the woods, whom he stops and asks to help him lift his purse off the ground. He can't do it himself because his head is too large, so if he bent over to lift it, he would just fall.

Helping him is a huge mistake! With dexterity unbefitting of such a frail looking old man he jumps onto the stranger's shoulders, grips him with his legs and tightly wraps a rope around his head. Blindfolded by the rope, the traveller has no choice but to stumble blindly through the woods until his rider gets bored of him and jumps off. But, as you imagine, the joyride leaves him with a debilitating headache.

The lesson here? Don't help old people in the woods, especially if they are disabled! What an asshole myth.

>>84635572
I was following usage of the word, though mind you same people whom live in finland at the time lived in northern rus too, moscow was their city after all.

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Right, so yesterday we have talked about one swamp spirit, the bagnik. But the swamps are too large for just one spirit, so they have another one associated with them - the Bolotnik. Whereas the bagnik is a sarlacc-like stationary creature that lives at the bottom of a quagmire and waits for people to get sucked in, the bolotnik takes a far more proactive approach to mischief. He's usually considered either a younger brother of the bagnik or his "larval stage".

Although he's not as fat as his big bro and has functional legs, he's still morbidly obese in most descriptions. His exact appearance is difficult to surmise, as he's permanently covered in a thick layer of dirt, rotting algae and snails. It's only known that he has no eyes and uses his keen smell-o-vision to take in his surroundings.

Unlike most powerful spirits, bolotniks can't shapeshift. They imitate different voices and sounds just as well as any auka, though. Unsurprisingly, he uses his talent to bait people into a quagmire and drown them there. Even less surprisingly, he's an actual incel. I mean, would you marry something like this? It still leaves the question where more of them come from.

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Next up we have another forest spirit, the Borovik. He's more powerful than an auka, but less so than a leshy, and rules over copses that are, evidently, too small for a full-fledged leshy to take over. Nonetheless, his appearance is quite imposing, almost as if he's overcompensating. He looks like a giant anthropomorphic bear with no tail, which is how you can tell that it's not ordinary bear. Apparently, the bear's unusual size and stature were not enough for the ancient Slavs to tell that this isn't your regular old animal.

Sometimes people summon him, either to return livestock or family members lost in a copse, or to guarantee safety in the future. The summoning method is the most horrible thing mentioned in this thread thus far, worse than ripping infants out of the womb. You need to strangle your cat to attract the borovik with its meowing. Is it worth it? I don't think so.

Like santa has his slave midgets, every borovik has borovichoks (pictured) who help him to run the copse. Those are gnome-sized old men with white beards reaching to the ground and mushroom caps growing out of their heads, reminiscent of the Fungoid Cave Shaman. Curiously, those dudes are actually better known than their master because one of them starred in a popular fantasy movie.

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Back to fantastic animals, by which I mean roosters. In many mythologies they are connected to the sun and the morning, but I don't know of any other tradition that separates all roosters into two tribes. The red tribe is associated with the sun, fire and light, as all roosters are elsewhere. In fact, "red rooster" is a common euphemism for a house fire. However, the black tribe is instead associated with water, cold and the underworld. Black roosters are almost always sacrificed to summon evil spirits. They're also drowned in rivers to appease the vodianoy because of their symbolic connection with water. It must have sucked to be a black rooster back in the day.

Also, all roosters are ruled by tsar Budimir, the greatest of their kind, who is really more like a phoenix than an ordinary rooster. His name literally means "Wake the world up", which I find quite poetic.

>>84626747
>>Psoglav ("Dog-heads")
>A chimeric humanoid, most probably begotten by demons.
Its called "cynocephalus", and there is an actual dog-headed saint (Saint Christopher) in Eastern Christianity.

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While we're on the topic of cats, meet the infamous Bayun Cat. Very similar to the Celtic cat-sith in its appearance and functions, this creature is a horse-sized black cat with teeth and claws of steel that can tear a helmet apart like a knitted cat toy. Its own black fur is tough as wires, it only can be sliced through with a sword. But its most potent weapons are not its claws, but his meowing, with which it can put any unprotected warrior to sleep and then slowly tear him apart at his leisure. Using ear plugs are recommended when dealing with this kitty. That being said, he's as intelligent as a human, can talk and be reasoned with.

Bayun is uncannily similar to another folklore creature - Vargin, the tsar of all cats. The similarity is so strong that I wonder whether they might be one and the same. Although Vargin can't put people to sleep as far as I know, he has a much more fearsome ability instead: he can summon a swarm of wasps into a person's skull. Just thinking about it makes me cringe.

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Yesterday you have learned about the Babay, an ugly spirit who kidnaps children for wandering at night. He's got a far better known cousin whose name is used by the parents to scare their kids into obedience. I'm talking about the Buka. It's a small monstrous creature with long, shaggy fur, a wide sharp-toothed mouth and a lolling tongue. He lives for scaring and tormenting the children, and may even eat the most mischievous ones. Bukas take residence in abandoned houses and will punish any curious kids who disturb their peace there.

The attentive and well-learned amongst you might have noticed that buka's name resembles that of the Irish pooka or the English puck (in Cornwall they're even called bucca). Indeed, even his appearance of a shaggy faerie is reminiscent of a pooka, yet their functions are vastly different. Whereas the pooka is a mischievous spirit of the wilderness, the buka is used to scare children. Here we see the Indo-European mythology at work, starting with the same basic concepts, but then developing them differently.

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>>84636220
Not sure what you're getting at, Psoglavs from slavic myth have literally nothing to do with the legend about Saint Christopher. Just because they use a similar theme, it doesn't mean they share in context, meaning, origin or explanation behind it, their likeness is superficial at best.

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At last, we have a truly despicable creature - the Verlioka. His name means "bulging eyes", yet he only has one eye and one leg, like a sciapod of Greek legends. They wear a boot made of wood and their bodies are covered in short, stubby fur. Utter assholes in every way, they interfere in people's business wherever they go, steal their food and bully them just for fun.

Eventually, enough humans, animals and sometimes even sentient objects get fed up with his shit, join up and make a pact against him. They find verlioka's house and ambush him inside. What happens next changes from one version of the story to the next, but it usually ends in the giant's humiliating exile or death. My favourite variant of the tale involves him getting stabbed in the ass, getting his ass fried and pinched by a crawfish, after which he runs out of his house and steps into a sentient piece of shit (probably this anon: >>84624266). Slavic myths are fun.

And I'm gone for the day, please don't let the thread die while I'm away.

good thread

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Apart from Psogs, this one is also one of my favorites
>"Zhar-ptitsa" (Firebird)
>a magical and prophetic glowing or burning bird from a faraway land which is both a blessing and a harbinger of doom to its captor.
>a large bird with majestic plumage that glows brightly emitting red, orange, and yellow light, like a bonfire that is just past the turbulent flame. The feathers do not cease glowing if removed, and one feather can light a large room if not concealed. In later iconography, the form of the Firebird is usually that of a smallish fire-colored falcon, complete with a crest on its head and tail feathers with glowing "eyes". It is beautiful but dangerous, showing no sign of friendliness.
>A typical role of the Firebird in fairy tales is as an object of a difficult quest. The quest is usually initiated by finding a lost tail feather, at which point the hero sets out to find and capture the live bird, sometimes of his own accord, but usually on the bidding of a father or king. The Firebird is a marvel, highly coveted, but the hero, initially charmed by the wonder of the feather, eventually blames it for his troubles.
I'm tempted to create a race of birdmen inspired by this premise

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Anon will eventually reach Baba Yaga so I might as well let you in on a little slavic Secret: we all have our own versions of her. I think the Romanian Samca is the most annoying to get rid of.
With neddle-like claws, a tongue of fire, skin dry like stone and tits as long and saggy as her hair Samca the 19th named is ugly, real ugly.
So in order to get close to kids during daytime to curse and steal them she shape-shifts into many sick-looking animals, like a hairless berserking cat or a scary hog.
The curse called The Malicious Children is a more potent version of Yellow Fever, it takes effect immediately and is hard to cure.
It is preferable to try and ward her away by chanting all her names and describing how your torch and pitchfork will harm her.
Alternatively you can carve a rune into an elder's house and Samca will visit them instead to sit on their chest and stare at them all night long.
Famous in the modern day for being the first adventure Harap-Alb Ștefan experiences after finishing his original myth.
(side-note, do you wanna know s9me of her names? cause there's barely any constancy with them, to make the spell harder to remember)

also I had a really cool pic where she's liking someone's freshly removed heart while chanting her own name but I can't find it anymore

>>84638220
It's just a phoenix bro

>>84638357
Don't think so, he seems intent on posting obscure shit that people wouldn't know about otherwise.

>>84636606
They have everything to do with cynocephali. That's a greek myth and these myths all spread around Greece. Use your brain.

>"My country's folklore has X and they do Y"
>"No, let me tell about your country's REAL folklore"
Is this an American thing or a Western European thing?

>>84636113
>Now the Black Cock craws
>in the Dark Yard's Nook
>and all the Portals open up
>— I must away.

>Now the White Cock craws
>in the High Hall
>— All living dead yearn for the earth
>— I must away.

>Now the Red Cock craws
>on the Heathen Ground
>— All living dead yearn for the earth
>— I must go along with.`

http://neonatalpaleonate.blogspot.com/2015/12/aage-and-else-only-real-translation-of.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YMWdTfAOlU

I appreciate the loredump, anon, but what sources did you scour for all of these creatures?
I've never heard about most of them, and I've been trying to scour various websites for creatures of Slavic folklore for months.

>>84638850
Phoenix is one of a kind and very powerful and sacred.
The firebird is the pride of The Other World next to the solid golden forests and castles of the Zmei. It is simply a quirk of the Other World, a bird that lights stuff on fire. A coveted thing in any king's court

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This is cool.
Now how owuld you adapt those critters to your game?

Most of them were developed to interact with farmers not adventures.

WHat does adventurers care about a horse protecting spirits?

Give me one shot summary with slavic beasts from here.

>>84643718
>Most of them were developed to interact with farmers not adventures.
Do you realise that the same goes for folkloric elfs and goblins?
>WHat does adventurers care about a horse protecting spirits?
He has a horse. Duh. Or he was hired to steal a horse.Or to protect one. What kind of GM are you?

>>84643718
Not all games are based around murder hobos, only the majority. They also can be used as adventure seeds. Perhaps they have to investigate WHY the horse protector turned into a horse molester (not in the sexual sense, but making they hair matted or full of knots, leting them free etc).

>>84624491
A steel wizard with dragon wings is metal as fuck. Hell even his name is metal.

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>>84639792
But that doesn't mean anything substantial, dog-headed people of greek myth, slavic myth and christian myth are entirely different. They have only a single point of connection, namely the trait of cynocephaly, but it's just a very broad category and weak connection at best. The myth behind the various kinds of dog-headed people is very different and even the traits of their dog-heads are different. It's like saying "Egyptians have Anubis and Christians have Saint Christopher, they both have dog-heads so they're one and the same in every regard". Not to mention that convergent evolution of similar ideas among different culture groups is also a thing. Just because World of Warcraft has elves and poetic edda has elves, that doesn't mean that "elf" means and is the same in both of these cases. It's just a word with tenatively similar meaning that's entirely and only defined by the surrounding context it's being used in.

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>>84643810
Yup, and his name "Bash Chelik" or "Baš Čelik" literally translates to something like "(of) True Steel" or "(of) Real Steel".

>>84630884
Sounds exactly like Love for three oranges

>>84624491
This is almost exactly the same as one of the stories about Koschei the Deathless. Only the prince tries three times to rescue his waifu from him, the first two times Koschei catches him, but lets him go in gratitude for freeing him. After the third attempt he loses patience and chops the prince to pieces. That's when the bird kings rescue him by putting his pieces together, sprinkling them with the water of death to make them grow back together and with the water of life to resurrect him.

They advice him to look for a horse that's fast enough to outrun Koschei. The prince learns that Koschei bought his horse from Baba Yaga, who lives beyond a river of fire. On his way to Baba Yaga the prince gets hungry and tries to eat a chicken, a lion cub and some honey on three different occasions, but when the hen, the lioness and the bee queen respectively tell him to leave them alone, he complies.

So he arrives at Baba Yaga's, who has her famous fence made of poles topped with human skulls on fire, except for one pole that's still empty. Baba Yaga receives him warmly and tells him that she could give him one of her horses, but only if he manages to herd them for three days without losing a single one, or else his skull would decorate the final pole.

On the very first day the horses all run away and the prince fails to catch them because they're faster than the wind. Resigned to his fate, he goes to bed and finds the horses back in the stables when he wakes up. The alpha horse explains to him that a flock of angry birds drove them back into the stables. The same scenario repeats for the next two days, only the horses are brought back by the bees and the lions, respectively.

Baba Yaga has no choice now but to give her best horse to the prince. He uses it to kidnap his waifu, but Koschei catches up with him again. But this time, the prince's new horse bashes Koschei's head in with his hoof, and the prince rides happily home with his waifu.

>>84624022
Sounds similar to saunatonttu, of Finnish (and probably also swedish) tradition. Although saunatonttu is usually described as benevolent, unless you piss him off. We also use vihta (a bundle made from birch branches and leaves) in sauna, apparently similar to your saunabroom. I don't think it makes you more sensitive to the heat, but it does mean the air around you is moving (thus increasing the perceived heat) as well as adding a pleasant birch smell.

>>84620887
Thank you for sharing all this, OP!

>>84620887
Doesn't Slavic mythology have a bunch of creatures that tickle people to death? I think one is a gnome prankster or something with its shoes on the wrong foot and the other one is like a satyr with one horn. Do you have anything on those two by chance?

>>84647004
Leshy's are known to tickle poachers to death, and they're indeed sometimes described as having mismatched feet or being satyr-like in appearance. So you're talking about a leshy.

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>>84638220
The firebird is a fairy tale version of rarog, the spirit of fire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rar%C3%B3g
Some people believe that the trident on Ukraine's CoA is a stylised swooping rarog.

>>84642695
If it's English sources you need, you're in for a big disappointment. I don't use any. English sources are just awful for Slavic mythology, which is why I made this thread. If you're still interested, name what creature piqued your interest and I will post sources.

Meanwhile, we continue with a creature that really doesn't need an introduction, with a famous eponymous short story based on its legend as well as several movies. Meet Vii - the lord of all trolls. That's what Gogol named him, but he's really more important than that. He's the ruler of all the spirits and mythological monsters, of every creature mentioned in this thread thus far.

Viis are usually depicted as hulking, troll-like old men with eyebrows as huge and heavy as elephant ears. So heavy are they, in fact, that he can't lift them himself. Instead, he's attended by a couple of chort pages with pitchforks who use their tools to lift their boss's eyebrows. It's not a good idea to be near him when that happens: his gaze is probably the most devastating one know to mythology, not only does it instantly kill people, but also turns entire villages to cinders. He's even been reported to destroy entire armies by just looking at them. Sounds a bit like Balar the Evil Eye, doesn't he? Only he's got both eyes, thus, he's twice more dangerous.

But he's not just a siege weapon of the spirits, he's also their lord. It's him who kills the nature in time for the winter, and it's him who sends nightmares and ghosts to torment people. He's also apparently a judge of the dead, which makes me think that he might've been a less malicious figure before Christianity came and demonised every mythological creature.

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>>84647804
Forgot the art

>>84647804
Not that anon, but do you have any sources for the leshy mentioned by >>84647100?

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>>84647141
Speaking of fantastic birds, here's one that's far worse known than the Rarog - the Vitar. That's not to say that it's any less cool. It was a large, falcon like bird of prey whose feathers were so sharp that they could cut through bone, metal or even rock as if they were butter. Every feather was like a small dagger, and by flying through a wood it could cut down trees with its wings.

Even a single feather from this bird would be a formidable weapon in the arms of an experienced warrior, but getting one was more trouble than it's worth. As you might imagine, vitars weren't particularly keen on parting with their feathers. Any would-be hero who went to pluck the sword bird was far more likely to lose his head or appendages instead. Only by climbing the tallest mountain at the edge of the world and finding a spot where vitars moult could one obtain its feather.

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>>84647927
Yes. Have fun tracking it down.

>>84647997
Can you please give me the author's name and the book's title in Cyrillic? That would make searching for it a lot easier.

>>84647997
>>84648091
Actually, nevermind. I got the title through a reverse image search.

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Okay, now it's time for a big one. Not as big as Baba Yaga or Koschei the Deathless, but easily as big as Leshy or Domovoi. I'm talking about the Vodyanoi - the spirit of bodies of fresh water. Every single one from a small village pond to the great rivers of Eastern Europe has a vodyanoi of its own looking after it. The bigger and more important the body of water is, the more powerful is its ruler.

He's usually depicted as corpulent, sometimes even obese man with a fish tail, scaly skin, webbed fingers, fish eyes and a massive green beard made of algae. Sometimes he's depicted riding a giant catfish. His favourite pastime is smoking, and he can often be found on the night of the full moon smoking a pipe on the river bank. Like all spirits of his rank, he can shapeshift into a regular surface human, but his shapeshifting is imperfect. There's always water dripping from his left hand, which is how you can tell that the fat stranger you've met is actually a vodyanoi in disguise.

You can also tell him by the fact that he's always dressed in black, his favourite colour. He keeps a herd of black aquatic cows on the bottom of his river, and owners of water mills traditionally keep black cats to honour their spiritual patron. Black chicken is his sacred animal, and they are sacrificed to him every season to keep him in his good spirits.

Typically benevolent when he's treated with respect, he's still not above tricking people for fun or even blackmailing them. He usually waits for a rich merchant, a tsar or some other important person to drink directly from his river, and then grabs him by the collar and threatens to drown him. In return, he asks for that person's youngest son to raise as a hostage in his underwater palace.

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The Slavic werewolf is called Volkolak, and he's usually friendlier than its Western cousin, sometimes even a tragic figure. Most people turn into one not because they were bitten, but because they made the devil mad. So he turns them into werewolves, doomed to be always on the run, hunted ruthlessly by their former kinsmen. Sometimes innocent children are born as volkolaks as a punishment for the sins of their parents, especially those conceived on Easter (as it's forbidden to have sex on that day).

The only guaranteed way for a volkolak to survive is to come back to his family. If his family members truly loved him, they will recognise him, hide him from the hunters and feed him. It's also possible to lift the curse entirely, but the specifics differ from one story to another. Sometimes it's enough to lead him through a horse yoke, sometimes he needs to make three consecutive backflips, and sometimes the wolf hide can be pulled off of him with a hook.

Another way to become a volkolak is through a magic ritual. Evil wizards typically use it to turn into wolves and attack people with impunity. If the ritual circle used by the wizard is disturbed while he's in his wolf form, or if this retard somehow forgets the words of his transformation spell, he's going to be stuck as a wolfman forever.

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The next creature on our list is Volokita, a malicious fantastic animal. Looking at this picture, you're likely to think that it's just a brutish beast, a bull with a fish tale. Nope! This is one of the horniest creatures in this thread, and he hits exclusively on human females. Whenever a cute girl's husband leaves home for a long time, for instance, to travel to the local fair, a volokita turns into him, goes into his house and tells his wife that he had to return. This is, of course, merely a pretext to have sex with her. Now, he can change his appearance perfectly, but he can't change his character, and his obsessive, horny personality is enough to be a red flag to most women. If she sees that her husband is acting so strangely and doesn't hit him on the head with a frying pan, it's her own fault for being dumb.

Sometimes, mostly in poetic contexts, his name is synonymous with that of Don Juan - a thirsty nymphomaniac who hits on every woman he meets. That's a somewhat rare usage, though. Generally, his name means bureaucracy, of the red tape type. How it came to mean that, I really don't understand. Maybe some spirits have changed their modus operandi since ancient times.

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And now let's talk about another fantasy race. If the chuds discussed above were similar to elves, then the Divii Liudi here are more like nasty, ugly dwarves. Although in terms of appearance they're more like "halflings" in the truest sense, in that each one of them is literally one half of a human. Every body part that normal people have a pair of, they only have a single one of - one leg, one arm, one eye, one ear, and so on. Because of this, they can only walk around while bent over, using their arm and leg as legs.

They live in the mountains on the edge of the world. As all of them are males, they can't reproduce sexually (only having one testicle doesn't help, either). So instead when one of them gets broken, they forge a new one from iron. They're the greatest blacksmiths in the world, but the smoke of their great smithies is extremely toxic to all creatures of flesh and blood. It's the source of the plague, pox and fevers, and whenever the wind carries it to the lands of the humans, great epidemics break out.

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One thing the Slavic mythology has a ton of is vampires. Hell, the original vampires come from the Slavic mythology, as well as the word "vampir" itself. That being said, there are many, many more varieties than just the vampir, beskud and pricolici discussed above. Take the Wurdalac. As you might guess from just the look of its name, it was originally a corruption of volkolak, the slavic werewolf, yet it was eventually spun into its own creature that is both a vampire and a werewolf. Finally we have a proper scientific name for whatever the fuck Samuel Haight was.

Now, lycanthropy isn't the only thing that differentiates a wurdalak from a basic bitch vampir. Apparently, he can only drink the blood of those who are related to him, and he won't rest until his entire bloodline has been turned undead. Extinctions of entire villages have been attributed to wurdalaks, as we all know that inbreeding wasn't exactly unheard of in ye olde times.

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I hate it when people stereotype Slavic languages as a huge mess of consonants, as it's generally not true. However, when it's true, it makes for one hell of a tongue twister. Try pronouncing "Vstrechnik" - this name might look intimidating, but it just means "greeter". But the creature itself is far more malicious than its name would imply.

It's a malicious air spirit who assumes the shape of a gust of wind or a hurricane, flies up and down the country roads looking for lonesome travellers, attacks them and rips their soul from the body. Unlike a regular wind, he can be told apart from his surroundings - he looks like a stretch of compressed air, or, perhaps, like a ground contrail. It's been reported that he only attacks drunks, so it's better not to drink before a long hike. And it's generally a bad idea to travel alone after dark, whether you're sober or not.

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After a bunch of vampires and werewolves, it's only natural to talk about a ghost. The one pictured here is called Vytianka, known also as the Wailing Bone. It's exactly what the name suggests - a skeleton that wails after every sundown, trying to attract strangers to its location for them to bury it properly. Usually it just scares people, but its high-pitched wails can also break windows and cause headaches. A vytianka doesn't stop wailing until at least a single bone of its remains unburied.

Although the ghost itself inhabits a skeleton, it has a separate humanoid form that it can use to attract people and point out the location of its bones. In this form, they look like silvery translucent silhouettes with laurel wreaths of gold on their heads, blood trickling down slowly from under the wreaths and white dove wings growing out of their temples, making them look a bit like a gothic horror Asterix.

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This thread began with the picture of an alkonost, but it's not the sole human-headed bird in the Slavic folklore. There are two more of them, including the Gamayun. Most of the things you read about alkonosts are also true for gamayuns, yet they're distinct. While both serve as the heralds of the gods, their functions are very different.

Alkonost is a bearer of good news, or just regular messages. Gamayun, on the other hand, hardly ever flies down to the human realms, and that's for the better, because the news it bears are always tragic. Sometimes even apocalyptic - according to a legend, a gamayun tried to warn people about the mongol invasion. Now, the news it's ordered to bear may be bad, but the bird itself is kind and compassionate. So it often cries as it delivers the messages, and its songs are sad and sorrowful.

That's all for today, please keep the thread alive until tomorrow.

>>84620887
I approve of your work sir, carry on.

>>84649600
Sleep well slav bro.

>>84649600
you're doing the lords work. good night

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>>84647960
i once commissioned a sword made out of feather on /tg/ very happy with the artist result.

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Speaking of messengers and heralds lets talk the Devil's finest. And one of Christianity and especially Germany's greatest demonization of our mythology: the Solomonar.
Solomonarii originally referred to the Thracian and Dacian wisemen that returned from their trips to Egypt where they studied under their greatest scholars, including Solomon himself. They knew nature magic, specifically control over the weather and could talk to spirits.
Than the monks rewrote them.
The students of Scholomance, the Devil's finest, red haired and heralds of storms. That's what became of the Solomonari. They also ride balaurs (the romanian word for devilish/serpentine dragon) now. It's their graduation gift for surviving their 7 year-long academy.
Scholomance is somewhere in Transylvania, since that's close enough to Germany and Austria for our dragon-riders to reach them.

just making sure this thread doesn't die

>>84643476
This is not the first time you mention this Other World. Can you elaborate a bit on it?

>>84621619
>which I find cooler because it has boobs
Ah, I see that you're a man of culture as well.

>>84633186
generally, artistically justifiable booba is OK

>>84645277
might be one of the best ever, fantastic thread

>>84648374
>œThose chasing clouds are called by peasants werewolves (vlkodlaci); when lunar or solar eclipse occurs, they say: ‘The werewolves ate moon or sun’. But all this are myths and lies.Œ

https://web.archive.org/web/20200312220138/http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0584-9888/2013/0584-98881302041L.pdf

>>84654041
The Other Side is the birthplace and domain of the fantastic.
It can be accessed through massive holed in the ground or by traveling till the edge of the world, usually by flying. Here lives the Firebird, the Zmei, the Căpcăun, in their castles and golden forests, here the 7 devils wait for bored maidens to dance with them all night long on their knife-like floors.
Here lives the giant Roc-like vultures who speak the human tongue and can graft and knit flesh together with their saliva.
Here most lakes are the lair of Balaurs with their 3-7-12 heads.
funny enough the one thing that isn't exclusively from the Other Side is golden apple trees, but such kingdoms usually live on the border and usually get raided by greddy zmei, as such apples are very potent anti-aging products

>>84620887
Just dropping in to say what a cool thread this is. You're doing great work, OP.

>>84636011
>Curiously, those dudes are actually better known than their master because one of them starred in a popular fantasy movie.
Yes! "Father Mushroom" (in the English dub) in Morozko, a 1964 adaptation of the folktale about him where to reach feature-length they had to give the good daughter Ivan the Fool as a love interest and have him meet Baba Yaga.

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whats up with slavic dragons? they all seem to have extra heads and human-like characteristics, they can talk and try to bang human women and some of them, like this dude, are half human? read yesterday that there was also a snake tsar with hot half-human/half-snake daughters, is he a dragon or a zmey as well?

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snake tsar

http://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2021/11/valery-slauk-belarusian-1947.html

some of this guy's art has been posted, this was a cool collection
shame theres not much english info on slavic folklore, good thread

We need more threads like this on /tg/

>>84655585
Some are zmyi some are "halfbreeds" result of banging human women so it's half human half dragon thing.
As for snake tsar might be a few things I think? One is just fairy tale of tragic nature about lady whom found snake by the sea, saved it, it brought her home and became this king of snakes, they married, had kids, but when she left to visit her relatives they murdered the king and gave poor lady trauma so bad she and her kids became trees

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>>84655585
Zmei means snake. I believe it is the same as scandinavian wyrm, worm, snake.

I would attribute the multiheads to the same origin as hydra. In the wild sometime you meat balls of snake People believed it was one single creature (I honestly met a 5 years old brazilian that tried to convince him that in his region multiheaded snakes were a norm).

Why they speak? Dunno. Slavic stroies like talking animals.

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>>84655604
A huge amount of cute feet in his pictures. Did Slavic girls traditionally go barefoot?

>>84643847
>dog-headed people of greek myth, slavic myth and christian myth are entirely different
The dog-headed people of Greek and Christian legends are one and the same. Constantinople was the birthplace of Christianity and the capital of Greece at the time. And the only Slavs who have legends about them also live next to Greece. Really gets the noggin jogging.

>>84655594
He's so handsome.

>>84648374
>If the ritual circle used by the wizard is disturbed while he's in his wolf form, or if this retard somehow forgets the words of his transformation spell, he's going to be stuck as a wolfman forever.
It's not usually a circle, it's a magic dagger or an axe stuck into a tree stump. The wizard needs to make three somersaults over it to turn into a wolf, and three somersaults backwards to turn back. If the dagger is stolen, tough luck.

>>84656861
So don't do it in russia, got it, do it somewhere less stuff full of thieving buggers.

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>>84656975
That would leave nearly every Slavic country unavailable.

>>84657095
Ya, but they are probably worst example, in other countries you got a chance to come back and still have ways to turn back.

>>84657130
Poland? I agree. Poor folks in Brandenburg have to shackle their tires now.

>>84651291
This sounds sick as fuck. It's pretty lame that WoW totally copied the name for a lacklustre school of necromancers in their game.

Dragon riding wizards is badass.

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>>84656975
>>84657095
If you don't fuck off from based OP's thread with your polshit, I will personally find you and punch you in the face until it turns into a mush.

>>84657378
I should note that russian things in slavic myth are often stolen from neighboring regions as those things never existed in russia at times if you look into how things were.
So this comment still holds up true.

>>84657347
The stupidest thing is that it's the OG school of wizards in the European folklore, and Rowling even wrote about Romania, but she never mentioned it anywhere, and the Romanian dragon presented in her book wasn't even a balaur. What a huge hack.

>>84657389
No one gives a shit. Fuck off.

>>84657389
mythologies don't have borders.

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Slavic century soon.

>>84657513
Same reason some old mythologies are gone because christians deleted them from existence, same thing was done by moscowia afterwards.
It's context of the mythology, same as history is good to know and explains it well.

>>84620887
>bird gets boobs but feathers cover the nipples
GAY
Even if she shaves them before you get down her titties still gon have the texture of a plucked chicken
Smh

>>84655818
love that type of dragon

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>>84655585
Zmei are not dragons, Balaurs are dragons, Zmei are to dragons what elves are to humans. They are noble and intelligent. Balaurs like the one the Devil shifts into, that Saint Gheorghe kills, are but giant snakes that stood in a pond too big and magical for them to handle.
There's no such thing as a poor Zmei, from a human perspective. Entire forests of bronze/silver/gold and matching palaces belong to them. But don't confuse a South Slavic Zmei with the likes of Gorynich, those guys are forces of nature personified, like Fafnir they aren't mere beasts, but you can't reason with them.
Our Zmei are different, blessed by the lucky numbers (3,7,12 and 5 if they are unlucky) they dress in armor and wield maces the size of humans. But alas, they have no luck in their love life, for Bulgaria exists.
Since it's inception, no Zmei male could marry a female Zmei, for all the females crave that Bulgarian Royalty cock (maybe they like being poor and having mortal husbands). So they have no choice but to settle for Iele-blooded or fully human women. They have no choice either, their moms really want grandchildren.
Crones of the Forests, witches one and all, strangely described as scale-less more often than not. They wish for all of their many children (as many as there are available princesses and princes to save them) to have wives and die for them.
Zmei represent a lot of things as an origin, they are the enemy from the Other Side, rich invaders with unending forces and our Charming Folk, our Heroes, are those that oppose these foreign kidnapers.

>>84657390
we got stereotypical vampires and Germanic dragons. Instead of Strogoi and Balaurs. It sucks I know, but thankfully the two books I actually like from Harry Potter (1st,2nd,6th) don't interact with those facts, so I don't lose sleep over it

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Now, of course, you may be wondering, 'Surly not all those Bulgarians will say yes, right?'
Oh sure you can say no (and die) but don't worry, even if they all said yes there's plenty of single little dragon-maidens left.
Also it's a maybe on me posting the other lewd pics from the Book

>>84659625
>two books I actually like from Harry Potter (1st,2nd,6th)
Ummm

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>>84657378
Please do it by all means, anon. I'm especially mad because their flamewar brings the thread to a close, and it doesn't look like I'm going to be able to post everything I set out to.

You know what Slavic mythological creature poltards remind me of? Eratniks. These are undead wizards, but not quite as powerful or sophisticated as the liches of modern fantasy - think of them as "lesser liches" who relate to their powerful cousins like ghouls relate to vampires. Unlike Koschei, who deliberately became undead by hiding his soul in a phylactery, they didn't chose their existence. In life they were malicious sorcerers and witches who attempted to repent and come clean before death, but their apology wasn't accepted by the judge of the dead, so they had to return to their lifeless bodies. Now they are forced to ambush lonely travellers on the crossroads, strangle them to death and drink their blood. Should two eratniks somehow meet, they would fight to the death, for they hate each other even more than they hate humans.

They haven't lost their gift for magic after death, but their spells are fairly mundane, nothing extraordinary. They can turn into wolves or bears to improve their combat capabilities, curse people directly or by sending cursed winds into a village, or take to the sky. Female eratniks use their levitation to sneak into houses through the chimney, steal infants and eat them.

One thing that sets them apart from the liches of Western fantasy is their inability to rot. Their bodies shrivel and desiccate like mummies, yet decomposition can never affect them as a part of their curse. Furthermore, they undergo some curious mutations. They have eyes of copper, sharp claws of iron and wolf teeth of iron as well. These fangs can bite through any metal. Some legends describe their ability to run faster than a horse, though others, curiously, say that they can't walk at all and have to hop around. Really reminiscent of the Chinese jiangshi, isn't it?

>>84659838
darn. Well to be honest, that's a Freudian Slip, I prefer the 6th movie over the book

>>84659894
Romanian Undead are all a little Lichy. Moroi, the most basic undead (depending on the legend, either dead unbaptized babies or poorly buried corpses) keep growing after death and don't lose their might no matter how dry and saggy they get. They feed on blood (can sense it too) and their touch is like ice, it paralyzes. Should they have been Warlocks or Solomonarii but not strong enough to become Strogoi they'll still retain some of their magic. They don't summon dragons, but having the ability to shape-shift and poison food and water can be very dangerous for an unprepared village.

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>>84655585
>some of them, like this dude, are half human?
That's a Chudo-Yudo, the ultimate Slavic dragon. In fact, he might well be an ancient god of the sea who gradually transformed into a malicious folkloric character, so you can think of him as the Slavic analogue of Ao Guang from Journey to the West. As the evil tyrant of the undersea realm who reigns over all kinds of sea monsters and reptiles, he serves as the malicious counterpart of the typically benevolent Sea Tsar - the ruler of civilised merfolks. While the Sea Tsar and his court rescue drowned sailors and allow them to live in their undersea palace where they can walk and breathe as if on the surface, Chudo-Yudo is usually responsible for sinking ships.

He looks as imposing as you'd expect the greatest of dragons to look. Whereas Zmei Gorynych, his better known relative, only has a meagre three heads and a single tail, Chudo-Yudo has twelve heads and twelve tails. While he doesn't possess any wings (indeed, those would be damn useless on the bottom of the sea), he's got something equally as good - a horse made of steel that breathes fire. Although his fangs are sharp, biting is too animalistic for this character: instead, he uses an enormous maul to hammer his enemies into the ground like nails. His greatest advantage in battle is his index finger, which is permanently on fire. By touching a neck stump with this finger, he can instantly regenerate severed heads. It's useless to even attempt to fight Chudo-Yudo without severing this finger first.

>>84660141
That sounds a bit like someone read hydra story from heracles and went "Ya let's have a nifty subversion", which...given fiction in modern day, wouldn't surprise me.

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>>84655604
I can't describe how happy I am that people took interest in Slawuk's art because of my thread. In my opinion, his art represents the atmosphere of Slavic folklore perfectly - it's very whimsical and folkish. I do my best to post all kinds of artists and artstyles, but it's Slawuk's art that represents what these creatures look like inside my imagination. So why don't I post another picture by him.

So apparently the ancient Slavs understood the geothermal processes, but not the physical reasons behind them. They didn't realise that there's an ocean of magma underneath the ground; instead, they thought that it's warmed up by a bunch of fire elementals who walk around the caves deep below. These elementals are called Zhyzhes. They look like old men with red skin and huge manes and beards of fire.

They also emit fire constantly, and the intensity of these emissions depends on their walking speed. When they're strolling leisurely through the caves, they merely warm the ground up, not letting it freeze up completely in winter. However, when they jog, let alone run, they emit so much fire that it seeps through the ground and gets to the surface. It's this flame that causes forest fires and makes the crops wither and die inexplicably. When enough zhyzhes are doing that, they may even cause a major drought by desiccating the land. Although they don't sound explicitly malicious, they're the enemies of Perun, the god of thunder, who throws lightnings at the ground in his attempts to target the zhyzhes down below.

>>84660141
There's a Legend about a black-mailed knight with a horse wearing leather wings. (like Da Vinci's Flying Machine) Either based or the origin of this guy. He's also referred to as a Zmei, even though he's fully human. A really lame Hungarian/Balkan analog for knights of the Dragon order who defend the Christian South from the Golden Horde and Turkish Dragon , although he was the antagonist of his story.
I've been trying to find his name (I think it starts with a B) and picture (of a normal knight facing him) but no dice yet

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>>84660241
That was definitely not the case. Scholars believe this character to be archaic, and Rybakov in particular (one of the key Slavists of the XXth century) even believes it to be the very oldest character in Slavic folklore.

Here's another old and popular spirit that some of you might have heard about - the Kikimora. She's essentially the archenemy of the Domovoi, the house spirit. Whereas her male counterpart surreptitiously helps the owners with housekeeping, kikimora only lives to play tricks on them. She breaks the pots, spits into the food, tangles the threads on a loom, tortures the livestock, in a word, does everything in her power to make the lives of the owners hell. And can you believe it? She's often said to be domovoi's wife.

There's no agreement on how a kikimora comes into being. She's usually believed to be the spirit of an unwanted daughter drowned by her mother in a swamp - hence her popular nickname, kikimora of the swamps. She seeks out the houses of lazy and negligent people, yet she can also be attracted to a certain house by vengeful chimney builders. If they believe that they were short-changed by the house owner for their work, they put a voodoo doll of sorts between the bricks of the chimney. This doll attracts a kikimora, and she's not going to leave until the doll is found and burned.

Likewise, there's no agreement on her appearance, except for one thing: she looks very old and very ugly. So ugly is she that her name has become the synonym of ugliness. If you want to offend a Slavic girl, call her a kikimora.

>>84656051
They might have had a same origin long time ago, but there is nothing connecting them to Christianity in Slavic folklore. In my Slavic country, Psoglavs are cannibals, associated with Tatar invaders.

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>>84655339
>Morozko
So some of you might have seen this movie and its titular character, a Santa-looking old man who brings presents on Christmas. But you should realise that he's an amalgamation of several real folkloric figures made to be a Santa analogue. He's not worth being mentioned in a mythological thread. His prototypes, on the other hand, are much more interesting, and, in some cases, even badass. Can you imagine a canonically badass Santa?

Meet the Ziuzia, the spirit of cold. Where do I start? He's not a frail old man, on the contrary, he's as strong and fierce as you'd expect the winter frost in Northeastern Europe to be. He only wears underpants and an unbuckled fur coat - neither a hat nor even any shoes. The cold never bothered him anyway. Instead of a brittle faggy wizard staff he wields an enormous mace of cold iron. Have you ever heard the trees creak in frosty weather? Well, the Slavs believed that Ziuzia causes the creaking by hitting the trees with his mace. Instead of air, he breathes cold winds, and his unruly mane is a snow cloud.

One thing he has in common with Morozko is that he absolutely detests wimps. When people complain about the cold, he might freeze them to death just to rid himself of their annoying whining. And when people take the winter chills stoically, he might reward them with good health or even an immunity to common cold. Surprisingly, he also has a genuine connection to Christmas - the owner of a house traditionally throws the first ladle of Christmas porridge into the window for Ziuzia to get on the stern spirit's good side.

>>84660639
Just my little speculation, we found cases of trade between china and baltic states, and trade between rome and india in the past, even as early as late stone age, some stories traveling what is really tiny distance from greece ending up there with some elements of it all isn't unheard of, seeing as slavic gods among northern slavs were very much mixture of baltic ones we know off and scandinavian ones, while general myths too shared similar nature.

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So a few creatures in this thread have been born from infants abandoned or killed by their parents - unfortunately, a real practise in the Middle Ages, when food was scarce and the parents couldn't always afford to feed an additional mouth. However, if the child was stillborn to begin with, it instead comes back as an Igosha. Although they were innocent, they couldn't be christened, and so they're doomed to remain in the physical world after death. The weight of this curse drives many of them to malice.

Igoshas look like very ugly infants with sharp fangs, but their most distinctive feature is their lack of extremities. As they're consigned to crawl around like very short caterpillars, their capabilities to harm humans are relatively limited - mostly they just break pots and hide the things that fell to the floor. Nevertheless, either out of precaution or out of pity for this pathetic creature some house owners put an extra spoon and an extra slice of bread on the table for an igosha when they seat down to dinner.

>>84660910
Interesting. Never heard of him, though there is an expression in Russian, uncommon, but still used nowadays - "зaмёpз, кaк зюзя" (zamerz, kak ziuzia) - "Got cold like ziuzia", meaning getting extremely cold and shivering.

>>84661122
These creatures are not universal. Ziuzia is popular across Belarus and in northern Ukraine. I suppose in western Russia and eastern Poland as well.

>>84656861
According to my grandmother, my greatgrandfather was attacked by a wolf pack led by a huge shewolf with green glowing eyes in early 1920s, while he was driving a wagon in a blizzard. He was able to wound her with an axe, causing her to flee, and the entire pack fled with her.
A bit later, people noticed that a local old hag, living on the outskirts of the village, rumoured to be a witch, had a bandaged left arm. Exactly the same place (front left paw) where the shewolf got hit with my greatgrandfather's axe.

>>84661180
Yes, I noticed that this thread mostly focuses on creatures of western and southern slav folklore.

>>84661233
My grandmother told me a story of how in one of the villages near Câmpina, where she was once requested for aid as a vet, there lived a hag that could scry. Many young women came to her cottage to have their future read, specifically who their potential husbands could be. I remember she told me something happened to her at some point, like she disappeared and that it was the first time her predictions started failing, as if the spell was broken and people realized things weren't meant to be

>>84661294
cause we got no East Slav here to tell his part of the story. We can only talk about the myths we personally know

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Is Black Book a good game for teaching Slavic folklore? I thought it was very interesting to play, at least.

>>84661334
I am, but I never delved that deep into the folklore and mythology. And my English is not that good.
My grandmother also told me a story how she was tormented by a domovoi after offending him. She was a little girl, 5 or 6, and she managed to spot him - a small creature with a shaggy fur. He got pissed, and for several days she had nightmarrs about something small and extremely heavy sitting on her chest, causing her to panic and suffocate.
I know it's a classic symptoms of a sleep paralysis, but after she made amends it instantly stopped.
I also helped and assisted one pagan witch 15 years ago. Saw some weird things and learned interesting tricks from her.

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You know what, friends? Fuck it. I'm not going to be able to cover every creature I was going to, so I might as well start posting the big ones before the thread goes to autosage. And you can't get bigger than Koschei the Deathless. How big are we talking here? Well, he left the biggest footprint on Western fantasy by being the direct prototype of a lich. Taken on his own, he's sometimes seen as the BBEG of the entire Slavic folklore.

Like the Sea Tsar rules over the oceans, Koschei is the tsar of the underworld and ruler of all of its malicious creatures. Aside from the political power he wields, he's also a powerful black sorcerer and necromancer. His greatest achievement lies in separating his soul from his body and putting it into a needle, thus making himself deathless, as his name indicates. He's far more meticulous about hiding his phylactery than most liches that followed: he hid it in an egg, which he hid inside a duck, hidden inside a hare locked in a chest suspended on chains from an oak on a magical island that can't be reached by regular means.

His name vaguely means "boney", and it reflects his appearance petty well. He's usually depicted as an ancient, emaciated old man, almost a walking mummy. Sometimes he's actually depicted as a skeleton, or with appearance quirks like a beard of copper wire or huge emeralds for eyes. But don't let his frailty fool you - he possesses supernatural strength, enough to tear thick chains of iron with his bare hands. As befits his status, he wears exquisite robes and a golden crown.

One thing drives him: greed, which he is the supernatural personification of. He has hoarded piles of gold that would make Smaug jealous, and spends most of his free time counting it. He's not just greedy for gold, but for beautiful women as well, whom he often kidnaps. This is his downfall, as it brings him into confrontation with heroes who find his phylactery and smash it.

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>>84661619

>>84661619
Is koshei the original lich? I always thought that was a DnD original, but an undead sorcerer who hides his soul in an object? That's a lich. I know there's a chinese myth about an alchemist who does something similar, but the chinese see alchemy and sorcery as being very different things, so I don't think that counts.

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>>84661334
Come on you guys, I mentioned a ton of East Slavic creatures. Not enough for you? Okay, here's another one, and it's super obscure. I guarantee that not every East Slav has heard about it.

Meet Kitovras - one of several Slavic centaurs. Kitovras is the noblest of them all, both by his deeds and by his appearance. Unlike your regular old horsemen, he's got a pair of wings behind his back that are fully functional and allow him to fly. He's one of the wisest creatures on earth, able to surprise even king Solomon with his wisdom, and clairvoyant as well. Kitovras rules the city of Lukoria populated by humans and animals living together in peace and harmony. During the day he rules over the humans, and at night - over the beasts. When does he sleep, the question begs to be asked? Apparently, he's too cool for sleeping.

Now, as you might have guessed, he's best known for feuding with King Solomon. Apparently, Schlomo needed his help while building his Tempe, which Kitovras was only happy to lend. However, that was a big mistake, as he became infatuated with the king's wife and eventually kidnapped her. Solomon chased him down, fought and slew the noble creature. To sweeten the pill, it appears that there are still more of his kind in the world.

>>84661619
I have a proposal lad, we can make a Folklore day to make threads about it. Having a slav expert would be pretty great, as simply acesing all the varied Soviet Union antropology projects and posteriors stuff in Ruskies is a boon, finding stuff from even the Chuckchis, Yukaghirs, Mari etc is very difficult.

>>84661753
Definitely the original lich. Wikipedia used to have a big section on this topic, but it got pruned by their rabid mods at some point. You can still dig it out in their archives.

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>>84661826
I'll consider myself done with this project as soon as this thread is over. Can't spend every evening for god knows how long on 4chan. I'm not a literal mental patient like noldorfag.

Meanwhile, let's stay on the topic of Slavic centaurs for a little while longer. The next one is not exactly a traditional centaur, for instead of a horse, he has the lower half of a horse-sized dog. This creature is called a Polkan, and his name became a popular nickname for guard dogs in an ironic twist of fate. Sometimes you just know how such creatures come into being: it happened when a noblewoman fucked a giant talking dog. Being very unwelcome at the court of his father for some reason, he ran away, and so began his legend.

At some point he must have sired a lot of offspring, because one source mentions an entire nation of polkans located somewhere in the warm south. Of all the Slavic centaurs, they're the closest to their Greek prototype in personality: unruly in the extreme, they're ruled by impulses and just as likely to do good as they are to do evil. Yet they appear much more physically capable than their hoofed cousins, covering roughly one kilometre with a jump. I especially like the polkan ability to split into two halves that can live autonomously, and then join back together like if nothing happened. That's pretty damn unique.

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Now, the final Slavic centaur is the most obscure one, for I don't have much to say about him, yet I'd be remiss if I left him out. His name is Konevrus, and he's a unicorn centaur. Looks mostly just the same as a regular one, only he's got a unicorn horn in his forehead, sharp as a razor. He's very quick to impale anyone who pisses him off on this horn, and pissing him off is extremely easy. He takes microaggressions very seriously and will readily kill a guy just for touching him. He's also got pig eyes.

That's not the kind of centaur you'd like to be around, but, thankfully, he's much harder to meet than your regular horsemen. They appear to be the world's northernmost centaurs, living in the taiga on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. Deep inside of it, they fight bears and deer for territory. They never approach human settlements, so the only way to meet a konevrus is to actually seek one out. But why would anyone do that?

>>84661466
I don't play indie games, but, judging from this promo art alone (dark, grimy, miserable) it must be terrible for teaching Slavic folklore. Slawuk's art is where it's at. I'm also a fan of Pawel Zych.

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Time to get spooky! The Kastamachs are Slavic skeletons whose name means "bone flappers", and it describes their behaviour quite succinctly. It's not clear how a person turns into one, but it can't be the usual reason, namely improper burial, because kastamachs are solely met on graveyards and near them. They lie in their graves and rot peacefully until only the skeleton remains, at which point they suddenly get the urge to dig themselves out and begin spooking everybody. And by everybody I mean horses, because they solely spook riders or carriages, causing the poor animal to bolt or break its harness.

The way to defend yourself against them may sound paradoxical, but it's actually quite logical in the larger context of Slavic folklore. Before riding next to a graveyard, you need to switch the right and the left wheels of you carriage around. Somehow, the kastamachs can tell the right and left wheels apart, and them being in the wrong place dumbfounds them so much that the poor skeletons just freeze still in the bushes, too flabbergasted to spook anyone.

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The name of the next creature will be familiar to most of you, but I assure you that it's not what you think. When most people think of a Lamia, they think of a cute girl with a snake tail in place of legs. Certain Slavs, however, think of a dragon with a hound's head (or three) and front paws. It's not one of your fancy horse-riding, mace-wielding dragons, it's a wicked beast that descends upon the fields from its lair in castle ruins and eats all the crops. However, just like the other Lamia, it's very horny for human dick and may assume the form of a beautiful girl to get under some farmer's bedsheets.

Lamias can't breathe fire, since they're spiritually connected to the element of water. Instead, they breathe thick fog that hides their movements and makes them difficult to fight for human heroes. Likewise, they can dam any river with their wings, causing a drought for the entire region. In exchange for allowing the water to flow they usually demand either a human sacrifice or plain old treasure. They're greedy like all dragons and keep their hoards deep in their lairs. Whoever's got enough grit to raid a lamia's home would quickly become a wealthy man (or a corpse).

That's all for today. Please keep the thread alive until tomorrow, but don't post too much. I still have like 20+ creatures to burn through.

>>84632346
Rusalkas are actually quite dangerous, they love catching people bathing in rivers and lakes (especially young man), and tickling them to death. Also, Christian lifehack how to fuck a rusalka and stay alive
> Go to the river where rusalkas dwell wearing two crucifixes
> Put one crucific on your front and one on your back
> Don't go too deep not to drown
> Rusalkas will approach you but will not be able to tickle you because they can't touch crucifix
> Offer one of them to have some fun, she'll likely agree
> Do her gently so as not to touch her with a crucifix or not to let either of your crucifixes move to the other side, lest you get captured by her friends and properly tickled

>>84632346
In some versions they drown people. Sometimes only other girls out of jealousy, sometimes lads too to get a fuckbuddy

>>84635775
Sounds to me like bagnik, bazhnik and bolotnik are different regional takes on the same thing. Especially with the names meaning the same "swamp dude"

>>84663089
not the same, bagna means bog, balota means swamp

>>84636296
>its most potent weapons are not its claws, but his meowing
I thought it was its purring

>>84647997
>aбeвeгa
Ugggh

>>84648374
Tiny addition: the word means "wolf skin shirt" (same as Norse ulfhednar) and it might of might not stem from the same ancient shamanistic tradition

https://www.bestiary.us/bestiary/vuzhalka/en

snake tsar's daughters, belarusian but i assume there's russian stories about them as well

have titties, dont want the jannies to delete them

>>84660911
>slavic gods among northern slavs were very much mixture of baltic ones we know off and scandinavian ones, while general myths too shared similar nature.
Watta surprise, closely related people living near each other have similar myths. Stop the fucking presses

>>84663128
>bog
>swamp
That's Iike saying birch and oak forests are meaningfully different

>>84664206
bog is the watery hole where people drown
swamp is just a wetland that may or may not have bogs

>>84651291
Are not the Solomonarii related to the Jewish populations in Slavic lands, in someway?

>>84664206
>>84664223
A bog is a grassy wetland, a swamp is an arboreal wetland. In other words swamps have trees, bogs don't.

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>>84662616
>One eye on the money, one eye on the streets

>>84665536
>>84664206
Learned a new thing today, nice.

>>84665475
nah, Solomon is Egyptian
we went to Egypt to study not Jerusalem

>>84621409
Best thread on /tg/

>>84661995
Wasn't Polkan a typical half-man, half-horse centaur? From what I read, the name itself is a compound from the word "pol" and "kan," which apparently roughly translate into a "half" and "horse."
I've also read that the typical explanation for what was perceived as a Polkan were the Mongol riders in the steppes beyond the Urals.
So did the dog part come into the play thanks to the "you just know" story associated with it, or is it misinterpreted? I know that myths and folkloric stories change a lot, but I'd just like to know what are the sources for this one.

>>84668421
>From what I read, the name itself is a compound from the word "pol" and "kan," which apparently roughly translate into a "half" and "horse."
Folk etymology, the real source is Pulicane (half-dog) from some Italian romance.

don't mind me keeping basedthread alive

>>84659806
>pic related
damn

>>84631503
Zazovka is a lot more like my Norwegian/Skandi huldra than an outright succubus. Not -wrong-, just not completely.

>>84635441
Well for huldra-maidens you forgot about the "her five of six troll brothers come out and -eat- your living body" after she's done the deed, anon.

And huldra only STAY pretty if you're unbaptized or unshrived (depending on whether your mormor telling the story was was Lutheran or Catholic, respectively, in my personal experience)

>>84635441
>However, she's known to turn into a swan in the winter and leave for the warmer countries with the rest of the birds.

Sounds like the Swan-may from the Parsifal and Lohengrin romances. Probably the origin, I expect.

>>84660141
I'm sure there's some connection to the Christian idea of Leviathan as the King of Pride undersea, especially in rural parts.

I remember when me and my cousins visited our grandparents out in the country as kids and my grandma told to us beware of topielcy because there was a river and a number of small bodies of water near her house and they probably didn't want us to play around them and fucking drow.

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>>84670632
>I remember when me and my cousins visited our grandparents out in the country as kids and my grandma told to us beware of topielcy because there was a river and a number of small bodies of water near her house and they probably didn't want us to play around them and fucking drow.
Why the hell didn't your granny want you to fuck drow? Did she hate you?

Speaking of undead, I promised to elaborate on Mavkas, and it's about time I did that. Like many other creatures listed above, those are created from infant girls who died before their baptism and can't ascend to Heaven. But, unlike all those creatures, they have a larval stage of sorts where they wander the woods in the form of a harmless little child. At this stage any stranger can save the spirit from turning into a mavka by making the sign of the cross at her and giving her a Christian name. But if she wander for entire seven years and nobody saves her, she turns into a proper mavka and there's no coming back.

The most notable thing about mavkas is their appearance. From the front they look like normal cute girls, yet they're completely transparent from the back. In other words, you can clearly see her skeleton and all of her innards if you're sneaky enough to approach her from behind. It's also interesting that while they have fully grown up bodies, they retain their small childish feet and leave footprints that clearly belong to little kids.

They spend nearly all of their time dancing in circles through the woods, mountains and river banks. A chort accompanies them on his reed flute. It's better to avoid their dance if you accidentally discover one, because mavkas are capricious creatures and their actions are unpredictable. On the one hand, they might get spooked and run away or invite you to dance with them and reward for your dancing skills. On the other hand, they might kill you by forcing you to dance so vigorously that you collapse and die of heart attack.

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Here's another creature that's universally popular and reasonably well known even outside of Slavic cultures, the Leshy. But popularity often engenders misinterpretations, and leshies suffer from them more than any other creature on this list, save, perhaps, for Baba Yaga. Let's immediately make one thing clear: they are not monsters, not any more malicious or wicked than untouched nature is. Just arbitrarily cruel.

More than any other European ethnic group, the ancient Slavs lived surrounded on every side by the woods, and these woods were ruled over by leshies - demigods of considerable power, kings of the trees and the wild animals. Like their subjects, they combined human, animal and floral features in their appearance. Many descriptions have been preserved, but the most common one describes leshies as mighty men with antlers, hoofed feet and great beards of moss, inside of which berries might grow. One curious detail than comes up time and again is that the left and right sides of their bodies are switched around. Namely, their right arms ends in left hands, and vice versa; same goes for their legs. They have no shadow and can change size at will.

Above all else, leshies are herders. All the animals living in their forest belong to them, and they spend most of their time herding them around, maintaining the delicate ecological balance and watching over the circle of life. Even more curiously, they can herd trees by ordering them to pull their roots out of the ground and crawl somewhere else. They typically use this ability to disorient trespassers and poachers who enter their woods without showing them proper respect, for leshies are capricious and arrogant. Sometimes they lead people astray just for fun, but they're known to tickle those who really pissed them off to death.

Like most high ranking spirits, they have palaces and families that include forest wives and children - either their biological ones or human kids lost in their wood and rescued by them.

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Next up we have another reasonably popular creature - the Likho, a supernatural manifestation of bad luck. Now this spirit is evil incarnate! Bringing misery to good people is the sole reason for her existence. She looks like an unnaturally lanky and slender woman, twice as tall as a normal human, but also twice as thin. However, it's not her unusual stature that immediately draws everyone's attention, but her face. While she lacks regular eyes, there's a giant bulging eye in her forehead that is permanently wide open.

Everything that she looks upon with this eye is cursed with bad luck. That doesn't just work on humans, mind you, but even on inanimate objects. Trees wither and collapse, rivers dry up, animals get sick. She lives in an abandoned windmill in the middle of the woods and sleeps on a bed of human bones taken from her victims. For you see, she's an obligate anthropophage who catches and eats humans for sustenance.

In a way, you can compare her evil eye to those of the vii. While it's not as immediately destructive, it nevertheless brings certain ruin to everything its gaze falls upon. I don't know about you, but I'd rather be looked upon by a vii and evaporate than by a likho and drudge through a few years of hopeless misery before dying in a ditch.

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The next creature is a little more whimsical, but far from harmless. It's called Lizun, and its name means "the licker". Those of you who have played the Resident Evil games must have immediately gotten a vivid picture in your heads, and, strangely enough, this picture is pretty much correct! Now, I don't think the Capcom developers were aware of Slavic folklore, it's probably a case of convergent creative effort, yet the resemblance between the Japanese mutant and the Slavic spirit is undeniable.

Lizuns are amphibian anthropomorphic monsters who inhabit abandoned wells. Their skin is pure white, and their tongues are truly enormous - several times the length of their owners and fully prehensile. Furthermore, these tongues are rough and abrasive like sandpaper. Just one lick can draw blood from a human, and if the licker is not spooked away, he can lick the flesh off right down to the bone. They're usually too cowardly for it to come to that, though. Typically they're used by mothers to dissuade their kids from playing near wells. Which makes sense, as falling into a well and drowning is far more likely than being licked to death.

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Time for another air spirit, the Gartsuk. These spirits with ugly, angry faces are no larger than little children and have the same asthenic builds, yet the danger they pose and their place in the supernatural hierarchy shouldn't be underestimated. They live high up in the mountains and answer directly to Perun, the god of thunder and one of the two chief Slavic deities. They spend the morning goofing and frolicking in their alpine homes, the afternoon looking after the horses of their celestial master and driving him across the sky in his chariot as he shoots his flaming bow at those who displease him, and in the evening they create hurricanes.

It's hard to believe it, but these scrawny looking creatures were considered responsible for all the destructive hurricanes and whirlwinds. To create a hurricane, they gathered in one place and waved their arms with such force as to bring enormous masses of air into motion. To make a whirlwind, they ran in little circles while waving their arms. Although the results of their actions were devastating, it's important to remember that they were put to this task by Perun himself. They were also not exactly malicious, but simply as cruel and irresponsible as your typical little child.

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For now, let's stay on the topic of air spirits. Just as gartsuks control hurricanes, Planetniks control rains and hailstorms. Clouds are their livestock which they herd across the sky wherever Perun orders them to. As clouds lack any normal means of locomotion, their herders have to drag them manually with enormous chains or ropes. Whenever their clouds run out of water, planetniks refill them with a rainbow. Yes, you heard that right - it's not a bridge of the gods or the symbols of the Lord's covenant with humans, it's just the world's biggest water pump.

Most of the water sucked up into the clouds was used to water the forests and the fields down below. The rest of it was frozen high up in the mountains, turned into blocks of ice and ground into hail with iron chains. Planetniks rained hail on people as a punishment for minor sins, such as sleeping with your own daughter. Yes, that shit was considered minor.

Although they were usually described as grumpy and morose, they were quite friendly with people whenever they met. As there are no sources of food in the sky, from time to time they had to descend into inhabited lands and ask strangers for eggs of black chickens or milk of black cows, since that was the only food that they could digest. It was considered of paramount importance to fulfil the request, because you don't want to get on a planetnik's bad side.

>>84672118
You're thinking of Rusałki I guess, not Topielecy which are guys.

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Our next creature is the Namnoi - a curious spiritual fortune teller. A lot of the spirits mentioned above have the gift of soothsaying and can tell fortunes to people if placated with a proper sacrifice. Yet namnois did not require any sacrifices or rituals for their services, they just visited people at random and predicted their future, whether they wanted it or not.

Well, at least their predictions were as vague as they get. They sneak into the house at night and begin kneading the bodies of sleeping people, leaving big bruises on their skin. The appearance of these bruises is in itself a sign of upcoming misfortune, and their nature predicts the outcome of this misfortune. If they hurt, everything will end poorly, and if they don't, there's going to be a happy ending.

>accurate information
I'm literally laughing out loud rn

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>>84673842
No, I'm thinking of drow. I'm shocked that this joke goes over people's heads on /tg/ of all places.

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>>84673889
Thank you for the update, you can go back to your blog now.

And we continue with a creature that many Western people will find familiar, although they call it a Changeling, while in the Slavic legends it's called an Odminok. They're left in place of a kid by all those numerous creatures who kidnap children - chuds, boginkas and others. Yet although the basic concept is similar, the details are quite different. To start with, an odminok is actually a kind of a golem, or, perhaps more accurately, a homunculus, as it's an artificial creature sculpted from ash and brought to an unnatural life.

Although odminoks roughly resemble real children, they're incredibly ugly with oversized heads, stick-like extremities and pot bellies that belie a ravenous appetite. No matter how much you feed one, he's never going to be satiated and will always ask for more. He never grows an inch, but, whenever the parents leave him alone, he grows to a huge size in an instant and eats the entire contents of the food store. After that, he shrinks down again and goes back to his cradle.

There are many methods of getting rid of an odminok, and all of them are cruel. One such method involves literally throwing him away with the trash, after which he gets so upset than he never comes back again. Another method prescribes tying him to five sprouts of wheat (by his head and extremities respectively) and whipping him with a birch stick. Apparently, the kidnapper will personally feel these hits, bring the stolen child back and take the odminok.

I have a suspicion about all this tickling to death. In western european mythology it's a common thing that the written versions of stories tend to be very sanitized since they were written down by christian chroniclers, mostly monks. As an example, when Freja's jewels were stolen by Loki and given to the dwarfs, in the written version she had to give each of them a kiss to get them back, but in the original oral version of the story she had to fuck them all. Do you think this repeated theme of "female monster tickles you to death" is a sanitized version of something else they may have been doing?

>>84673900
Ah, "fucking drow", I get it now.

Woosh.

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Next up we have a wicked spirit that many Slavs are intimately familiar with - the Opiven. These malicious little creatures are merely as big as cats, but can inflict just as much harm as their larger cousins by accustoming people to hard drinking. They are invisibly present at every celebration, sitting in the corner of a table and watching how much alcohol people drink. If an opiven thinks that someone drinks too little, he whispers words of encouragement into his ear. If that fails, he pours a droplet of his special potion of drunkenness into this man's mug that makes him completely shitfaced after just one little sip.

Only those already drunk can see opivens. They look like little green-coloured anthropomorphic pigs with bull horns who always walk backwards. Their favourite pastime is making fun of drunks. Opivens like pushing them around, making them stagger, or, preferably, fall face-first into the dirt. They also mercilessly pull drunkards on their noses, which makes them red. One thing that no one should ever attempt is trying to drink an opiven under the table, as they drink vodka like humans drink water.

>>84674159
Leshies are the most famous deadly ticklers. I don't think they qualify as female monsters.

>>84674159
Can be, or it can also be taken as truth. People knew you *could* be tickled to death because you choke, even if you only go unconscious tickle monsters are usually aquatic so you still drown.
I think it's a way of conveying Feyish humor, or rather their emotions. To a powerful spirit of nature, it's just a silly punishment, but they actively ignore human fragility and keep going past the point of no return.
It can also possibly be a lesson when dealing with mentally unsafe people since they don't know, nor care to know, their own limits or those of their victims.

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Now we come to the final and most famous member of the trio of human-headed birds - the Sirin. While their cousins, alkonosts and gamayuns, live in Iri and serve as the messengers of the Slavic gods, sirins inhabit the underworld and don't appear to do anyone's bidding. They visit the ground world and sing their songs just for fun, and may heavens help those who hear them. No, they aren't musically bad - on the contrary, the voices of sirins are far more beautiful and enchanting than those of the other mythical birds. The opposite is true - they are actually too beautiful for the mortal ears.

Those who have heard them are immediately enthralled and can wish for nothing else in life other than to hear a sirin's song for just a minute longer. When the bird flies away, these poor fools remain standing in place, completely petrified, until they eventually wither and die. A pretty nice metaphor for the Stendhal syndrome and the destructive power of beauty, if you ask me.

Thankfully, sirins appear to be rare guests in the Slavlands. If the medieval woodcuts are to be believed, they can usually be found all the way south in India, where the locals are very familiar with them. As soon as they see a sirin perched up somewhere, they plug up their ears and shoo the bird away, lest she ruin someone's life with her singing.

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And another dragon, this one is called Hala. It's not the most intelligent of their kind nor the most powerful, yet it's the largest of them all by far. So big is it that its heads touch the clouds when it stands up. Traditionally, it's got three horse heads, each one with three tongues, six wings and twenty tails. As if their natural tools of destruction weren't enough, they're always accompanied by storm clouds that they can control. They eat just as much as you'd expect from a creature of their size, turning everything into a lifeless wasteland in their wake. Yet nothing on earth can satiate the dragon's hunger: what it truly lusts after is the sun. Whenever they gather up enough strength, they attack it, and their fights can be seen from down on earth as eclipses. Naturally, they can never win, for otherwise everything on earth would freeze up and die.

If all of the world's halas could join together, there would be few forces able to oppose them. Thankfully, like many other dragons, they hate each other even more than they do everyone else. There exists a powerful magic staff that all of them strive to capture for themselves, and they spend much of their time fighting fruitlessly for it up in the sky. Instead of using their powerful teeth or claws, they shoot bullets of ice at each other. A shot down hala falls to the ground, where the local people may nurse it back to health. In spite of their malicious nature, these dragons know the meaning of gratitude and swear to protect their little human friends from other halas from that point forward.

That's it for today. Keep bumping the thread while I'm away, but please don't post any comments before I come back tomorrow to finish up. Otherwise the thread may very well die and I won't be able to finish.

>>84623440
>nyavkas, women-like monsters who lead young men into forests and are indistiguishable from normal humans apart from the hole in their back through which you can see their insides.
Reminds me of Norse Huldras, which wear long hair to cover their bark-covered back, in which there is a hole like the ones used by birds, but even bigger.

>>84643894
You can't convince me this isn't a cover art of some metal album.

>>84625585
Same thing happened to Tuatha de Danann after Milesians arrived from likely Iberia, leading to former become gods living in the Underworld. Seems the theme likes to repeat.

>>84625328
>beskud (known in Czech as paškudlo). These are very unique vampires originating from the western Carpathians.
>Beskud
>Western Carpathians
>Close to Beskids mountains
>paškudlo
>Paskuda in Polish can mean something evil, mischievous, and/or ugly
I like the name.

>>84636517
>tfw Buka was used for Groke from Moomins, while the shaggy fur round creature was called Bobek in Polish
Well, at least Buka in Poland was voiced as a male and is regarded as one of scarier ones because of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53ZcjYqkVms

>>84620887
Bird tits

>>84620887
>Slavic Mythological Creatures

No such thing. Pre christian slavs had no mythical creatures because they considered spirits to be ritually unclean and for this reason slavs did not speak of such things. All the things ITT are later adoptions mostly from rich mythscape of Germans, Turkic peoples and Finnic peoples.

>>84682051
>they considered spirits to be ritually unclean
That would require them to have higher brain functions

>>84620887
Bayraktar bird, Saint Javelin, Toilet and Washing Machine spirits.

>>84674879
>Three heads, six wings, multiple tails, lives in a storm cloud

>other dragons hate it even more than they do each other

Well, good to know my favorite golden boy kaiju Ghidora has a mythological predecessor.

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>>84682051
>>84684065
>>84684489
The fuck are mods doing? Get this trash out of my thread ASAP.

Anyway, let's finish this undertaking. I started this thread with a mythical bird, so it only seems fitting that I should end it with the progenitor of all birdkind - the Stratim. Like many of her offspring, she's got the body of a bird and the head of a crowned woman, yet she's big as a mountain. Because there's no place on the ground large enough to hold her nest, she builds it in the middle of the ocean, where it floats like an artificial island.

With a bird of such size, you can bet that she's got a lot of destructive power, even though she only wrecks havoc accidentally. Storms arise when she speaks, the sea runs high when she moves her wings. And whenever she takes flight, she creates tidal waves that crush ships into splinters and wash entire coastal cities off the face of the Earth.

Yet she's not actually malicious, she's merely aloof and uncaring like a true force of nature. In fact, she's got a lot of love and compassion for her grandchildren, which includes all of the birds. When a hero saves a wounded bird or kills a serpent trying to steal eggs from an empty nest, stratim may notice it and repay his kindness. For instance, she's known for rescuing heroes marooned on uninhabited islands.

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From a gargantuan monster of legends we move on to a small, but very malicious spirit - the Liadashtsik. In fact, he's sometimes called the most nefarious of all spirits, and with a good reason. Nobody knows why, but they hate humans with all of their heart and harm them by damaging their minds.

It's enough for a liadashtsik to fly over a person to drive him insane. If a person's got a strong enough mind to resist his mental assault, the spirit may turn him into an animal out of spite. Also he's a dyed in the wool incel who hates women above all else. All of the venereal diseases specific to women are sometimes ascribed to his malign influence.

One reason for his rampant misogyny might be his ugliness, for liadashtsiks are truly some of the ugliest spirits in a folklore absolutely bursting with freaks of all kinds. They look like ugly and deformed humanoids covered in ginger pubic hair from head to toe. They've got a pair of bat wings and a single cyclopean eye in their foreheads, much like a Likho. In fact, this eye might be the source of their mind-shattering power.

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Our next spirit, the Hovala, is quite the reverse - fairly handsome an charismatic. He's usually depicted as a tall old man of noble countenance. His regular eyes are blind, but he doesn't need them, for his head is surrounded by a rotating halo of twelve eyes on fire that see everything around him. These eyes emit magical rays whose effect appears to depend on the time of the day. In the night they emit rays of light that burn the darkness out from the hearts of people, heal their bodies and make the crops and livestock grow much faster. They produce so much radiance that night turns into day around him.

However, during the day his eyes emit destructive rays of darkness that turn day into night. The effect of these rays is actually very similar to that of vii's gaze - everything they touch experiences accelerated entropy, people fall ill, trees wither, and even the rocks crack and crumble into fine dust. Nothing on earth can withstand the gaze of all twelve of his levitating eyes, so he usually only has one of them open when he travels, and opens more of them if necessary. It's believed that hovalas don't wander at random, but reward and punish people in accordance with the will of the gods.

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Next we move on to one of the cutest Slavic mythological creatures - the Kotalachen, in other words, were-cat. All Slavs have always been cat people, so it's little wonder that kotalachens are treated with much more respect than the regular werewolves. Traditionally they're depicted as female, living in small werecat clans in communal houses located inside clearings deep in the woodlands. During the day they live as cats, hunting and frolicking in the meadows. After sundown, however, they eat special magical grass and turn into cute girls. While they're in their human forms, they do all kinds of housework that requires opposable thumbs.

While people usually become volkolaks as a result of a curse, they're turned into kotalachens by a spell, and this spell is not necessarily malicious. A wizard may find a sick or wounded girl whose condition is too poor for him to save her, so instead he turns her into a kotalachen (the proper name for the female specimens is koshkalachen, but don't sweat it too much). As the cats have nine lives, she can die once in her cat form and still keep on living.

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Our next curious creature is the Klikun, the spirit of the roads. He looks like a slender giant in a tattered robe with unnaturally long extremities and an unruly mane of equally long, tousled hair. He holds an incredibly long horsehair whip in one hand and a musical horn of pure gold in the other. He rides a giant snake up and down the country roads, urging it on with high-pitched screams that scare all travellers in his vicinity. Although regular snakes aren't very fast animals, klikun's mount is so swift that it raises clouds of dust around it as it slithers along.

Travellers should take utmost care to avoid these clouds, for klikuns don't take kindly to those who intrude upon their roads. Those who merely get lashed with the spirit's whip should consider themselves lucky. Others are permanently deafened by the roaring of his horn or worse, cursed. A klikun's whistling has the same effect as a likho's gaze on everyone who hears it. Although it's difficult to see the clouds of dust that herald a klikun's approach in the night, shrewd travellers can spot them from afar by the intense stench of sulphur that they emit. Klikuns are generally horrible slobs and their name became a byword for someone with poor hygiene.

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The next creature I'd like to discuss is functionally similar to western Familiars. Called Koloviortyshes, they are fantastic animals that look like black-furred hybrids between a cat and a rabbit, except each one of them has a pelican-like throat pouch. These pouches have near infinite volume on the inside and can store anything a witch needs, from food stolen from the local farmers to spell and potion ingredients. Koloviortyshes follow their masters around like intelligent bags on legs and then regurgitate everything they've collected onto the table once they've returned to the hut. They can also go raiding the local farms for food and useful stuff without their masters.

Although they're roughly feline in appearance and can even turn into regular black cats to trick the normies, they're actually made from puppies. A witch seeks out a litter of puppies whose mother was killed by wolves, takes one of them back home and performs a ritual on it. Then she puts it under her fireplace for seven days, during which the puppy transforms into a proper koloviortysh.

I wish there was a general like this

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Among the vast host of household spirits, the Povetnik takes the role of an inspector. Although he lives in the firewood shed, he only goes there to sleep. For the rest of the day he walks around the courtyard and its buildings, inspecting every aspect of the household and checking whether everything's in order. Being very meticulous and and obsessive over minutia, they're the perfect candidates for such a job. Once they're done with the daily inspection, they report their findings to the corresponding household spirits, such as domovois, banniks, bagans and so forth.

While most household spirits are short humanoids, povetniks are much more exotic in appearance. They look like giant birds with six wings and can turn invisible to avoid spooking the humans. However, when the household is doing really poorly, povetniks might appear before the house owner to chastise him for negligence. For these occasions they assume the form of handsome young men with flaxen hair wearing flame-coloured shirts.

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>>84686257
So this is the guy responsible for Ochilă (no translation is satisfing enough, but Gazey or even Pippin Tom are decent substituttes) who is one of Harap-Alb's 5 (rarely 7) quirky, magical companions. A man with a gigantic eyeball that can see everything, was very depressed because there were no secrets left for him to uncover so he joins the princeling on his quest to get his Master a hot witch.
Is responsible for locating said witch during one of their trials, when she was shape-shifted.
If you are curious the others are Flămânzilă/Hungy (with a bottomless stomach), Setilă/Parchy (famous for draining a Sea), Gherilă/Frozey(is immune to fire or heatstroke, breath can freeze melting bronze) and finally Păsărilă-Lăț-Lungilă/Long-String-Birdcatcher(can circumnavigate the Earth on foot in 3 strides, arms are dexterous enough to catch a magically enhanced bird).
Gherilă, Ochilă and Lăț-Lungilă got the biggest drip upgrade in Harap-Alb Continuă

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The next creature is a bit hard to describe because there are so many regional disagreements on its role and appearance. By no means am I suggesting that there are no regional differences regarding the dozens of creatures I've listed previously, but in those cases they can usually be narrowed down to a single simplified version filtered through the lens of popular culture. Not so with the Drekavac. Is it a soldier's ghost? Is it a long-legged cat? The only thing that can be said about them with absolute certainty is that they screech at night. Because this is literally what their name means, "screecher". Maybe it's the ancient Slavic term for poltards.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, the most popular and generally accepted version of the legend presents them as ferocious man-eating beasts that are born from the forsaken spirits of people who didn't receive a proper burial. They have slim, slender bodies topped with disproportionally large heads and dagger-like fangs. Yet they aren't considered particularly dangerous because they seem to be mortally afraid of regular dogs, even the small breeds. Thus, they mostly limit themselves to attacking neglected livestock, although some of them, especially those who have retained their human memories, may target their family members who didn't give them a proper burial.

>>84687411
>Ochilă (no translation is satisfing enough, but Gazey or even Pippin Tom are decent substituttes)
Eye Guy

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While we're on topic of magical animals, let's discuss the Bukavac. Also nicknamed a water bull, this monster has almost nothing in common with regular bovines. In reality, it's a bull-sized six-legged amphibian that looks like a fat salamander with a toad's head and legs. Its head is crowned with enormous gnarled antlers that look like waterlogged snags, and its skin constantly secretes viscous slime.

It spends the day on the bottoms of lakes and ponds, only venturing to the surface under the moonlight. There, it hunts the livestock or even humans by jumping on top of them and strangling them under its mass, then swallowing them whole, no matter the size. Thankfully, bukavacs are very easy to spot from afar, even at night. They have very loud croaking, and their clumsiness on the surface means that they make a lot of noise even when they keep silent.

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Our next famous creature from Slavic folklore is Tony Stark. No, seriously, it's the Iron Man (or Zhalezny Chalavek, as he's locally known). The logic behind this one will take some explaining. In ancient times, the majority of Slavic lands weren't rich in iron ore. Chunks of bog iron found in the swamps were the primary source of that metal, so eventually swamps came to be as strongly associated with iron as the mountain mines are in Germany. It's little wonder, then, that the local folklore populated them with merciless giants made of living iron with nails for teeth who crush all trespassers who came to steal their precious ore.

While not exactly nefarious, they act much like robots - heartless, merciless, cold and unfeeling. Unlike the vast majority of spirits, they can't be reasoned with, don't talk with their victims and may not even be able to speak at all. That being said, like all robots, they can potentially be controlled. There's a legend where a young hero found an artefact that gave him control over a zhalezny chalavek and turned him into his obedient servant.

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I debated with myself whether I should have included the next creature, the Todorac, amongst the Slavic centaurs, but eventually decided against it. You see, these monsters don't have the body plan of a traditional centaur. They're far more similar to the Scottish Nuckelavee in that they have monstrous humanoid torsos growing from the backs of fanged horses. But while nuckelavees are mere evil spirits, todoracs are very civilised, armed to the teeth and behave more like the Wild Hunt of Germanic legends than their Scottish cousins.

They ride out of the underworld during the Lent. Their great processions are led by the greatest of their kind, who's dressed in all white and whose horse part is lame. Don't let this detail fool you, though, for he's the fastest and most agile of them all. They ride through the villages and punish all those who eat forbidden foods or work on forbidden days by kicking them with their hooves. Instead of regular bruises, their kicks leave festering ulcers that can eventually lead to death. These ulcers can't be healed by any kind of medicine. Instead, to get rid of them a person must come to the place where he originally got kicked one year later. If he's led a pious life during that year, the ulcer will instantly heal. If he kept sinning, he will collapse and die.

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Next up we have the Volots - an ancient race of giants who are believed to have inhabited the Slavic lands before the Slavs themselves came there. Fewer and fewer of them remain in the world with each passing year, for they're too heavy for the ground to support. They keep growing throughout their lives and, when they grow massive enough, they begin sinking into the soil little by little. Most of them eventually disappear entirely into the bowels of the earth, while some others sink only up to their chins and remain as mere heads sticking out of the ground. Yet they can't move or eat, and soon enough they die. Volots turn to stone after death, so curious head-shaped rocks found in the middle of clearings were believed by the ancient Slavs to be volot heads.

Yet it was not always this way. Back in the ancient past, during the mythical heroic age, volots were abundant and active. The current shape of the world is the result of their work, for they used to push mountains around and knock down entire forests in their wake. Some of them were legendary heroes and left behind artefacts for their human replacements to use. Apparently, those artefacts were magical and could shrink or grow to fit their current owner, because it's difficult to image a human wielding a volot sword.

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Our next spirit, Hapun, likes nothing better than to kidnap little kids. He looks like a wicked old man with a bushy beard, carrying behind him a sack larger than himself. As you might have guessed, the sack is meant for the captured children. He spends his time flying around, looking for kids who disobey their parents, whine and generally act naughty. As soon as a kid he singled out walks away from his house, hapun swoops at him like a bird of prey, grabs him and stuffs him into the sack. It's completely soundproof, so no one can hear the poor child's cries for help. Even if someone witnessed the act of kidnapping, there's little he could do, for hapuns fly as fast as the wind.

They live deep in the thickets, in subterranean dwellings under ancient tree stumps. Once there, hapuns put the captured kids in cages and abuse them verbally and physically. They're particularly fond of flogging them with brooms of fresh nettle. No kid has ever managed to escape from a hapun's captivity, and when they eventually grow up, they turn into hapuns themselves. Even the girls, who apparently undergo a biological sex change triggered by abuse.

There's clearly a veritable goldmine of metaphors here, but I don't feel like going into them.

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I didn't feel like doing this next character, because I'm frankly a bit sick of her depictions in Western media. It's almost like she's the sole character who exists in the Slavic folklore, which is, as you must clearly see at this point, painfully untrue. But what hurts the most is that practically nobody gets her right. The only portrayal I approve of is Mike Mignola's take from Hellboy. It's still very much his personal interpretation, but, at the very least, he captured her genuine controversial nature from the myths, which can't be said about evil caricature shit from pathfinder and the like.

You all probably understand by this point that I'm talking about the Baba Yaga. You all know her: a hideous old woman with a skeletal leg, lives in a house on chicken legs behind a fence topped with human skulls on fire, flies around in a pestle and steers it with a broom. That's all true. However, and I can't stress this enough, she's not a witch. She's not even a human! She's as much of a spirit as a leshy or a vodianoy, and might actually stand higher than them in the spiritual hierarchy. If you absolutely need to put her into one of the categories of Western fantasy, call her a faerie.

This is actually a very apt characterisation. She's capriciousness incarnate, never predictable, the greatest ally of the heroes in one tale and their worst enemy in another. The stories where she acts as the antagonist usually star children or waifus, as she eats the former and tries to kill the latter out of jealously. For the traditional epic heroes, though, she typically acts as a vendor and an innkeeper. She allows them to rest in her hut, restores their strength with her potions and gives them magical artefacts, or, at least, hints to their location. That's female behaviour in a nutshell.

I've also almost never seen her supernatural servants anywhere, though she has a plenty, including a flock of giant man-eating swans and three flying disembodied arms.

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>>84688682
Her role as innkeeper and peddler of magical artifacts is usually replaced by the Saintly Days. Saturday and Sunday especially. They are just your typical nice-grandma spirit. Will outright refuse anyone that disrespects them and doesn't bring them alms when posing as beggars.
Once you've made it clear that you are a veritable gentleman with all 7 Years-From-Home she will share every secret and disrupt every plan those in the path of your destiny have set up. It's like an angel or a Seelie Fay, once convinced you'll do good, they take your desires with fanatical diligence.

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Next up we have the Domovoy - the spirit of the house. Those who have been reading the thread from the beginning know that each Slavic household has an entire army of helpful and malicious spirits living there, but the Domovoy is the chief of them all. This is reflected in a plethora of his nicknames such as gospodar (the master). Aside from directing the other household spirits, he personally looks over the family's main home where they eat and sleep, as well as their well-being.

Like most spirits of their class, domovoys appear as gnome-sized humanoids with animal ears, with the colour of their hair and their facial features changing to match those of the current head of the household. They normally have thick manes, bushy beards and shaggy fur covering their bodies, but this is not a given. The shagginess of a particular domovoi depends on the wealth of the household. Those living in the richest homes look like miniature Abominable Snowmen, while those in the poorest houses might be completely hairless. They rarely appear in front of humans in their true form, choosing instead to assume the shape of a snake or a cat.

They spend much of their time keeping the house clean and helping out with the chores, but only if the family respects them and regularly brings them sacrifices in the form of buttered pancakes that are thrown behind the fireplace, where they're believed to reside. If ignored and mistreated, a domovoy might actually engage in mischief that would put a kikimora to shame. If truly pissed off, he might even attack the family members by strangling them in their sleep (hello, sleep paralysis) or scratching them with his sharp, bestial claws.

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Before I wrap up with another big character, I'll do a semi-repost of a creature I mentioned elsewhere that actually inspired me to start this thread. Meet the Shulikuns - goblin-like swamp creatures with horse legs and pointy (conic) heads who dress in garish clothes. The pointedness of their skulls comes in handy in the winter when the swamp freezes over - they use their heads as rams to make holes in the ice and crawl onto the surface. They're armed with hot coals, frying pans or hooks, but can also breathe fire in case they get disarmed. That's not the full extent of their equipment, as they also have self-propelled iron sleds that they ride around in.

The main reason why they venture onto the surface is to bully random travellers passing near their swamp. Their attacks are usually relatively harmless, although they're known to grab drunks with their hooks, drag them into the quagmire and drown them. Sometimes they ride their magical sleds to the nearest village, get into empty houses, loot the food stores and break the furniture. The best way to defend against their raids is actually to scare them into timidity by conducting carriage races on ice. Apparently, the danger posed by shulikuns is scarier to people than the danger of drowning in ice water.

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And I end my thread with one of the most famous antagonists of Slavic folklore - the Zmei Gorynich. Sure, Koschei the Deathless might be more intelligent and insidious with his magic tricks, but few things can oppose a gigantic three-headed serpent face to face. After all, the dragon is the most archetypal enemy of the hero in the Indo-European myth.

Appearance-wise, he's a regular Western dragon, nothing special here, aside from the three heads. Sometimes they're depicted as having separate personalities, the differences between which are exploited by the heroes to trick the dragon, but in other cases they act as one, or are joined by a hivemind. He's got green or red scales that no regular sword can cut through, iron claws, a pair of draconic wings and a deadly arrowhead on the tip of his tail. He breathes fire, too. But, unlike his western cousins, he appears to be completely disinterested in wealth acquisition. He's solely interested in bitches, whom he kidnaps, and in wanton destruction, which he does seemingly for fun. Both scenarios bring him into conflict with heroes, who eventually slay him.

That being said, the bitches might not be averse to the idea of their kidnapping. When interacting with them, Zmei Gorynich usually takes the shape of a handsome youth and seduces them like a pro. But his shapeshifting powers aren't limited to humans: he can perfectly turn into any object. In one story he even turned into kitchenware to avoid detection, and in another one into a broom. Apparently, dragons are no strangers to cowardice.

>>84689358
Thanks bro, that was very cool. Do we still save the threads?

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That's all, folks! I'm done for the time being. A huge thanks for all those who have been encouraging me, and a big fuck you to the trolls. See you later!

>>84689367
I archived it earlier

https://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/2022/84620887/

>>84689379
>155cm
>100 of that is just legs
IMAGINE

>>84689393
>0 votes
seriously.

>>84689432
How do you vote?

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Noonwrath (poludnitsa) - ghost of a woman who died working in the fields. Looks like a flying mummy in a slavic dress with a wreath of flowers on her head. Sneaks up on field workers and kills them with her sickle. Actually the personification of deadly sunstroke.

>>84620887
Since this thread is going into the archive, I'm going to make an index post listing all of the creatures described here (or most, I might miss a few).

Alkonost:
>>84620887
Aspid:
>>84621047
Chort:
>>84621276
Anchutka:
>>84621409
Arys-pole:
>>84621619
>>84633186
Auka:
>>84622106
Babay:
>>84622247
Bagan:
>>84622456
Vazila:
>>84622590
Kumelgan:
>>84622760
Chuhaister:
>>84623440
Bagnik:
>>84623449
Potercha:
>>84623576
Badzula:
>>84623614
Balamuten:
>>84623797
Bannik:
>>84624022
White Maiden:
>>84624243
Bash Chelik:
>>84624491
>>84643894
Belun:
>>84624723
Vodnik:
>>84624895
Chud:
>>84635221
>>84624898
>>84625589
Beskud:
>>84625328
Bzionek:
>>84625512
Berendei:
>>84625769
Blud:
>>84625995
Bovesh:
>>84626119
Boginkas:
>>84626381
Bozatka:
>>84626551
Psoglav:
>>84626747
>>84626762
>>84626797
Zlydens:
>>84630201
>>84635004
Blajin:
>>84631129
Căpcăun:
>>84631129
>>84632456
Zazovka:
>>84631503
>>84635441
Rusalka:
>>84632346
>>84662946
>>84663013
Boli-boshka:
>>84635572
Bolotnik:
>>84635775
Borovik:
>>84636011
Budimir:
>>84636113
Bayun Cat:
>>84636296
Buka:
>>84636517
Verlioka:
>>84636703
Zhar-ptitsa:
>>84638220
Samca:
>>84638357