Zbruch Idol

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Zbruch Idol (Polish: Światowid ze Zbrucza, Russian: Збручский идол) is a 10th-century sculpture, and is one of the rarest monuments of the Slavic ethnic religion. It was discovered near the village of Lychkivtsi just north of Husiatyn in the Zbruch River (Dniester's tributary) in 1848.

The statue is now on display in the Archaeological Museum in Kraków, Poland. The exact copy of the idol is located in the State Historical Museum in Moscow.

[edit] Description

The Zbruch Idol is a four-sided pillar of grey limestone, 2.67 meters in height, and has three tiers of reliefs engraved upon each of the four sides. The lower tier is 67 cm; the middle tier is 40 cm; and the top tier is 167 cm. The reliefs are in rather poor condition, possibly due to erosion of stone in water. The reliefs depict the following characters:

• The three sides of the lowest tier show a kneeling bearded entity who, kneeling, appears to support the upper tier on his hands; the fourth side is blank.
• The middle tier shows a smaller entity with extended arms on all four sides.
• The four sides of the uppermost tier have the largest figures of the idol, with four faces united beneath a spherical headgear. Each of the sides has a distinct attribute: a ring or a bracelet; a drinking horn and a tiny "child" figure; a sword and a horse; and an eroded solar symbol.

[edit] Identification

There is some debate about what exactly the idol represents. Most scholars now agree that the three tiers of reliefs represent the three levels of the world, from the bottom underworld, to the middle mortal world and the uppermost, largest, world of heavenly gods.

• Soon after the discovery, Joachim Lelewel theorized the top tier represented two bearded males and two beardless females, being the four seasons: female with the ring, the Spring; male with the horn, Summer; female with the horse and sword, Autumn; and a male without any attributes, Winter.

• A.S. Famintzyn in his 1884 work "Ancient Slav Deities" argued against Lelewel's theory, and instead claimed that the Zbruch pillar is a representation of a single deity, Svantevit. Famintzyn believed that all four sides of each tier represented a single entity. Historical sources described Svantevit's idol as being on the island of Rügen, that it had four heads, and was kept in a temple together with a sacred sword, drinking horn and horse.

Famintzyn was also the first to recognize the three-tiered structure as related to the three levels of the world, linking it to the Slavic deity Triglav.

• In 1964, G. Lenczyk was the first to identify the eroded solar symbol on the side, previously believed to be without attributes. Otherwise, Lenczyk supported Famintzyn's theory that the idol represented Svantevit.

• In 1979, H. Lowmianski claimed that the idol was altogether non-Slavic, as it was made of stone, and not of wood.

• Boris Rybakov in his 1987 work Paganism of Ancient Rus argued that four sides of the top tier represent four different Slavic gods, two female and two male, with their corresponding middle-tier entities always of the opposite gender. In Rybakov's hypothesis, the male deity with the horse and sword is Perun, the female with the horn of plenty is Mokosh, the female with the ring is Lada, and the male deity with the solar symbol, above the empty underworld, is Dazbog, (the God of sunlight for whom the sun was not an object but an attribute, thus the symbol's position on his clothing rather than in his hand). Further, Rybakov identifies the underworld deity as Veles.

Rybakov also identified the side with the male figure holding a horn as the front of the idol, based on the bottom-tier figure, which is shown with legs as if seen from head-on, the two adjoining sides showing the legs from the side, and the fourth side left blank.

Finally, Rybakov believes that the entire idol's phallic shape is meant to unite all of the smaller figures as a single larger deity, Rod.

Most scholars believe that the Zbruch Idol was dumped into the water some time after the baptism of Kievan Rus, just as the idols in Kiev and Novgorod.

[edit] Sources

• Weigel. Bildwerke aus altslawischer Zeit. Archiw fur Anthropologie, 1882, Bd. XXI
• Famintzyn A.S. Ancient Slav Deities. St Petersburg, 1884
• Lenczyk G. Swiatowid Zbruczanski. Materialy Archeologiczne. Krakow, 1964
• Lowmianski H. Religia slowian i jei upadek. Warszawa, 1979
• Boris Rybakov. Paganism of Ancient Rus. Moscow, 1987