Alkonost

Her name is a scribal accident that hardened into a person: a Greek phrase about the halcyon, misread in a Slavonic manuscript as a proper noun, and then given a body, a voice and a dwelling place over several centuries of copying and painting. The record says so rather than supplying a Slavic etymology that does not exist. She is also, with Sirin, the subject of one of the most reproduced images in Russian art — Vasnetsov's 1896 painting sets the two of them in one tree.

Domains

• joy
• paradise

Relations

• companion: SirinThe pairing is the standard one — the bird of joy against the bird of sorrow — and the two are printed facing each other on lubok sheets. It is a grouping in the tradition's own iconography, not an episode in which they meet, and this note is here so that nobody reads the edge as the latter.Reference treatment: Alkonost, Sirin and Gamayun are often grouped together in Slavic mythic tradition as a symbolic triad, each representing different emotional and spiritual states. (secondary)
• companion: GamayunThird of the triad. Same basis, same caveat.Reference treatment of the three bird-maidens as a symbolic triad of the Slavic tradition. (secondary)

Sources

• Alkonost is the bird-woman of Slavic tradition who dwells in paradise and whose voice brings joy to the hearer and despair to the wicked.: Reference treatments of Alkonost and of the Slavic bird-maidens. (secondary)