Alkonost
Slavic · numen · modern collection · numen
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
Sources
- Reference treatments of Alkonost and of the Slavic bird-maidens.