Paradise Birds- Slavic GroupCollective"The Three Birds of Paradise"

The World Tree

Three birds roost in the upper branches of the World Tree, where the canopy opens into Iriy, the celestial paradise. Each has a woman's face and feathered wings. They do not hunt, do not migrate, do not age. They sing.

The Songs and the Listeners

Sirin sings first in most tellings, and her song is the most dangerous. Mortals who hear it forget their names, their homes, the faces of their children. They follow the sound through forests and over rivers, enchanted past hunger and exhaustion, until they die. In Russian folk practice, people drove Sirin away with loud noise, banging pots and shouting, because her beauty could not be resisted quietly.

Alkonost answers with the opposite voice. Her song fills the listener with joy so complete that pain and grief fall away like shed clothing. She lays her eggs on the surface of the sea at the winter solstice, and for the days they float on the water, the waves go still and no storm rises.

Gamayun does not enchant. She speaks. Her prophecies recount the creation of the earth and the genealogies of gods. In Afanasyev's reading of the folk material, Gamayun is a living record of sacred history. Only the wise endure hearing her.

In Paint and Woodcut

The three birds entered Russian visual culture through lubki, the popular woodcut prints that circulated from the seventeenth century onward. In these prints the birds perch together, wings spread, their human faces framed by halos or crowns of feathers. They appeared on church carvings, manuscript illuminations, and embroidered textiles, their images far more widespread than any written text about them.

In 1898, Viktor Vasnetsov painted Gamayun: dark-winged, grave, perched against a stormy sea. The painting fixed her image in modern Russian memory as a figure of solemn and uncanny knowledge.