Svyatogor- Slavic GiantGiant"The Holy Mountain"

The Ancient Giant

The earth could not hold Svyatogor. In the byliny, he walks only the Svyatye Gory, the Holy Mountains at the edge of the world, because the flat lands of Rus buckle under his weight. The ground groans with each step. Trees snap at his belt. He is a bogatyr from before the age of bogatyrs, old when the human heroes of Kiev were not yet born.

The Bag of Earthly Weight

In one bylina, Svyatogor encounters a small traveler on the road carrying a simple saddlebag. The giant, supremely confident in his strength, reaches down to lift it and cannot. He strains with both hands, then with all his might, but the bag does not move. Instead, Svyatogor sinks into the earth up to his knees. The traveler is Mikula Selyaninovich, the peasant bogatyr, and his bag contains the tyaga zemnaya, the weight of the earth itself.

The Meeting with Ilya Muromets

The central Svyatogor bylina describes his encounter with Ilya Muromets. Traveling through the mountains, Ilya comes upon the sleeping giant and is awed by his scale. Svyatogor is so large that Ilya and his horse can fit in his palm. Despite the vast difference in their power, the two become sworn brothers. Svyatogor places Ilya in his pocket and carries him through the mountains.

During their travels, they find a great stone coffin lying on the road. Ilya tries it first. It is far too large for him. Svyatogor lies down and the coffin fits perfectly. When he tries to rise, the lid slams shut and will not open. He calls to Ilya to strike the coffin with a sword to shatter it, but each blow only adds iron bands that seal the lid tighter.

The Dying Breath

Accepting his fate, Svyatogor breathes his strength onto Ilya through a crack in the coffin. In Rybnikov's collected variants, he offers all his power, but Ilya wisely accepts only a portion, understanding that the full strength of a giant would make him too heavy for the earth. In Gilferding's Onega recordings, Svyatogor warns Ilya not to take the final breath, which carries not strength but death.

The coffin seals shut over the last of the ancient giants. Ilya rides down from the Holy Mountains into the world of men, carrying enough of the old power to defend the Russian land, but not so much that the earth cannot bear him.