Triglav- Slavic GodDeity"Three-Headed God"

Three Heads, Blindfolded

Triglav had three faces, each turned in a different direction. One ruled heaven, one earth, one the underworld. His eyes were bound with golden bands. Ebbo and Herbord, the biographers of Bishop Otto of Bamberg, recorded the reason the priests gave: Triglav's gaze covered all three realms, and if he saw the sins of humanity without the blindfold, his wrath would end the world. The golden bands were not decoration. They were restraint.

The Black Horse of Szczecin

At Triglav's temple in Szczecin, a sacred black horse was kept that no one rode except during divination. Before a military campaign, priests laid nine spears crossed upon the ground and led the horse over them. If the animal stepped cleanly across without touching a shaft, the omens favored war. If it stumbled or caught a hoof on one of the spears, the campaign was abandoned. The horse was groomed and fed by the temple priests alone. Its behavior was Triglav's speech, the only way the blindfolded god communicated with the people who worshipped him.

Otto's Campaign

In the 1120s, Bishop Otto of Bamberg arrived in Pomerania to convert the Western Slavs. At Szczecin, his followers destroyed a three-headed statue of Triglav. They cut off one of the golden heads and sent it to Rome as proof that paganism had fallen. The rest of the idol was broken apart. The sacred black horse was taken. The temple was leveled. Herbord's account, written around 1159, describes these events with the satisfaction of a chronicler recording a victory, yet the detail he lavishes on the idol, the horse, and the rituals suggests he understood he was recording the end of something that would not come again.