Deity · Slavic · c. 980 CE
Dazhbog
Also called Dažbog, Dazhdbog
The Slavic sun god of Vladimir's pantheon at Kiev, whose people are still calling themselves his grandsons in a poem written two centuries after they were baptised.
Narrow source base
His name is transparent — the god who gives — and he stands in the list of idols Vladimir raised at Kiev before he demolished them. What makes him the most useful Slavic figure in this corpus is the second attestation: the Tale of Igor's Campaign, a secular poem of about 1185, calls the Russian people the grandsons of Dazhbog as a matter of ordinary praise. Nobody is worshipping him and nobody is attacking him. The god has become an ancestry, which is a stage of demotion the corpus can otherwise only assert.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
The hill at Kiev, where Vladimir set the idols up and then had them thrown down
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- Rank
- The Giving God
- Pantheon
- Slavic
- Order
- Slavic pantheon
- Base of operations
- The hill at Kiev, where Vladimir set the idols up and then had them thrown down
- Era
- c. 980 CE
- Traditions
- Slavic
Traits
- Domain
- The sun, granted fortune, the descent of a people
- Traditional form
- Set up as an idol at Kiev; no description survives
Stats
Known connections
Chain of command
1 site
Where was it worshipped?
Attested cult sites, located against the Pleiades gazetteer of the ancient world where it reaches and against Wikidata everywhere else. An absence here is not evidence that no cult existed: a good number of figures never had one, and the entry above says so where that is the case.
Vladimir's idols stood here from 980 until he had them pulled down in 988 — Perun on the hill above the town, Veles down in the Podil by the river.
One of the idols Vladimir raised on the hill in 980 and had pulled down in 988.
50.450, 30.524 · Wikidata Q1899
3 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 3 offices attributed to Dazhbog, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- material2
- social1
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Dazhbog, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts, all inside a single century
Where the texts differ
- Rank: given as Of Vladimir's idols; Ancestor
Named among the idols set up on the hill at Kiev and thrown down at the conversion.
The Russian people called his grandsons, two centuries after the conversion, in a poem that neither worships nor denounces him.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Dazhbog?
What rank is Dazhbog?
How else is Dazhbog spelled?
What is Dazhbog said to do?
How old is Dazhbog?
Nearest in the corpus
If Dazhbog is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Perun
Thunder God · Slavic
Chief god of Vladimir's pantheon at Kiev, whose idol was thrown into the Dnieper at the conversion in 988.
Stribog
Lord of the Winds · Slavic
The Slavic wind god of Vladimir's pantheon, whose grandsons in the Tale of Igor are the winds themselves, blowing arrows across the steppe at an army.
Veles
God of Cattle and the Underworld · Slavic
Perun's opponent, god of herds, wealth and the world below — and one of the clearest cases of a god converted directly into a devil.
Chernobog
The Black God · Slavic
The Slavic black god, known from one sentence in one hostile German chronicle — and the foundation of everything later written about Slavic dualism, which is more than one sentence can hold.
Artemis
Mistress of Animals · Greek
Huntress and protector of the young, whose Ephesian cult statue looks nothing like her and whose temple gave the ancient world one of its most durable protective formulas.
Hades
Lord of the Underworld · Greek
Ruler of the dead by lot rather than by punishment — a god of the underworld who is not evil, a distinction Christian cosmology cannot express.
The books behind Dazhbog
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
The Primary Chronicle & Slavic Folk Record
Attributed to Nestor and later compilers · c. 1113, describing earlier practice · Old East Slavic
Read The Primary Chronicle & Slavic Folk Record in full ↗Cover: Public domain · from the Middle Ages, unknown · Wikimedia file page
The Tale of Igor's Campaign
Anonymous; tr. from the Old East Slavic · c. 1185 · Old East Slavic
Read The Tale of Igor's Campaign in full ↗
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.