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deity with their Perkunas, a god of similar name, while the Varangians might have interpreted him as their Thor. Such a deity was a good patron for a town in which interests of several tribes converged. Moreover, Vladimir, before he gained supremacy over the whole Ruthenia, had been the ruler of Novgorod under the protectorate of his uncle Dobrynia sińce about 970, and this very town was his base in the struggle against his brother in 980 (SSS, vol. 6, p. 532). The sacred oak grove of the Thunderer, the sanctuary with Perun’s efTigy, the monastery called Perynsky - were the milestones of the tradition of Perun’s cult. It was continued by 01earius’s relation ąuoted above, the seventeenth-century Tsvetnik and ethnographic records, in which the figurę of dragon-crocodile might be viewed as the opponent of the Thunderer from the Indo-European myth of their duel. In Slavonic mythology this function was often ascribed to Voios-Veles (Ivanov, Toporov, 1974, p. 4-179). The cult of this deity appeared in Novgorod, which may be deduced from the example of the Street named after him.

The mentions about Kiev and Perynia in the chronicles are the only reliable information about open-air sanctuaries in Ruthenia. Let us now supplement them with archaeological finds, which are ąuite numerous.

First, there is the village Khodosoviche near Rokhachev, with Svyatoye Ozero (Sacred Lakę) situated a few kilometers from the Dnepr bank. In 1969 remains of two cult circles were discovered there. The first one, reach-ing 7 m in diameter, was surrounded with traces of a former palisadę. In the middle of the circle a hole left by a post or an idol was revealed. From the south, east and north the circle was surrounded with C-shaped ditches filled with sand, ash and fragments of pottery. The Southern ditch

Fig. 58. Khodosoviche. A plan and profile of the sanctuary. a - sod; b - dark grey sand; c - light grey sand; d - charcoal; e - the filling of the trench; f - the soil excavated from the trench; g - burnt clay; h - rock-bed. After A.F. Kuza, F.G. Soloveva, 1972, p. 147.

Fig. 59. Khodosoviche. A reconstruction of the cult circle. After V.V. Sedov, 1982, p. 287.

was accompanied with a round hollow of 2.25 m diameter, filled with similar materiał. The western part of the site was not archaeologically explored, washed away by the waters of the nearby lakę. Ten metres to the east from the first circle another, smaller one, also with a post-hole in the centre, was found. It was surrounded with C-shaped ditches as well, in this case there were two of them, located to the north and to the south of the object. Several dozen meters to the north of both circles remains of a single hut, probably contemporary with the sanctuary, were discovered. Another fmds, situated to the south-east of the shrine, were fragments of a settlement (probably earlier than the circles) and an extensive burial ground with barrows. The discoverers, F.G. Soloveva and A.F. Kuza (1972), datę the sanctuary to the lOth/llthc. on the basis of the pottery found there. The lonely hut standing near the circles is worth attention, as it may have been the house of a priest serving at the sanctuary. The three C-shaped ditches around the larger circle, orientated towards geographical directions, bear some resemblance to the similarly orientated fire-places in Perynia and the projections of the alleged zhertvennik in Kiev. The symmetrical arrangement of the sanctuary in Khodosoviche induced V.V. Sedov (1982, p. 287) to suggest that the part of the shrine destroyed by the lakę contained a fourth

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