That the ancient Slavs must have had some religious sense, not to say organisation, seems doubtless. They were, after all, as human as any. However, for whatever reason, be it the lack of a written language before the advent of SS Cyril and Methodius, or the swiftness, with which they accepted Christianity from both German and Thessalonian, except for a very few carvings in stone and wood32 the ancient Slavs have left no record of their beliefs, to say nothing of the marbles left behind by ‘our brethren the Greeks.’ Mediaeval chroniclers conflated supposition with what they learned of the classical pantheon in their schools; this and the paucity of material artefacts leads the greatest of modern scholars of Slavic antiquity, Aleksander Brückner, to shrug with a sigh: ‘After setting aside a
