This holiday was so strongly rooted in the Slavic tradition that the Church authorities decided to make the pagan ritual a part of the Christian calendar – Kupała Night is now known as St. John’s ...

However these ‘pagan churches’ are attested primarily as late as ... A more typical feature of Slavic religious ritual was horse divination. Horses (often white) appear in many records of Slavic ...

A beautiful but lesser-known tradition in Belarus involves whispering one's deepest desires to trees within its ancient ...

In fact, they discovered that this goes back to Szczodre Gody, a Slavic pagan celebration of the Winter ... while in fact it comes from earlier rituals," Julia explains further.