Bogatyr

This article is about the medieval epic heroes. For other uses, see Bogatyr (disambiguation).
The three most famous bogatyrs, Dobrynya Nikitich, Ilya Muromets and Alyosha Popovich, appear together in Viktor Vasnetsov's 1898 painting Bogatyrs kept in the Tretyakov Gallery.

A bogatyr (Russian: богатырь, IPA: [bəɡɐˈtɨrʲ] ⓘ, Ukrainian: богатир) or vityaz (Russian: витязь, IPA: [ˈvʲitʲɪsʲ], Ukrainian: витязь) is a stock character in medieval East Slavic legends, akin to a Western European knight-errant. Bogatyrs appear mainly in Rus' epic poems—bylinas. Historically, they came into existence during the reign of Vladimir the Great (Grand Prince of Kiev from 978 to 1015) as part of his elite warriors (druzhina[1]), akin to Knights of the Round Table.[2] Tradition describes bogatyrs as warriors of immense strength, courage and bravery, rarely using magic while fighting enemies[2] in order to maintain the "loosely based on historical fact" aspect of bylinas. They are characterized as having resounding voices, with patriotic and religious pursuits, defending Rus' from foreign enemies (especially nomadic Turkic steppe-peoples or Finno-Ugric tribes in the period prior to the Mongol invasions) and their religion.[3]

  1. ^ Pronin, Alexander (1719). Byliny; Heroic Tales of Old Russia. Possev. p. 26. ISBN 9783791219882. Retrieved 2019-01-05. Stay in my druzhina and be my senior bogatyr, chief above all the others.
  2. ^ a b Bailey, James; Ivanova, Tatyana (1998). An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics. New York: M.E. Sharpe.
  3. ^ "Богатыри". www.vehi.net. Archived from the original on 2013-02-06. Retrieved 2018-03-21.