Yarila

            Yarila (or Yarilo) is a deity of spring fertility, he is close to antique cults of the dying and reviving god of fertility like Dionysus. Yarila personifies the spring, the nature waking up from winter sleep.

The pagans imagined him as the young man on a white horse, in white clothes, with a wreath of wild flowers, with a sheaf of rye in one hand and the chopped off human head in another.

With adoption of Christianity this deity has drawn closer to the cult of George - Yuri. But even in the XIX century the rest of Yarila holidays still remained in Russian villages.