One of the paradoxes of religious history in Eastern Europe is that paganism lasted so long there, yet we know so little about it. There is no Slavic equivalent to the great compendium of Norse myth preserved in the Icelandic Edda, or the Celtic tales contained in the Welsh Mabinogion or the Irish Táin. All we have are fragments, recorded by hostile witnesses.

One of the first such testimonies comes from, of all places, Sicily. Around A.D. 700, a Slavic raiding party was taken prisoner by the local militia. An enterprising bishop asked its members what they believed in. By means of a translator, they replied that they worshipped „fire, water, and their own swords.“ Almost seven hundred years later, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was still being ruled by practicing pagans who believed something very similar. A vast realm that incorporated much of today’s Belarus and Ukraine, Lithuania was the last country in Europe to give up the old faith. In 1341, when Grand Duke Gediminas died, he was buried in the full, cruel splendor of the pagan rite: burned to ash on a giant pyre, along with his favorite weapons, slaves, dogs, and horses, and a few German Crusaders thrown in for good measure. When the whole thing caught fire, Gediminas’s fellow pagan lords cried out in sorrow and pelted the flames with the claws of lynxes and bears.

—Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye Eastern Europe, (Great Britain: Oneworld Publications Ltd, 2023), 6.