Where the reconstructed myth of a dying and returning Jarilo remains a scholarly hypothesis, the ritual customs that fed that hypothesis were themselves directly observed and recorded, and it is worth separating the two. Nineteenth century Russian ethnographers, collecting material in provinces including Voronezh, Kostroma and other parts of central Russia, described a widespread springtime or early summer custom often called the funeral of Yarilo, in which villagers, most often young women, fashioned a straw or wooden effigy dressed as a man, sometimes given exaggerated markers of fertility, and carried it through the village with singing, mock lamentation and festive mourning before burying it, burning it, or tearing it apart in a field, an occasion that mixed genuine grief-like performance with unmistakably festive, even bawdy, celebration. Regional variants recorded by different collectors differ considerably in detail, some treating the buried figure as a fertility charge returned to the earth for the harvest, others folding the rite into broader midsummer festivities that the Orthodox Church tolerated as folk custom long after any explicit pagan meaning had faded from participants' own understanding of the rite.
These accounts are ethnography of nineteenth century peasant practice, not eyewitness testimony to a medieval or earlier pagan rite, and the connecting thread back to a hypothetical ancient god named Jarilo is an inference scholars such as Katicic and Belaj later drew rather than something the villagers themselves stated. What the ethnographic record secures beyond doubt is the custom itself: real, well attested seasonal rituals involving a mock death and burial performed under the name Yarilo, whatever their ultimate antiquity or original meaning.