Morana, also called Marzanna, Mara or Morena, is the Slavic goddess of winter and of death, and of the death that a growing year requires; but, as with much of Slavic religion, the record must be read carefully. She is not attested in any pre-Christian source, and the earliest mentions of her are medieval Christian glosses, passing references by churchmen, such as a thirteenth-century Polish note equating a figure of this name with a classical goddess, rather than descriptions of a living cult. What is genuinely well documented, and continues into the present, is a ritual: across Poland, the Czech lands, Slovakia and neighbouring regions, a straw effigy called Marzanna or Morena, representing winter and death, is made at the end of winter, carried in procession, and then destroyed, burned, or drowned by being thrown into a river, to drive out the cold and the dying season and to welcome the spring. This custom is well recorded over several centuries and is still practised today, especially by children around the spring equinox. The figure of Morana as a goddess, then, stands at the meeting point of a securely attested seasonal ritual and a much more uncertain question about ancient belief: whether the effigy that is drowned each spring preserves the memory of a genuine pre-Christian goddess of winter and death, or whether the personification grew up around the ritual itself and was later given the dignity of a deity.
Scholars treat the ritual as real and old and the goddess behind it as probable but not securely documented. Morana is best understood as the personified winter-and-death of a living folk custom, the season that must be ritually killed each year so that spring can return, whose standing as an ancient goddess is likely but cannot be proven from early sources.