Zbruch Idol (Swiatowid ze Zbrucza)

A four-sided grey limestone pillar statue, about 2.67 metres tall, carved on all four faces in three horizontal tiers usually read as the underworld, the world of the living and the celestial realm of the gods, and crowned by a single stone cap bearing one four-faced head looking in all four directions. Pulled from the Zbruch River near Lychkivtsi, then Liczkowce, during a drought in 1848, it was given to Count Mieczyslaw Potocki, who proposed identifying the four-faced summit figure with Svetovid, the many-faced Slavic god described in medieval chronicles of the pagan Baltic Slavs. Scholars remain divided on the identification: some read the four faces as four separate deities rather than one, and the crouching figure on the lowest tier, bearing the weight of the whole pillar, is separately identified by some as Veles, associated with the underworld and cattle. Whatever its precise reading, it is the single most important surviving monumental sculpture of pre-Christian Slavic religion and has become a visual touchstone for the modern Rodnovery revival, appearing in replica at Slavic pagan sites across Eastern Europe.