Rusalka
A water spirit of Slavic folklore, the soul of a drowned girl or an unbaptized child, who lives in lakes and rivers, sits in the trees at the start of summer, and lures people into the water.
Meaning
The rusalka (plural rusalki) is the water-maiden of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian folk belief. W. R. S. Ralston, writing in 1872, compared the rusalki to “the elves and fairies of Western Europe” and described them as pale, beautiful girls with long wavy hair, green as grass, dressed in green leaves or “a long white shift, worn without a girdle”. Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Czech scholar Jan Máchal both say they were believed to be the souls of unbaptized children or of girls who had drowned. Our drawing shows one on a bent birch, where Britannica says they climbed during “rusalki week”.
Origin and history
The rusalki were seasonal. Ralston says they vanished in winter and did not show themselves again until it was over, and that in the week before Whitsun they sat in the trees asking for linen; in Little Russia (Ukraine) women hung shifts and skeins of thread on the branches as gifts for them. Máchal adds that at Whitsuntide people did not stay out at night, bathe in rivers or work in the fields, for fear of angering them. Britannica says that in rusalki week they came out of the water to sit in willow and birch trees and danced in rings by moonlight.
They were dangerous to meet. Máchal writes that they rocked on slender branches, enticing travellers, and tickled them to death or drew them down into the stream. Ralston adds that a rusalka whose hair dried out would die, unless she had her comb, with which she could raise a flood.
Beautiful or wicked?
Britannica records that the rusalki were pictured differently from place to place. By the Danube, where they were called vile, they were lovely girls in robes of mist singing to passers-by; in northern Russia they were ugly, unkempt and wicked, waiting to ambush people.
Where the name comes from
The sources disagree. Ralston thought the name probably came from rus, an old Slavonic word for a stream, or ruslo, a river bed. Máchal derived it from the Rusalye, the Slavic festival kept at Whitsun, whose own name he traced to a Greek word for a “feast of roses”. Both describe the same water-spirits; the Leshy is their counterpart in the forest.
Read next
- Next in Mythical creatures of Greece and EuropeMinotaurThe bull-headed man of Greek myth: the son of Queen Pasiphae of Crete and a bull, shut in the Labyrinth that Daedalus built, and killed there by Theseus.
- The same shape in Maya symbols and godsAk’bal (Aq’ab’al)The third Maya day sign: night and darkness. Eric Thompson saw in it the jaguar god of the dark inside of the earth; K’iche’ daykeepers, who call it Aq’ab’al, make it the day of the light of dawn.
See also
Leshy, Centaur, Chimera, Hydra, Harpy, Siren.
Sources
- The Songs of the Russian People (W. R. S. Ralston, 1872), W. R. S. Ralston, The Songs of the Russian People, as Illustrative of Slavonic Mythology and Russian Social Life (London: Ellis and Green, 1872), Internet Archive, chapter II, The Rusalka, pp. 139–142
- Slavic Mythology (Jan Máchal, The Mythology of All Races, vol. 3, 1918), Jan Máchal, “Slavic Mythology”, in The Mythology of All Races, volume III: Celtic, Slavic (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1918), Internet Archive, Chapter V, Navky and Rusalky
- Rusalka (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Rusalka”, online edition (archived copy), Encyclopaedia Britannica, article
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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