Slavic strokes and notches

One sentence, and what it does not say

Everything starts with a single line written around 890–900 by a Bulgarian monk, Chernorizets Hrabar, in a short work called O pismenah — On the Letters. He was defending the new Slavic alphabet against Greek condescension, and in passing he described what came before it: the Slavs, being pagan, had no books, but counted and divined by means of cherty i rezy — strokes and notches.

That sentence is the entire documentary basis for pre-Christian Slavic writing. It has been carrying an enormous amount of weight for over a thousand years.

Read plainly, it says rather little. Cherty are strokes, lines, scratches; rezy are cuts or notches. Both words belong to the vocabulary of carving and furrowing, not of reading or speech — the same relationship the Finnish runo, borrowed early from Germanic, has to its origin as a scratched mark. And Hrabar tells us what they were for: counting and divining. He does not say the Slavs wrote with them. He says the opposite — that they had no books.

One argument is regularly made in the other direction, and it is a fair one. The early Slavs lived among wood. Anything carved on staves, bark or bone would have rotted, and the silence of the archaeological record is exactly the silence you would expect whether or not a script existed. That is true, and it means absence of evidence is weak evidence here.

But it cuts one way only. It licenses saying we cannot rule it out. It does not license producing a row of letters and calling it recovered.

What counting and divining marks actually look like

The practice Hrabar describes is not exotic and is not lost. Systems of exactly this kind are documented all over Eurasia: tamgas, the property and clan marks of the steppe peoples; potters' marks identifying a workshop or an owner; tally sticks recording debts, days and quantities by notch; and lots cast from marked chips of wood.

All of these are genuine, useful, sometimes elaborate — and none of them is writing. A tally cannot record a sentence. A property mark identifies a thing without saying anything about it. This is what specialists mean by proto-writing: symbols that carry meaning without encoding language.

The archaeology fits. Pottery from the fourth-century Chernyakhov culture — a mixed zone where Slavic, Germanic and Sarmatian populations met — and from the later Prague-Korchak and related cultures carries incised marks made before firing: crosses, geometric patterns, and rotational figures. The plausible readings are ownership, workshop identity, contents, and protection of what was stored inside.

One caution about a symbol that comes up constantly. Rotating cross and swastika-form motifs do appear on early pottery across Eurasia, including on Slavic material. The name kolovrat, and the political charge the symbol now carries in pan-Slavic nationalist use, are modern additions to a very old and very widespread decorative motif. The shape is ancient; the modern meaning was attached later, and does not travel back.

The pot from Alekanovo

In autumn 1897 the Russian archaeologist Vasily Gorodtsov excavated a Slavic burial at Alekanovo in Ryazan Oblast. In the grave of an elderly woman, dated to the tenth or eleventh century, he found a small, roughly made clay pot with a continuous horizontal band of fourteen characters running around it.

Gorodtsov wondered aloud whether they might be native runes. Comparative analysis did not support him: only two of the fourteen resembled anything in the Germanic or Turkic runic repertoires. The following year more of the same characters turned up on pottery fragments in the same village, which at least established that the pot was not one person's doodle.

After more than a century of attention, the Alekanovo inscription remains completely undeciphered.

It is worth being clear about why, because the mystery is often oversold. Fourteen characters is not enough material to decipher anything, in any script, ever — decipherment needs volume, repetition, and ideally a bilingual. Even if this were a fully phonetic alphabet, fourteen signs on one pot would remain unreadable. The candidates that fit the evidence are a local Vyatich set of marks, a potter's series, or a proto-script that never spread far enough to standardise before Cyrillic made it unnecessary.

What Alekanovo does establish is real and modest: early Slavs made structured sequences of abstract signs. That is a genuine finding. It is not an alphabet.

The bone at Lány

The most important discovery in this whole field is recent, and it is not what anyone was looking for.

Excavating a sixth-to-seventh century settlement at Břeclav-Lány in South Moravia, archaeologists recovered a fragment of cattle rib from a refuse pit, deposited alongside Prague-type hand-made pottery — unambiguously early Slavic material. During laboratory cleaning a graduate student, Alena Slámová, noticed deliberate incisions on the surface. A team led by Jiří Macháček of Masaryk University published the analysis in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2021.

The work was thorough. Scanning electron microscopy and use-wear analysis established that the marks were carved, not root etching or animal gnawing. Radiocarbon dating of the collagen, with ancient DNA confirming the species, placed the bone between 585 and 640 AD.

The incisions are runes — and they are Elder Futhark, the Germanic row. Specifically, six of the last eight characters of the twenty-four rune sequence, in order. Because it is an abecedary, a stretch of the alphabet rather than a word or a name, the runologist Robert Nedoma read it as a practice piece. The carver was not good at it: two runes of the final group are missing, the proportions wander, and lines are repeated.

Someone in a Slavic village around the year 600 was practising the Germanic alphabet on a discarded bone, roughly three centuries before the Glagolitic script was invented.

The interpretations are genuinely open. It may have been carved by a Germanic person — perhaps from a population that stayed behind rather than moving on to Italy — living among Slavs. It may be a Slav learning a neighbour's script. It may be someone copying shapes understood as powerful rather than as letters.

What it is not is evidence of a Slavic script. It is evidence of contact, and possibly of Slavs learning to write in somebody else's system — which is interesting enough on its own, and undercuts the older assumption that these populations lived in sealed hostility. The specific reading is still argued over. The date and the carving are not.

Scandinavian runes on Slavic rivers

Three centuries later, runes came to Slavic lands again, in quantity and in person. Scandinavian traders and warriors — the Varangians, the Rus' — worked the river routes down the Dnieper, Volga and Volkhov toward Byzantium, and left a deep mark on the politics of Kievan Rus'.

They left very few runestones, for two reasons that have nothing to do with the Slavs. The Scandinavian habit depends on abundant surface granite, which the forests, steppes and marshes of Eastern Europe do not provide. And the Arab envoy ibn Fadlan, who watched a Rus' funeral on the Volga, records the memorial being cut into a wooden post set over the burial — a practice that leaves nothing behind in a damp climate.

The main survivor is the Berezan runestone, found in 1905 by Ernst von Stern on Berezan Island, where the Dnieper reaches the Black Sea. A Gotlandic merchant named Grani cut it for Karl, his félag — his business partner. It is in the Younger Futhark, entirely authentic, and entirely Scandinavian: a Baltic trading practice carried down a river, not a local script.

As the Varangian elite married into and dissolved among the Slavic majority, their runes went with them, and Cyrillic occupied the ground completely.

Two centuries of manufactured evidence

A conspicuous gap plus national feeling is a reliable recipe for forgery, and this gap produced a great deal of it.

In 1768 a hoard of bronze figurines, plates and ritual implements was reported from near Prillwitz in Mecklenburg. Promoted by the theologian Andreas Gottlieb Masch, who published them in 1771, and later by Count Jan Potocki, the pieces were said to come from Rethra, the great lost temple of the Polabian Slavs. More than a hundred and eighty objects, many carrying runic inscriptions — apparently decisive proof of a literate pagan Slavic civilisation.

They are forgeries. The casting technique is of eighteenth-century manufacture, and the inscriptions turn out to be characters lifted from published Germanic rune rows and applied without regard for sense.

Poland produced its own version in the mid-nineteenth century: the Mikorzyn stones, carved with a horse, a human figure and runic characters, taken up enthusiastically by prominent Polish Slavists as proof of native literacy, and demonstrated to be patriotic fakes before the century was out.

The pattern is the one that runs through every case on the fabrications page. The demand comes first. The artifact arrives to meet it, and it arrives carrying exactly what the audience already wanted to find.

Where the eighteen runes actually come from

The 18-character 'Slavic runic alphabet' in circulation today has a traceable history, and it does not begin in Slavic antiquity.

It begins in Vienna in 1902, with the Austrian occultist Guido von List. Blind for eleven months after cataract surgery, von List reported a vision revealing what he took to be the original runes of an ancient Aryan priesthood he called the Armanen. He took the historical 16-rune Younger Futhark, altered it, and published the result as the Armanen Futharkh — eighteen characters. The number is not arbitrary and not Germanic-historical either: he chose eighteen to match the eighteen magical songs Odin lists in the Rúnatal section of the Hávamál.

Von List's eighteen runes went on to become the backbone of twentieth-century Germanic occultism, including its völkisch and Nazi-adjacent currents.

After 1991, the revival of Slavic Native Faith — Rodnovery — across Russia, Ukraine and Poland created demand for a sacred indigenous script with the mystical standing the Germanic runes had. Russian esoteric authors, chief among them Anton Platov, supplied one. They built a row of eighteen characters, attached Slavic deities to them — Perun, Veles, Dazhdbog, Makosh — wove in the folkloric cosmology of Nav, Prav and Yav and the Alatyr stone, and presented the result as the recovered cherty i rezy of Hrabar's sentence.

The borrowing is visible in the structure itself, which is what makes this more than an accusation:

• The row has eighteen characters. Eighteen is the number of songs in a Norse poem, chosen by an Austrian in 1902. No Slavic source specifies eighteen of anything.
• Mir is drawn as the Germanic Algiz stave, and Chernobog is the same shape inverted. That opposed pair is precisely von List's Man and Yr.
• The characters are given phonetic values matching Cyrillic letters — an alphabet created in the ninth century, by the very Christianisation the row is supposed to predate.

Scholars of religion have a settled term for this kind of thing, and it is not simply fake: it is an invented tradition. The construction is recent and the claimed pedigree is false, but the practice built on it is real, is used sincerely by a great many people, and does what they need it to do.

The eighteen, as they are actually used

This table documents a living modern practice. It is not an ancient alphabet, and nothing in it can be traced to a pre-Christian source. Anyone meeting these symbols is better served by having the full list with its date attached than by being sent away.

Rune	Sound	Associated with	Meaning in use
Mir	M	Belobog, the World Tree	Order, protection, community, the divine spark within
Chernobog	Ch	Chernobog, chaos	Entropy, breaking old bonds, necessary destruction
Alatyr	A	The world stone and mountain	The centre, the altar, beginnings and endings
Raduga	R	The rainbow bridge	The path between realms, travel, favourable outcomes
Nuzhda	N	Veles as lord of the dead	Inescapable fate, restriction, hardship, prohibition
Krada	G, K	The sacrificial fire	Purification, burning away falsehood, revealed intent
Treba	T	The warrior of spirit	Sacrifice — of the ego rather than of goods
Sila	S	Victory	Integrity, force of body and mind united, triumph
Veter	V	Veles as patron of magic	Inspiration, breath, poetry, ascent
Bereginya	B	Makosh, the Earth Mother	Fertility, protection, fate; both birth and death
Ud	U	Yarovit, generative fire	Passion, youth, the impregnating force
Lelya	L	Lelya, living water	Intuition, the subconscious, flow, spring
Rok	—	Unmanifested spirit	Fate beyond mortal control; submission to the design
Opora	O	The ancestral pillar	Grounding, homeland, the support of ancestors
Dazhdbog	D	Dazhdbog, the giver	Wealth, harvest, an inexhaustible flow of gifts
Perun	P	Perun, thunder	Justice, wrath, defence of truth, force against evil
Yest	E	Zhiva, life force	Life, movement, renewal, optimism
Istok	I	Ice	Stillness, stagnation, stored potential, waiting

The internal design is genuinely coherent. It is organised by opposed pairs — Mir against Chernobog, Ud against Bereginya, Krada's fire against Lelya's water, Istok's freeze against Yest's quickening — with Alatyr at the centre and Rok outside the whole system as the fate that binds even the gods. Whoever assembled it understood what they were doing.

Coherence is not antiquity. A well-made modern thing is still a modern thing.

The politics, named

This material has a political dimension, and the honest handling is the same one this section applies to the Germanic runes.

Rodnovery is not one movement. Much of it is reconstructionist nature-religion practised by people with no political programme at all, interested in seasonal festivals, folklore and a relationship to land and ancestors. Some currents are explicitly ethnonationalist, and a few are openly racist. The clearest case is the Ynglist movement founded by Alexander Khinevich, which promotes a separate invented script of its own alongside the fabricated 'Slavic-Aryan Vedas'. At the pseudo-scholarly end, Valery Chudinov has built a large following by claiming to read Slavic inscriptions in what are, on examination, rock textures, photographic noise and natural cracking.

The association matters because the row's actual ancestry runs through von List, whose Armanen system fed directly into völkisch and later Nazi occultism. That inheritance is a fact about the symbols' history, not about the people using them.

So the same narrow, true claim applies here as elsewhere on this site: a few shapes carry public meaning their user does not control. Most people drawn to these symbols have no political intent whatsoever. Some of the people who publish about them do. Both statements are true at once, and knowing which is which is the practical value of knowing where the eighteen runes came from.

Why there is no row on this page

Every other script in this section gets a row of letters and, where the letters are attested, a page each. This one gets an essay, and the reason is the finding itself.

There is no Slavic rune row to page. Not a lost one, not a disputed one — none has ever been attested. What exists is a sentence about counting and divining, a scatter of marks on pots, an undeciphered band of fourteen characters, and, most interestingly, a Germanic alphabet being practised in a Slavic village around 600 AD.

Building eighteen letter pages here would put a system assembled in the 1990s into exactly the same architecture as the Elder Futhark, which is attested on hundreds of objects across five centuries. The architecture would make the claim on its own, whatever a disclaimer said underneath. The one thing this page must not do is manufacture the script it is reporting the absence of.

So the eighteen are listed once, above, in full, with their author and their date — which is what someone searching for their meanings actually needs, and is more than most sources will tell them.