Slavic Creation Stories
Religious Fables, Folklore, Legends, and Stories
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Submitted by: Yuri Klitsenko

God sails in a boat and the devil swims after him. God scatters earth, and immediately the water parted and dry land came forth with forest, field, and meadow. The devil looked on and was just amazed at where all this came from.

Three sycamores stand in the sea. On each tree is a chair, and on the chairs sit the Lord, St. Peter, and St. Paul. The Lord tells St. Peter to dive into the sea and retrieve yellow sand, to carry the sand about all the world and create heaven and earth, heaven with its stars, and the earth with its flowers. Peter is not able to dive all the way to the bottom. Paul also fails, and so the Lord dives down to the bottom of the sea himself, gets the sand, scatters it, and creates heaven and earth.

Source: Slavic Creation Narratives: The Sacred and the Comic by Andreas Johns, Fabula; 2005

Yuri Klitsenko is a Russian living in Moscow.  He works for the Russian Orthodox Church.

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