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Buyan Island

📍 Rügen, Germany Legendary Place ~600 AD
Buyan Island

Buyan (Russian: Буя́н, sometimes spelled "Bujan") emerges from Russian folklore as a mystical island that possesses the extraordinary ability to appear and vanish with the changing tides. This legendary place features prominently in traditional Russian oral literature forms—the heroic epic poems known as byliny and the magical fairy tales called skazki. The island gained widespread fame when it was immortalized in Alexander Pushkin's celebrated work The Tale of Tsar Saltan.

Often characterized as a paradise-like realm in the midst of the ocean, Buyan serves as a critical setting in numerous Russian folk narratives. Perhaps most famously, it houses the hidden soul of Koshchei the Deathless—the immortal antagonist whose essence is ingeniously concealed within a needle, which itself is hidden inside an egg nestled in the branches of a sacred oak tree on the island. In other tales, Buyan functions as the cosmic origin point of all weather phenomena, which are created on the island and then dispatched throughout the world by Perun, the Slavic god of thunder and lightning.

The medieval Russian spiritual text known as the Dove Book further enhances Buyan's mythological significance by identifying it as the resting place of the legendary Alatyr stone (Russian: Алатырь). This mystical rock, endowed with powerful healing and magical properties, lies under the vigilant protection of two supernatural guardians: the mythical bird Gagana and the serpent Garafena.