84 CHAPTER 1
tradition of kingship inheritance through the female line of descent. The one
who marries the king’s daughter,297 usually after passing some sort of test,
becomes the ruler.
This theme is preserved in folk tales, especially ones about the dragon that
takes a maiden each year. In the end, when it is the turn of the king’s daugh-
ter, the young hero slays the dragon and marries her.298 G. Davletshin draws a
parallel with a similar folk tale, once popular among the Volga Bulgars and the
peoples along the Middle Volga Region (a part of the Khazar Khaganate), that
is still told by Kazan Tatars today: “Somewhere in a lake, not far from the capi-
tal city, there lived a monstrous dragon that demanded a king’s daughter every
year”.299 The scholar connects this folk tale with the account of Ibn Fadlan,
according to whom the daughter of the Bulgar ruler was kept in the harem of
the Khazar khagan. Since the capital center Itil was located on the Volga delta
and the khagan lived separately on an island, connected to the rest of the city
by a bridge, G. Davletshin sees this account as a reflection of the notion of the
water-dwelling dragon or serpent. And in the legends of the Kazan Tatars the
Khazar Khaganate is called Land of the Dragon.300
In the steppe tradition, the dragon symbolizes the Upper World (the skies)
and royal sovereignty. The Huns named some of their cities after the dragon.301
as a young hero), of initiatory stay in medio mundi for a certain ritual period of time
(Gagen Odolian stays in Sredets for three years and three months, before defeating Gordie
Chigochin), of initiatory battles with the forces of evil, etc [.. .] the dynasty lineages are
difficult to trace, since many of their rulers acquire their own kingdoms. [.. .] The slay-
ing of rulers (of Gordie Chigochin near the double-mouthed well in the field of Sredets
and of Gagen Odolian at Edrilo Field) [.. .] reflects a mythologem, closely related to the
Saturnalian change of generations—the one about the change of ruler through a duel
between the reigning king and a pretender to the throne” (Iordanov 1995, 32–33).
297 See for instance Frazer 2006, 152–155.
298 Frazer 2006, 143–144; on various Bulgarian folk tale storylines, see Mollov 1997, 127–129
and corresponding notes. Also of interest is another group of Bulgarian folk tales, in
which the king’s daughter marries the son of a snake or snake/zmei, after passing a series
of challenges, not unlike the hero (Benovska-Subkova 1995, 25–26).
299 Davletshin 1990, 106.
300 Davletshin 1990, 106–107. The notion of the ruler, whose palaces were on an island, was
probably a part of the overall mythological belief that “one of the paradigmatic images
of creation is the Island that suddenly manifests itself in the midst of the waves [.. .]
the symbolism of the waters implies both death and rebirth. Contact with water always
brings a regeneration: on the one hand because dissolution is followed by “a new birth”,
on the other because immersion fertilizes and multiplies the potential of life” (Eliade
1998a, 93).
301 Stepanov 2005a, 51–52.