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A comparison of a group of Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian legends implying a thunderous character, with a passage from the Mahābhārata, an ancient Indian epos, allows us to reconstruct a fragment of the myth of the Baltic and Slavic thunderstorm god.

Thirty years ago, the Russian historian L. S. Klejn proposed that the legendary Chechen and Ingush character Pira or Pirow was borrowed during the Middle Ages by the local population from the Russian mythology, through a contingent of Eastern Slavs deported there by the caliph Mervan II. Thus, Pira or Pirow would be the old Slavic god Perun. I will propose here an alternative source to this legendary figure, an Iranian source. A hero named Piran indeed appears in the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi’s epic dating from the tenth century. That hero, like Pira or Pirow, is able, through an intermediary, to make rain and lightning. In fact, the name Piran seems to have an etymology close to that of the god Perun.

A particular type of icon, known in all oriental Christendom (orthodoxe world), shows the Holy Mother having three hands. On the most ancient copies, the third hand is in silver. The legend which accompanies this icon, of Serbian origin, could well be a relic of Celtic mythology in the Balkans.