bogatyr

thumb|300x300px|The three most famous bogatyrs, Dobrynya Nikitich, [[Ilya Muromets and Alyosha Popovich, appear together in Viktor Vasnetsov's 1898 painting Bogatyrs kept in the Tretyakov Gallery.]] A bogatyr (, ; , ) or vityaz (, ; , ) is a stock character in medieval East Slavic legends, akin to a Western European knight-errant. Bogatyrs appear mainly in Rus' epic poems—bylinas. Historically, they came into existence during the reign of Vladimir the Great (Grand Prince of Kiev from 978 to 1015) as part of his elite warriors (druzhina), akin to Knights of the Round Table. Tradition describes bogatyrs as warriors of immense strength, courage and bravery, rarely using magic while fighting enemies in order to maintain the "loosely based on historical fact" aspect of bylinas. They are characterized as having resounding voices, with patriotic and religious pursuits, defending Rus' from foreign enemies (especially nomadic Turkic steppe-peoples or Finno-Ugric tribes in the period prior to the Mongol invasions) and their religion.

==Etymology== thumb|Photo of bogatyr definition in different languages from Max Vasmer's Russian Etymological Dictionary