thumb|Slavic priest of fire, Jan Matejko, ca. 1870 A zhrets is a priest in the Slavic religion whose name is reconstructed to mean "one who makes sacrifices". The name appears mainly in the East and South Slavic vocabulary, while in the West Slavs it is attested only in Polish. Most information about the Slavic priesthood comes from Latin texts about the paganism of the Polabian Slavs. The descriptions show that they were engaged in offering sacrifices to the gods, divination and determining the dates of festivals. They possessed cosmological knowledge and were a major source of resistance aga
thumb|Slavic priest of fire, Jan Matejko, ca. 1870 A zhrets is a priest in the Slavic religion whose name is reconstructed to mean "one who makes sacrifices". The name appears mainly in the East and South Slavic vocabulary, while in the West Slavs it is attested only in Polish. Most information about the Slavic priesthood comes from Latin texts about the paganism of the Polabian Slavs. The descriptions show that they were engaged in offering sacrifices to the gods, divination and determining the dates of festivals. They possessed cosmological knowledge and were a major source of resistance against Christianity.
== Etymology == The earliest attestation of the word is Old Church Slavonic жьрьць žĭrĭcĭ "priest". In other Slavic languages it occurs as Russian жрец zhrets, Belarusian жрэц zhrets, and Ukrainian жрець zhrets, all derived from Old East Slavic жрецъ žrecŭ, and Bulgarian and Macedonian жрец zhrets and Slovene žréc and all meaning "pagan priest". Czech žrec was borrowed from Old East Slavic, as was Croatian žrec zhrets. The exception here is the Polish attestation żerca, which historically means "matchmaker". The Proto-Slavic form is reconstructed as *žьrьcь, which is an agent noun from the verb *žьrti "to consecrate, sacrifice", which is continued by OCS жрьти, жрѣти žrěti and Old East Slavic жерети žereti and it literally means "one who makes sacrifices". This verb is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *gʷerH- "to praise" and is cognate to Lithuanian gìrt, Latvian dzir̃t, Old Prussian girtwei, Sanskrit गृणाति gṛṇā́ti "to praise", or Latin grātēs "gratitude". From this verb is also derived *žьrtva "sacrifice" continued by OCS жрьтва, ⰶⱃⱐⱅⰲⰰ žrĭtva, and other related words.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).