Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license.
Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat.
We can research this topic together.
Centaur-like creature in Russian folklore
For the village in Iran, see Polkan, Iran.
You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Russian. (April 2010) Click for important translation instructions.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Misplaced Pages.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Russian Misplaced Pages article at ]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|ru|Полкан (фольклор)}} to the talk page.
Polkan or Palkan (Russian: Полка́н or Палкан, from the ItalianPulicane) is a half-human, half-horse (in some variants, half-dog) creature from Russian folktales which possesses enormous power and speed. In folk etymology his name is understood as полуконь (polukon - half-horse). He appears first as the enemy of the hero Bova Korolevich, but after a battle becomes his loyal friend and ally. He dies to lions after protecting Bova's wife and children from them.
Prince Bova fights Polkan
Polkan is originally based on Pulicane, a half-dog character from Andrea da Barberino's poem "I Reali di Francia", which was once popular in the Slavonic world in prosaic translations.
In the 19th century Polkan became a popular name for a guard dog.
