Of all the dragons in this collection, Zmey Gorynych is the one whose name most literally tells you where to find him: Gorynych derives from gora, "mountain" — this is, quite plainly, the dragon that comes from the mountain.
Zmey Gorynych is the great antagonist dragon of Russian and broader East Slavic folklore, most commonly depicted with three heads, though the number varies across different tellings, and capable of breathing fire on his enemies. He is a central figure of the byliny — the epic oral narrative poems of Kievan Rus, performed and passed down across generations, celebrating the heroic deeds of the bogatyrs, Rus's legendary knight-champions.
Zmey Gorynych's most famous opponent is Dobrynya Nikitich, one of the three principal bogatyrs of the Kievan cycle alongside Ilya Muromets and Alyosha Popovich. In the bylina traditionally called "Dobrynya and the Dragon," Zmey Gorynych abducts Zabava Putyatichna, niece of Prince Vladimir (celebrated in the epics as "Vladimir the Fair Sun"). Dobrynya sets out, confronts the dragon, and after a hard-fought battle, defeats it and rescues Zabava — a rescue-the-noblewoman structure that echoes, independently, similar dragon-slaying rescue tales found across medieval Western European tradition.
A dragon that may encode real history: some scholars read Zmey Gorynych's fire, mountain origin and habit of abducting people and hoarding wealth as a folkloric processing of the genuine, repeated threat posed by steppe nomad raiders — Pechenegs, Cumans, and later Mongol-Tatar forces — who periodically devastated medieval Rus settlements. Under this reading, the dragon functions as a mythologised memory of real historical violence rather than a purely fantastical invention.
Zmey Gorynych remains one of the most widely recognised figures from Russian folklore today, a constant presence in Russian animated films, children's literature and video games — a genuine case of a medieval epic-poem antagonist surviving into thoroughly contemporary popular culture with essentially no loss of recognisability.