Goddess Lada

Lada is the Slavic goddess of love and beauty. The ancient Slavs called the name Lada not only the original goddess of love, but also the whole structure of life - a way where everything should have been okay, that is, good. All people should be able to get along with each other. The wife called her beloved one, and he called her - sweetheart. “Ladies”, - people say when they have decided some important matter, and in ancient times, a ladder was called an agreement on a dowry: frets - engagement, okay - matchmaker, ladkanya - wedding song.
And even the pancakes, which were baked in the spring in honor of the reviving life, from the same root.
Then they sang:
Bless mother
Oh mother Lada, mother!
Call the spring ...
And, of course, mother Love gave her blessing to people to invoke spring. The goddess Lada was known to many European peoples.
Lithuanians and their neighbors, Letts, glorified Lada during the Kupala festivities. They sang: "Lada, Lada, dido musu deve!" ("Lada, Lada, our great goddess!") - and sacrificed a white rooster.
When in the XII century BC. e. Dorians conquered Greece, then they brought with them the cult of Lada, whose name in their language meant Lady. Since then, our Lada has firmly settled in ancient Greek mythology, she even split in two, becoming, first of all, the titanide Leto (in Rome she was called Latona), the mother of Apollo and Artemis. It is interesting that Leto and her children helped the Trojans (the relatives of the ancestors of the Rus people) against the Achaeans. Then she was embodied in Zeus's beloved - Leda, who gave birth to the Dioscuri twins.
Why can we assert that Leto and Leda are the Slavic Lada, what do they have in common, besides the similarity of names? First, all three goddesses were associated with the cult of the white swan, the sacred animal of Lada, whose name meant, among other things, "swan." Zeus for this very reason appeared to Leda in the form of a white swan. And the Lithuanians sacrificed a white rooster to Lada as a substitute for a swan (in fact, it was difficult to find swans in Lithuania in those days). Both Greek women, Leto and Leda, gave birth to divine twins, and Lada also had twins - Lel and Polel.
But in the Slavic lands, Lada was revered more than anywhere else. Preserved information that in pre-Christian times in the lower part of Kiev, in Podil, there was a majestic temple of Lada. In the center stood a statue of a divinely beautiful woman in a rose wreath. Her golden hair was adorned with river pearls, and a long Russian dress, tied at the waist with a gold belt, covered with precious and intricate ornamental embroidery. At the base of the statue, incense was smoking, piles of flowers lay, which the attendants replaced daily with new bouquets.
The building of the temple was traditionally built from "living" material - wood (this tradition is strictly observed, for example, in the East - in China and Japan), completely covered with silver plates. Thousands of burning candles were reflected in these silver slabs and illuminated everything around with flashes. Indeed, it was a striking, unearthly beauty spectacle.