johost

So, in ep01, she says her parents were killed in a village on the Russian-Ukrainian border - not mortarbanned, but supposedly due to the villagers stringing them up as witches

Hoo boy

First of all, this is portraying Eastern European villagers as superstitious backwood yokels, living in log huts and meeting every stranger with pitchforks and torches

Secondly, as my gf pointed out, if the locals had believed them to be witches, they'd be swimming in cash

We Eastern Europeans, for some reason, really go for witches, mystics and other such types

The one president we impeached had a Sakartvellan seer who claimed that God told her about the future - and that she could charge TP rolls with healing energy.

People in urban areas will go to get their fates read or their ills magiced up.

This is happening concurrently to those people considering themselves good Christians.

If this was cooler, you might consider it syncretism, but there's no system behind it.

Most of these folk derive their powers from I-said-so, not some ancient pagan beliefs you could point at.

I assume a lot of this is due to USSR promoting Eastern mysticism to deny popular power to the Roman Catholic Church, but I haven't really looked into it.

So next time you're writing a book where someone is mistaken for a witch in Eastern Europe, they better end up getting paid to enchant a bog roll with impotence-healing powers.