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Bałwan Polish, balvan/балван Serbian (literally wood block) or balvan Kyrgyz – today, literally indistinguishable from everyday word for snowman, is an ancient word common to all Slavic languages, describing a statuesque or monolithic depiction or a pillar or a plinth depicting or erected in honor of a deity. This object was worshipped, or constituted a tangible representation of a cult image. The Western Slavs transcribed and pronounced the word as bałwan (in American English pronounced: BOW as in the phrase bow-wow and von as in Stratford-Upon-Avon, with the accent on the penultimate (in this case, the first) syllable, as is the typical stress), which is its contemporary and old Polish lexical manifestation, whereas the Southern Slavs and the Eastern Slavs used the just slightly differently-voweled bołwan (English pronunciation:BOH-van).
The word itself has Sanskrit origins, where it figures as bala (the force) appended witth the suffix -van signifying possession of an attribute, thus etymologically bałwan means strong, powerful, mighty. In the Kyrgyz language of Central Asia, geographically remote from the territories Slavs are today identified with in Europe, balvan is a "strongman" or a hero, whereas in Persian, pahlevān denotes a militant or a veteran, as well as the plinth or boundary marker erected in his or her honor, or even a cairn, and, by extension, a fool. That latter meaning, at first secondary, became primary after Christianity was imposed on the Slavs, making bałwan acquire a distinctly pejorative primary meaning.
Some suggest that the Slavs share throughout their idioms such as they have evolved apart this single entity -- a common term for all cult objects in the form of a statue or cairn -- might suggest that idolatry spread early among the Slavic peoples, perhaps when they came in contact with Turkic peoples or Iranian. A word with similar etymology is the Slavic word for God (when capitalized) or deity, bóg, a cognate of Sanskrit "bhaga"/Iranian or Persian bag. In India the concept of a deity or god is often relayed with the word bhagvan, variously transcribed as bhagwan.
A derived term from bałwan is the Slavic word for idolatry: bałwochwalstwo.