Krstnici

The Slovenian villagers around Görz, today’s Italian Gorizia on the Slovenian border, did something every autumn that Friedrich Krauss found odd. They dug up the stakes and stumps left in their fields and carried them home. Stakes too solidly anchored to remove, they rammed down deeper. The reason they gave was specific. On St. John’s Eve, the witches fought a fierce battle against the Krstnici, a band of twelve brothers, and the witches attacked them with leftover stakes and stumps. Removing the stakes denied them weapons. Krauss quoted the belief in 1908 from a printed note dated 1854.

Appearance

The 1854 note describes the Krstnici only on St. John’s night, when they are in great danger from the witches.

It also says who they are: twelve brothers in a single family. In Krauss’s German rendering of the note: Wenn sich in einer Familie zwölf Söhne von einem Vater befinden, so ist der zwölfte unter ihnen ein Kerstnik. When a family has twelve sons by one father, the twelfth among them is a Krstnik. Krauss noted that the text contradicts itself: first all twelve brothers are called Krstniki, and then only the twelfth is supposed to be one. He wrote that the mythical number twelve had been brought in only etwas notdürftig zu erklären, was man nicht mehr versteht, to give a makeshift explanation of something no longer understood.

Origins

The word is not in doubt, Krauss wrote. Krstnik is an old loanword from Greek, and in Bulgarian and Slovenian it means the baptized one, a godchild. A second note says only: “The Krstnici mostly protect the world from witches.” A third, from 1860, gave Krauss his key: Krstnik, človek kterega vile obljubiju, “a Krstnik is a man whom the Vile have grown fond of.” Krauss cites it as Veglia glasnik II. 8.

From there Krauss built his reading. In one South Slavic tale the Vile took such a liking to a young man that they carried him off to their hollow tree, because through him they smelled of baptism (da su po krstu dišale). Vile also carry off children who are already baptized and raise them. Such favourites, Krauss suggested, could be called the baptized ones, the Krstniki, in contrast to the unbaptized Vile. They could speak for their fellow humans and protect them. When the Vile turned into witches (coprnice) in folk belief, the old friendship had to turn into enmity. From then on the Krstniki protect the world by open fight against the Vile turned witches.

Krauss singled out one part of this as odd. Only the Slovenes around Görz, and none of the other South Slavs, practised the custom of pulling out the stakes and stumps.

Behavior

On St. John’s Eve, the night of June 23-24, the witches of the region fight the Krstnici. The Krstnici are in great danger that night, because the witches fall on them with the remains of stakes and stumps.

The witches’ weapons are the stakes and stumps left in the ground after the harvest. The peasants of Görz, knowing this, dug them out carefully in autumn and brought them home. Stakes too solidly anchored to be pulled out were rammed down deeper, so the witches could not wrench them out and use them.

This was the only practical contribution the ordinary villager could make to the night-battle. The Krstnici fought. The peasants on the ground denied the enemy weapons.

A Folkloric Anomaly

Krauss flagged the harvest-stake practice as anomalous. By a general belief, he wrote, a South Slav would not tear even a dead plant out of the ground by its root, because that pulled the hair of his dead mother or grandmother in the grave. He added that a farmer who works only as much as he must would not take on such needless work anyway. The Görz villagers did it for the Krstnici.

Krauss did not take this as a sign of great age. By his reading, the 1854 tale was of very recent origin. He asked whether the pulling of stubble and stumps belonged with the Krstniki at all, or whether it was an old piece of soil magic. That, he wrote, could only be assumed if the stubble were burned.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The Krstnici are a close South Slavic structural parallel to the Friulian benandanti, the good walkers documented by Carlo Ginzburg from 16th- and 17th-century Inquisition records. The benandanti were also born under specific conditions (with a caul), also fought witches in night-battles for the agricultural year, and also used vegetable weapons (stalks of fennel). The geographic distance between Görz and Friuli is small. The cultural border is the Italian-Slavic linguistic line. Whether the two beliefs share a common source is an open question.

For the singular figure, see Krsnik. In the 1860 note he is a man whom the Vile have grown fond of.

Modern Survival

Krauss had only three short printed notes to work from: the Görz note of 1854, a one-line note on the Krstnici as protectors of the world, and the 1860 note on the Vile. In his book none of them runs longer than a paragraph.

What the Krstnici preserve is one of the small geographically-bounded folk-beliefs that European folklore is full of. Here it survives as one printed paragraph from 1854, quoted by Krauss in 1908, with his own doubts attached.

Sources

• Friedrich S. Krauss, Slavische Volkforschungen (Wilhelm Heims, Leipzig, 1908)
• 1854 printed note on the belief of the Slovenes around Görz, quoted by Krauss
• Veglia glasnik II. 8 (1860), on the Krstnik and the Vile, cited by Krauss
• Carlo Ginzburg, I benandanti (1966), for the Friulian structural parallel