Šembilja

At night on the Karst, the stony plateau of southwest Slovenia, a burning wagon races down an old road. The noise is like thunder. The people who told this story called the rider the Šembilja.

Her wheels left grooves in the limestone, the story goes, and near one village you can still see them. Beside the stream there is a stone seat with a hole for the devil’s tail. Smaller seats with smaller holes were for the little devils, who stopped to cool their feet in the water.

Elsewhere in Slovenia the same name belonged to a wise woman who foretold the future. Her prophecies were still repeated in the villages in the 1850s. One of them said the railway was coming, long before anyone had seen a train.

Appearance

In most tales the Šembilja appears as a wise woman. One account makes her enormous, with one foot in Hell and the other on Earth. In some tales she is the sister of a proverbially wise biblical king and wiser than he was. In others she is the sister of a legendary ruler from local lore.

Nobody in the tradition drew her. The card above borrows a real Sibyl instead, from a Dutch woodcut made around 1530.

Down on the Karst she is hardly a person at all. To some she was a witch, to others the devil in a fiery carriage. Sometimes she was only the carriage, with horses or without them. She is always fast and loud. In two villages people point to hoofprints in the rock and say her horses made them.

Function

The seer foretold the future from a legendary book. Village tradition claimed the text had been hidden high in a rocky cleft, placed where only wandering hunters would chance upon it.

The prophecies were grim. Hard times would come “when there is a road from village to village.” After a bloody war only one man would be left in the whole province. He would walk from hill to hill calling for people, with the wheat standing ripe and nobody to cut it.

Another tale warned of Turkish armies whose pack animals would reach the Rhine. Villagers also told of an old woman whose grandfather had promised she would live to see roads made of iron; in her old age, the first trains arrived.

Handwritten prophecy booklets bearing her name circulated among villagers, listing disasters and future wars that would scourge the land.

The Karst Šembilja does something else. She races along the old roads that locals call Roman roads, often with the devil at the reins. Carters feared her, and mothers used her name to make children behave. In one village she came as an omen before a war.

In the valley of Vreme she is kind. She walked past a Roman smithy where the smiths were struggling to weld iron wheel rims. “Look how they struggle,” she said, “when you only put sand in between.” The smiths heard her, and from then on they knew how.

Cross-Cultural Connections

Her name ties her to other women who knew the future. Šembilja is the Slovene form of Sibyl, a prophetess of the ancient world who spoke in a trance. Much later, books of the Sibyl’s prophecies spread across Central Europe, and Slovene copies followed.

In local tales she often takes on traits of the mountain fairies known as Vila, who live in rocky heights and know the hidden workings of the world.

Her wagon tracks turned out to be real. The grooves the villages point to mostly lie on old side roads, many of them Roman or older. Archaeologists have used her stories to find such roads since the 1970s. The oldest written note comes from an Italian traveler. Villagers told him that a sibyl drove around the world in a great coach, pressing her wagon wheels deep into the stone.

The fiery carriage likely echoes older storm lore that pictured lightning and thunder as a blazing chariot racing across the clouds. On the limestone plateau, that roaring night rider seems to have borrowed the ancient prophetess’s name, blending a wise woman with the fury of a storm.

Modern Survival

The name lives on in a saying. Across the limestone plateau, “you go fast as a Šembilja” came to mean racing at breakneck speed. When the first cars rattled into the Karst valleys with their carbide lamps lit, people called them Šembiljas. In one village people thought the Šembilja herself had arrived. Children in the hills sang a rhyme about the devil driving the mail on the Šembilja.

She has also been cut in stone. A local sculptor carved a limestone block for a quiet spot where the lands of three villages meet. It shows the devil as a coachman with a whip, sitting still for once, with a hidden smile.

Beside it, a sign marks the actual course of an ancient Roman road, bridging stone archaeology with the fiery legends of the plateau.

Sources

• Sušnik, Blaž. ‘Šembilja.’ Slovenski glasnik 2, no. 1 (1859). Digitised at dLib.si, URN:NBN:SI:DOC-0DVOJDW1
• Bukve tiga prerokuvajna (the so-called Šembilja books). Manuscript, central Slovenia, early 19th century. Ljubljana, Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica, Ms 1181. Described in the eZISS/NRSS manuscript catalogue
• Wesselofsky, A. N. ‘Sembilja = Sibylla.’ Archiv für slavische Philologie 8 (1885), p. 330
• Slapšak, Božidar, and Svetlana Kojić. ‘Šembilja – hudič na gorečem vozu.’ Glasnik Slovenskega etnološkega društva 16, no. 2 (1976), p. 27
• Hrobat, Katja. ‘Šembilja na rimskih cestah. O mitološkem prežitku in arheološkem indikatorju na Krasu in v Brkinih’ (Sibyl on Roman Roads: On the Mythological Remnants and the Archaeological Indicator in the Kras and Brkini). Annales, Series historia et sociologia 15, no. 2 (2005), pp. 263-274
• Kropej, Monika. Supernatural Beings from Slovenian Myth and Folktales. Studia Mythologica Slavica Supplementa 6. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, ZRC SAZU, 2012, pp. 146, 153-154, 239
• Kosovelova knjižnica Sežana. ‘Skulptura Šembilja na lokaciji Pod Lisičino.’ Kamra, 30 December 2022 (quoting ‘Mitski’ 2020, p. 26, and the sculptor Sibila Leskovec, 2020)
• Lucas van Leyden. Tiburtine Sibyl, from the series of Sibyls. Woodcut, c. 1530. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, object 364734, public domain (basis of the house engraving)