In 1867, a schoolteacher named Mijat Stojanović published a collection of sixty folk tales in Zagreb. He had spent over thirty years gathering them from the common folk of the Habsburg Military Frontier, the narrow borderland that separated the Austrian Empire from the Ottoman world. The book appeared in Croatian under the title Šale i zbilje and was never translated into English.
This new English translation by Rade Kolbas brings all sixty tales into English for the first time.
The people who told these stories lived on a fault line between empires. Serbs and Croats shared villages with Hungarian and German neighbors, and their stories cross-pollinated in ways that show up throughout the collection. Ottoman-era words sit comfortably inside Slavic sentences. A household serpent under the hearthstone was as ordinary as a cat by the fire. Stojanović wrote all of it down, and what survives is one of the richest windows into South Slavic folk belief ever published.
The Schoolteacher Who Listened
Mijat Stojanović was born in 1814 in Babina Greda, a village in eastern Slavonia. He worked as a teacher and school inspector for most of his adult life, traveling through the villages of Slavonia, Syrmia, Bačka, and Banat. These were the lands of the Habsburg Military Frontier: a special administrative zone where peasant-soldiers farmed in peacetime and fought the Ottomans when called.
Stojanović collected his tales at spinning bees and evening gatherings, from old soldiers and village grandmothers. He recorded where each tale came from: the village, the informant’s name, the year. His foreword, dated Zemun, February 1866, describes a man who had been listening for decades and finally decided to write it all down before the stories vanished.
His collection feels different from the better-known Serbian fairy tales gathered by Vuk Karadžić a generation earlier. Karadžić worked from central Serbia. Stojanović worked from the frontier, and his tales carry frontier textures: dervishes argue with monks and Turkish loanwords pepper the dialogue. The supernatural creatures blend Slavic paganism with Ottoman-era folk belief in ways that give the collection a texture all its own.
Stojanović documented the source of each tale: the village, the storyteller, and the year of collection. Some entries name informants from the 1830s, making these among the oldest documented oral narratives from the South Slavic frontier.
The Things That Come at Night
The supernatural tales are some of the collection’s strongest material. They preserve South Slavic folk beliefs that were already old when Stojanović recorded them, and several have no close equivalent in Western European fairy tale traditions.
A good place to start is “The Horseshoed Witch.” A blacksmith’s apprentice discovers that his master’s wife is a vještica, a witch who rides sleeping men like horses at night. She transforms her victims into mounts and flies them to Aršanj Mountain, the traditional gathering place for South Slavic witches. The apprentice’s companion catches the witch mid-flight, bridles her, rides her back to the smithy, and has her horseshoed like a mare. The next morning, the blacksmith’s wife is found with iron shoes nailed to her hands and feet. The story is brutal and funny in the same breath, and the image of the horseshoed witch appears across the Balkans in variants that go back centuries.
Other tales in this vein include “The Changeling,” “The Vila,” “The Werewolf,” “The Apparition,” and “The Specter and the Plague.” Each one treats its subject as a fact of village life. There is no frame of irony, no wink at the audience. A changeling is a problem to be solved, a werewolf a neighbor to be feared. The plague travels as a visible specter, and someone has to face it down.
This matter-of-fact quality makes the tales valuable as documents. They are reports from a world where the supernatural was part of the operating system.
Aršanj Mountain, where witches gather in South Slavic folklore, appears by name in several of Stojanović’s tales. The mountain functions like a Slavic Brocken: a real-sounding place that exists only in the geography of belief.
Death Walks In
Death is a character in several of Stojanović’s tales, and she is always female. This is standard for South Slavic folk tradition, where smrt (death) is grammatically and conceptually a woman.
“The Blacksmith in Paradise” is the finest Death story in the collection. A blacksmith meets Death on the road. She is a tall woman who has come to kill him. He talks her into sharing a drink first, then dares her to prove she can squeeze through the bung of a wine cask. Death stretches herself thin as a thread and slips inside. The blacksmith hammers the bung shut. Nobody dies. He hangs the cask behind his chimney, and the world goes on without death.
God sends the Devil to fetch the blacksmith. The blacksmith tricks the Devil into climbing into his bellows, then beats him with hammers. God sends three more devils. The blacksmith traps their fingers in a split log and beats them with cudgels. When the blacksmith finally grows weary of life and walks to the gates of Paradise, Peter turns him away. He tries Hell; the devils slam the gate in terror. Back at Paradise, he asks Peter to crack the gate open just enough for a peek. He spots a pair of his own old trousers inside, the ones he once gave to a beggar, sits down on them, and refuses to move. God relents.
The tale belongs to a family known in folklore studies as ATU 330, “The Smith Outwits the Devil.” Variants exist across Europe. Stojanović’s version carries South Slavic details that set it apart: Death as a woman, the emphasis on sharing a drink (hospitality as the opening move), and the blacksmith’s quiet act of charity as the key to his salvation.
“Death as Godmother” and “The Fates” cover similar ground. Death and fate can be bargained with, tricked, or occasionally beaten with a hammer. The relationship between humans and the supernatural in Stojanović’s world is pragmatic.
In South Slavic folk tradition, Death (smrt) is grammatically feminine, and she appears in folk tales as a tall woman who walks the roads. “The Blacksmith in Paradise” is one of the oldest recorded South Slavic versions of this encounter.
Serpents, Dragons, and the Otherworld
“The Serpent” introduces the guja, the household serpent of South Slavic folk belief. A guja is a snake that lives under or near a family home, bringing luck and prosperity to the household. Killing one is catastrophic. In the tale, a servant saves a guja from a burning cottage. The grateful serpent takes him to her father, the serpent king, who lives in a cave full of serpents. The king offers the servant any reward. He asks for the power of silence: the ability to understand the speech of animals. The king grants it reluctantly, with a warning that revealing the gift means death.
The guja belief was widespread across the South Slavic world and appears in ethnographic records from Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Bulgaria. Stojanović’s tale captures it in narrative form: the serpent as household guardian, the serpent king as ruler of a hidden realm. The gift of animal speech, in this tradition, is the highest knowledge available to a mortal.
Five dragon brothers rescue a stolen princess in “The Pleiades in the Sky.” Each brother claims the princess for himself. Their mother settles the dispute: the girl cannot be a wife to all of them, but she can be their sister. The brothers and the princess become the Vlašići, the South Slavic name for the Pleiades. The tale explains the star cluster through kinship and sacrifice rather than divine punishment, which sets it apart from most Greek stellar myths.
A poor man follows a silver track through a series of bridges in “The Beggar,” the collection’s strangest tale. At each bridge he sees a moral allegory. Quarreling sisters-in-law appear as sows in mud, and feuding brothers as oxen under a shared yoke. A greedy plowman is yoked to his own oxen while an adulterer is constricted by a snake. A miser reaches for apples that pull away from his hands. The poor man passes through all of them and arrives in a paradisiacal garden. When he returns home, years have passed and everything has changed. He goes back to the garden and stays.
The tale is a complete otherworld journey, closer to the Irish immram tradition or the Japanese story of Urashima Tarō than to anything in Grimm. Time passes differently in the other world. The moral allegories on the bridges recall medieval vision literature. Stojanović collected this story from a village in Slavonia in the mid-1800s.
Cheats, Swindles, and Village Justice
The collection holds darkness, but it holds laughter too. Many of the sixty tales are comic, and the humor is sharp.
“The Traders” follows two men who each plan to cheat the other at a village fair. One fills a sack with moss and plans to sell it as wool. The other fills a sack with acorn caps and plans to sell them as walnuts. They meet, trade sacks, and both go home congratulating themselves. The rest of the tale spirals from there: a faked death, a coffin behind a church altar, bandits with saddlebags of gold, and a final reversal that leaves one man rich and the other still holding his acorn caps.
“The Plowed-Up Carp” is darker. A wife decides to prove she can drive her husband insane. She secretly plants a fish in a plowed furrow, then convinces her husband he found it there. She builds on the lie until the man questions his own sanity and monks are called to exorcise him. The humor is there, but it bites.
These trickster tales map the social tensions of village life: between spouses and neighbors, between the clever and the gullible. The moral is never abstract. It arrives as a proverb or a practical lesson about living among people who may not wish you well.
A Living Archive
Stojanović was not the only collector working in the South Slavic lands during the nineteenth century. Vuk Karadžić had published his landmark Serbian collections decades earlier, and others were active in Montenegro and Herzegovina. But Stojanović’s territory was unique. The Military Frontier was a zone of sustained contact between empires and religions, a place where the borders between Catholic and Orthodox, Slavic and Ottoman, pagan survival and Christian overlay were visible in the same village.
The tales in this collection preserve that contact. A dervish debates a monk. A shepherd boy outwits Turkish soldiers. A bride’s mother follows her daughter into a new household, and the humor depends on understanding how a zadruga (extended family household) worked. Read together, the sixty tales form a portrait of a world that no longer exists but whose belief structures survive in folk memory across the Balkans.
For readers who want to explore the broader tradition of magic and sorcery in South Slavic fairy tales, the Crazy Alchemist has a companion article: Slavic Sorcerers in Old Serbian Fairy Tales. That article examines the figure of the vrač (sorcerer-healer) across tales by Karadžić, Stefanović, and Novaković, and traces the vocabulary of magic back to pre-Christian Slavic religion. Stojanović’s tales sit in the same tradition, recorded from the same century but from a different corner of the South Slavic world.
About the Translation
Folk Tales was first published in Zagreb in 1867. The original Croatian title is Šale i zbilje. This new English translation by Rade Kolbas is the first complete edition in any language other than Croatian.
The translation preserves Stojanović’s footnotes, which identify the village and informant for each tale. It also retains South Slavic cultural terms (vještica, guja, vila, mora) with explanatory footnotes, so readers unfamiliar with the tradition can follow the stories without losing the texture of the original language.
The book is available on Amazon: Folk Tales by Mijat Stojanović, translated by Rade Kolbas (ISBN 9783039900091).
