A storm rolled over Split. Black cloud, salt wind off the Adriatic, the first crack of lightning over the campanile. In the Borghi, the suburbs that climb the slopes behind the harbour, men reached for their guns.
They were going hunting.
Each man loaded his barrel with small bullets of blessed wax, walked out into the open, and waited for the next flash. When it came, he fired at it. He believed he had just shot a witch in the sky.
If an old woman in the neighbourhood fell ill the next day, or died, the shooter took the credit. He had not missed his target. The villagers especially went hunting before the harvest, when a hailstorm could ruin a year of work, and when the witches, riding the clouds, were thought to be at their most dangerous.
This was 1879. The book that records it is one of the most overlooked sources on the South Slavic occult: Ethnographische Curiositäten, by Otto Freiherr von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld and his wife Ida von Düringsfeld, published in Leipzig three years after both authors had died on the same day. The chapter is called Aberglauben der Küsten- und Inselbewohner Dalmatiens, the Superstitions of the Coastal and Island Inhabitants of Dalmatia. It is short, dense, and reads like a working field manual.
A Coast Where Two Worlds Met
The Düringsfelds open the chapter with a small geographical observation that tells you where the rest of the chapter is going.
In the interior of Dalmatia, they note, the Serbian folk type stands in its original purity. On the islands and the coastal towns, the Slavic population had mixed for centuries with Italians from across the sea. The Republic of Venice had ruled Dalmatia for four hundred years, and the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) ran its own affairs in Italian as well as Slavic. The folk beliefs of the coast were not pure Slavic and not pure Italian. They were a working hybrid.
You can see the hybrid most clearly in the names of the dead-walking. The vampire of the interior is the vukodlak, the wolf-haired one. The bestiary entry Vukodlak sketches the broader Slavic background. Around Ragusa, the same kind of creature splits into two, with two different names: the Tenac (or Denac) and the Orko. Bad people, or corpses that animals have run beneath, become Tenac. Blasphemers and misers become Orko. To prevent either, the Borghesi drove a whitethorn stake through the corpse, or cut the tendons of the feet at death. The same defensive logic ran the length of the Adriatic and across the Aegean: see the Greek Vroucolaca of Mykonos and the broader Vampire entry for comparison.
The name Orko is the giveaway. It comes from the Roman underworld god Orcus, and the same Latin root carried far beyond the Adriatic. It became Italian orco, the child-eating ogre of the fairy tale, and from orco into English ogre. It also fed the Old English word orc, which appears in line 112 of Beowulf as orcneas, the corpse-things descended from Cain. J. R. R. Tolkien took his Orcs straight from that line. He said so in his own notes: “I originally took the word from Old English orc (Beowulf 112 orc-neas).” The Dalmatian Orko, the Italian orco, and the orcs of Middle-earth are all descendants of the same Roman underworld god, scattered along the trade routes that carried Latin north and east. The full philological trail runs through Tolkien’s Mythology of Middle-earth: The Real Sources Behind the Legendarium. The Slavic vampire of the coast had picked up an Italian alias, which is exactly what you would expect from a four-hundred-year overlap.
The same hybrid logic shapes the witch material that fills the rest of the chapter. For the wider context of how Slavic and Italian Christianities first met on this coast, the long backstory is in The First Christians of the Balkans and in the heretical undercurrent traced by Bogomilism.
The Vistice
The witches of the Dalmatian coast had a Slavic name and a Slavic etymology. They were the vistice. The Düringsfelds break the word down: from vest, meaning skilled, knowing, experienced. The vistica is, literally, the woman who knows. The same word-family runs through the older South Slavic stories collected in Slavic Sorcerers in Old Serbian Fairy Tales, where knowledge and harm sit closer together than any modern reader expects.
The belief was still general in the 1870s. A vistica could suck the blood of children and eat their hearts. Her gaze was harmful to animals and to people. If a baby fell ill or wasted away, the mother searched her memory for a day when she had been crossing the street with the child in her arms and had been caught by the eye of an old neighbour woman. If she could remember the moment, she gave up. There was no medicine for it.
That is the dark half of the belief. The other half is the protective machinery, and the protective machinery is more elaborate than anything you usually find on the Adriatic in the late nineteenth century. The wider apotropaic toolkit of the period is sketched in The Amulet Trade: Sacred Objects or History’s Longest-Running Fraud.
In Ragusa (Dubrovnik), to identify a witch, you placed a sewing needle under the threshold of the church door, with the eye of the needle pointing outwards. The needle was the trap. When the witch crossed the threshold, the trap caught her, and she could not pass without revealing herself.
On the island of Lesina (Hvar), people lit fires on the eve of St John (24 June) and the eve of St Peter (29 June) to drive the witches away. The St John fire is the standard midsummer bonfire of half of Europe, but the Düringsfelds catch a detail you do not always see in the German and Italian sources. In Ragusa, when the fires were lit on St John’s Eve, an old man of the village had to leap over the flames first, cursing the witches as he jumped. Only after he had cleared the fire did the young people dare to follow. The cursing portion belongs in the same family as the Christian rituals catalogued in Exorcism Across Religions, Cultures and History, where the binding of harmful spirits by name is the operative move.
The young then jumped the fire on the eves of St Vitus (15 June), St Elias (20 July), and St Peter and Paul, with their hair crowned in flowers, calling out the name of someone they loved: U ime Boga i svetoga Vita za…, In the name of God and of Saint Vitus for so-and-so. It was a love charm and a witch ward at the same time. Some people refused to sleep at all on those nights, out of fear of the witches. Others said the witches vanished at the Ave Maria and the night was safe.
The St John’s Eve fires of Dalmatia were not unique to the coast. The same midsummer fires burned across the Slavic and Germanic worlds, but in Dalmatia they were specifically tied to the witch-detection cycle, with three saints’ eves (St Vitus, St John, St Peter and Paul) forming a sequence of nights when the supernatural was thought to be most active.
The Hunt at Split
In the Borghi of Split, the witch defence took its most aggressive form. Here is the passage in full, in the Düringsfelds’ German, with the wax bullets and the lightning:
In den Borghi von Spalato greifen die männlichen Bewohner, sobald ein Unwetter droht, zu ihren Schusswaffen, um, wie sie sagen, “auf die Hexen Jagd zu machen”. Sie laden die Gewehre mit kleinen Kugeln von geweihtem Wachs, stellen sich an verschiedenen Plätzen ins Freie hin und schießen auf die Blitze.
In English: In the Borghi of Spalato, as soon as bad weather threatens, the male inhabitants reach for their firearms, in order, as they say, “to hunt the witches”. They load their guns with small bullets of blessed wax, station themselves at various places in the open, and fire at the lightning bolts.
The reasoning is the part that takes a moment to follow. The hailstorm was the witches’ weapon. A hailstorm before the harvest could destroy a year’s grain or ruin the vines. The peasants of the Dalmatian coast were not insured against the weather. They had no warehouses of grain to fall back on if the harvest failed. They had a single shot at the year, and it ran from sowing to threshing.
If the witches were riding the storm clouds, then the storm clouds could be shot. The wax was blessed, which made it spiritually lethal. The bullet was small, which let you fire many. The lightning was where you could see them. If you knocked an old woman out of a thunderhead with a wax slug, she would crash to earth as a corpse, and you would find her in the village the next morning, dead in her bed.
That is what happened, in the belief of Split. If an old woman who had been suspected of being a witch fell ill or died after a hunt, no one in the Borghi doubted that one of the shooters had hit his target. The Düringsfelds note this without comment. They do not call it superstition. They report what the men said.
Klek
The mountain that rises behind Neum, the small Bosnian sliver of coast that splits Croatia in two, is called Klek. It is a sharp, irregular ridge, visible from far out at sea, the first piece of high ground a sailor coming up the Adriatic from the south sees clearly through the haze. Today it is known mainly to climbers and to the few thousand people who live in its shadow.
In the nineteenth century, Klek was the witch mountain of the entire Adriatic coast.
The Düringsfelds put it plainly:
Als Hauptversammlungsort aller Hexen gilt Klek, wo sie an jedem Freitag und Sonntag des Neumondes zusammenkommen, um ihre Feste abzuhalten.
Klek is held to be the chief gathering place of all witches, where they come together every Friday and Sunday of the new moon to hold their festivals.
The whole region echoed with the noise on those nights. If a traveller saw a great light flying through the air, he knew that a witch was on her way to Klek, riding either a broomstick or, alternatively, an enemy she had captured. The man being ridden carried something of the experience with him for the rest of his life. The traveller who saw the flight was supposed to hide, because if the witch noticed him she would force him to come along.
This is one of the few places in European folklore where the witch sabbath is not a vague theological abstraction but a specific mountain you can point at on a map. The Brocken in the German Harz has the same status in the Walpurgisnacht tradition, and Klek is, in effect, the Adriatic Brocken. The difference is that the Brocken got Goethe and Faust, and Klek got a paragraph in a forgotten German ethnography.
Klek is real. You can drive there. The mountain is in Bosnia and Herzegovina, sitting almost on the Croatian border, and the small town of Neum below it is the country’s only stretch of seacoast. From the coastal road, the ridge rises sharply against the inland sky, and on a stormy evening, with the cloud broken and the light flickering off the sea, it is not hard to understand why people believed that something was meeting up there.
Born to It
A child born with a caul, a piece of amniotic membrane around the head at birth, has been considered lucky in folk traditions across Europe for centuries. In Iceland the child became a fylgja-bearer, a soul carrier. In England the caul was sold to sailors as a charm against drowning. In Italy and Germany the caul-born child was thought to be marked for prophecy.
In the Borghi of Split, the caul-born child was lucky too, with one condition. The child had to carry the dried caul for life, and if the colour of that caul was reddish, the same child stood a good chance of growing into a vistica.
The Borghesi believed that the caul of a newborn could tell you, before the child could speak, whether she was likely to grow into one of the women you would later try to shoot out of the sky. Witchcraft, in this view, came on you the way a birthmark did.
The Düringsfelds catch one more variation of this theme. On Mljet, the island west of Dubrovnik that the Romans called Melita and that locals call Meleda, the Orko tradition had a peculiar twist. People who had not bothered to keep the holy days, who had worked on Sundays and saints’ days during their lives, came back as Orko after death. The villagers feared particularly the case where a male Orko and a female Orko appeared in the same village at the same time, because then the population was doomed.
To prevent the dead from rising as Orko, the men of Mljet cut the tendons of the feet of anyone whose habits suggested he might come back. The cut was made on the body of a person who, at the moment of the cut, was perfectly alive and was simply known around the village as a hard worker who never rested. The conversations between the cutter and the cut must have been worth hearing.
Other Inhabitants of the Air
The chapter is a witch chapter mainly, but the Düringsfelds catalogue the rest of the airborne population of the Dalmatian coast in the same matter-of-fact way. Three of them deserve a paragraph, because each one shows a different side of the hybrid culture the chapter sketches.
The Vile (singular vila) are the South Slavic mountain spirits, female, beautiful, sometimes dangerous, the closest thing the Slavs have to the Greek nymphs. The Düringsfelds note that the vile are everywhere on the coast and on the islands, and that the Volkserzählungen, the folk tales, are filled with them. There is no separate Dalmatian variant. The vila is pan-Slavic.
The Mora, the nightmare spirit, the same entity the Germans call Mahr and the English call the nightmare, sits on sleepers’ chests and steals their breath. The bestiary entry Mora and the longer essay The Mare: A Shadow from the Realm of Nightmares trace the same figure across her European range. On the islands, only unmarried girls were thought to turn into a Mora. Once they married, they became witches instead. The Mora was a stage of life rather than a permanent identity, and a woman could outgrow it.
The White Woman of Canosa on the Primorje is the strangest entry. She washes by the river, but never speaks. If you address her, she throws her washboard down and runs away through the water. The Düringsfelds tag her as Romance rather than Slavic, and they are right. She is a cousin of the Italian Anguana and the French lavandière, and she has wandered into the Dalmatian coast from the other side of the Adriatic. Compare her with the Woman in White, whose European pedigree runs even further back.
There is also the Mittagsgeist, the podne roga, the noon spirit of Ragusa, which the Düringsfelds use as their proof that the South Slavs of the coast still know the same demon as the North Slavs. The noon demon was a children’s bogeyman, kept indoors during the burning hours of the Mediterranean afternoon. The same figure haunts the wheat fields of Russia and Poland under the name Poludnitsa. From Ragusa to Smolensk, the same fear of the bright hour.
And the tintiline of Dubrovnik, the tintinelli of Bosnia, belong to the ground rather than the air. They are dwarf-sized red-clad spirits, the souls of unbaptised children, who play and dance over the graves of children buried unbaptised. If you steal their red caps and promise to return them, they will do anything for you. The Düringsfelds locate one of their favourite spots: at Sljebi above the Ombla, beside a spring that runs under alders, where there is a great stone table.
This is a topographical detail you cannot invent at a desk in Stuttgart. The Ombla is a short karst river just outside Dubrovnik, with springs and alders right where the Düringsfelds put them. The big stone table is the kind of thing a folklorist hears about once in a generation, and they got it on paper.
Why This Chapter Matters
The witch material from Dalmatia is interesting on its own, but it becomes more interesting in the context of the rest of European witch belief, because it shows what the witch hunt looked like in a culture that was no longer having one.
There is no Inquisition in this chapter, no tribunals, no torture cells, no printed catechism for identifying witches. The Düringsfelds were writing in 1879, more than a century after the last legal execution for witchcraft in Habsburg territory. The Croatian and Dalmatian witch belief they recorded was the property of the men of Split with their wax bullets and the old women of Ragusa with their needles under the threshold, and of nobody else.
This is folk witchcraft of the kind that lives in villages without paperwork. The vistice meet on a real mountain that you can drive to, they spoil the harvest with hail rather than with heretical sermons, and the people who hunt them use sewing needles and shotguns instead of an inquisitor’s manual. Compare this with the Roman strix tradition, which we covered in The Roman Strix: The Original Vampire-Witch and the bestiary entry Strix, and with the Kozlak material from the same coastal villages a generation later, and you start to see the shape of the South Slavic supernatural as a single working system. The Serbian half of that system is in The Vampire of Zarožje: The Legend of Sava Savanović and The Drekavac of Tometino Polje, the Croatian half in The Werewolf Woman of Pleternica and Returning Souls: Night Visits in the Balkans. The Hungarian and Moravian neighbours produced their own outbreaks: see Vampires in Hungary: When the Dead Walked, The Medveđa Vampire Panic and the Truth of Arnold Paole, and When the Dead Dined: The Revenant Panic of Moravia. The aristocratic legal version of the same anxiety, the noblewoman accused of consuming the young, is in Elizabeth Báthory: The Blood Countess.
The Düringsfelds were not after a system. They were collectors. Ida von Düringsfeld had travelled through Dalmatia in the 1850s and published Aus Dalmatien in 1857. Her husband Otto, a professional folklorist whose other great work was a thick comparative collection of European proverbs, helped her organise the Slavic material she gathered. They wrote together, signed together, and died on the same day, 13 October 1876, in Stuttgart. Ethnographische Curiositäten was assembled from their unpublished notes and the articles they had scattered through German feuilletons, and it appeared three years after their deaths. The publisher’s preface, a single page in old German type, says only that the editor thought the time was right for a culture interested in folk customs to receive the pieces in book form.
He was right. He was also right that nobody would translate them. The book has never been issued in English, and the chapter on Dalmatian witch belief, with its wax bullets and its red cauls and its mountain at Klek, has been quietly waiting on the shelves of a few European libraries for a century and a half.
The wax used by the men of Split was geweihtes Wachs, blessed wax, the same kind of wax that went into the Easter candle of the local church. The transfer of sacramental power into a firearm is one of the more interesting examples of the way folk Catholicism on the Adriatic borrowed liturgical materials for everyday magical work.
Further Reading on the Site
If you want to follow the Dalmatian thread further, the next stops are The Kozlak: Dalmatia’s Forgotten Vampire, which covers the hereditary vampires of Split from the 1908 ethnography of Friedrich Krauss, and The Mare: A Shadow from the Realm of Nightmares, which traces the Mora across her European range. The Italian half of the Adriatic is sketched in The Roman Strix: The Original Vampire-Witch and in Tarantism: The Dance of Desire and Delirium.
For the long Slavic vampire spine the Düringsfelds were sampling from, see The Vampire of Zarožje, the bestiary entries Vukodlak and Vampire, and the panic dossiers in Vampires in Hungary and Arnold Paole at Medveđa. For the religious soil the witch belief grew out of, The First Christians of the Balkans and Bogomilism are the two starting points.
For the politics of being a strange woman in a Catholic city of the period, see The Lady of Secrets: How Isabella Cortese Made Science Go Viral in 1561 and Elizabeth Báthory: The Blood Countess. For the philological branch that took the Dalmatian Orko all the way to Middle-earth, Tolkien’s Mythology of Middle-earth: The Real Sources Behind the Legendarium is the place to go.
The Düringsfelds’ source book, Ethnographische Curiositäten (Leipzig, 1879), is in the public domain and can be read online at the Bavarian State Library and the Internet Archive. The chapter on Dalmatia runs from page 79 to page 92 of the second part. Ida von Düringsfeld’s earlier Aus Dalmatien (Prague, 1857) is the more substantial Dalmatian ethnography of the two, in three volumes, and is also in the public domain.
