The Serbian word for sorcerer is vrač. It comes from the same root as vračanje: healing. Not spellcasting, healing. In Belgrade, an entire district called Vračar still carries the name, after the healers who once gathered there. That tells you something about what “magic” meant in the old Slavic world before Christianity reorganized its vocabulary.
The fairy tales collected in 19th-century Serbia preserve figures that don’t translate neatly into English. They’re called old men and old women, but they know your name before you speak it and revive the dead with herbs. They are mediators between the human world and whatever lies beneath it.
Four tales from three different collectors show this pattern clearly. Here is what happens in them and what those old figures might be remembering.
Three Collectors, One Lost World
Between 1821 and 1871, three Serbian scholars did something urgent without fully knowing it: they wrote down what peasants still remembered.
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864) was the giant of the three. He reformed the Serbian language, standardized its alphabet, and published his first collection of folk tales in Vienna in 1821. A second, expanded edition followed in 1853, dedicated to Jacob Grimm, who wrote the preface and had earlier championed Karadžić’s work in the German-speaking world. Karadžić traveled across Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, writing down what peasants and storytellers carried in memory. His collections preserved tales that had no other written record.
Đorđe Kojanov Stefanović published his Serbian Folk Tales in Novi Sad in 1871. Less famous than Karadžić, he collected stories from communities where the old beliefs still ran close to the surface. I translated his collection into English as Serbian Folk Tales, and what struck me during the work was how different his sorcerers were from anything in Grimm or Andersen. No wickedness, no bargains with the devil, just knowledge and obligation, and a staff made of gold.
S. Novaković published fairy tales in the Srpski Letopis, the journal of Matica Srpska in Budapest, one of the oldest continuously published literary journals in the world (founded 1824). His contribution to the 1862 issue included “The Man with the White Beard,” one of the strangest stories in the Serbian fairy tale corpus. It reads less like a fairy tale and more like instructions for finding a safe place to build a house, delivered by someone who can hear the earth talk.
These three men did not record “folklore” in the quaint sense. They recorded the residue of a pre-Christian worldview that had survived centuries of Christianization by hiding inside bedtime stories.
The Old Man Under the Fir Tree
In Radovan and Slavojka, from Stefanović’s 1871 collection, a prince named Radovan follows a heavenly voice into the forest. Under a massive fir tree, he meets an old man who already knows his name, his father’s name, and the call that sent him on his journey.
“What are you saying, my son? That we have never met before? We have known each other for a long time, my child. You just don’t remember me.”
The old man reveals that he issued the call himself three nights earlier, during the king’s celebration. He sends Radovan to a dragon with nine heads, gives him a golden jar, and later summons a white horse, a dog, and a falcon by kissing three dragon feathers.
Radovan does not fight the dragon or slay it. He takes its feathers and gains power through them. In Serbian folklore, the zmaj (dragon) is not the fire-breathing enemy of Western tales. The zmaj is intelligent, proud, often protective. Serbian legends say that the great Despot Stefan Lazarević (1377–1427) was the son of the Dragon of Jastrebac, who visited his mother Kneginja Milica. Heroes descended from dragons were called zmaj-ljudi, “dragon-men.” So when Radovan cooperates with the dragon instead of killing it, the tale is working from a different mythology than Saint George.
The old man fits a pattern. He knows the hero’s name before hearing it, sets tests, and commands animal spirits. In Slavic mythology, Veles governed the underworld, cattle, and magic. Modern reconstructions of his attributes from folk survivals describe him as appearing in two forms: a horned young man, and a gray-haired old man with a white beard and a shepherd’s staff. The old man under the fir tree fits this second form exactly.
The Sun’s Mother
Karadžić collected this tale. A woman who couldn’t keep a fasting vow gives birth to a basil plant instead of a child. The basil becomes a girl. A prince takes her, but jealous women at court kill her and throw her body into the forest. An old woman finds the corpse, gathers herbs, and brings her back to life.
“An old woman passing through the forest found the lifeless girl and was moved by her beauty. Gathering some herbs, she brought her back to life. This old woman was the Sun’s Mother.”
She keeps the girl safe until the prince returns. When the Sun’s Mother dies, she receives an honorable burial. She is mortal, she ages, and she dies. But she can raise the dead with plants.
This is the znaharka tradition in action. In Serbian villages, the healer, from znati, “to know,” was usually an older woman who understood which herbs did what. The knowledge passed through maternal lines: grandmother to granddaughter, mother-in-law to daughter-in-law. Sometimes, according to tradition, the knowledge came through dreams. The practice was called bajanje (incantation healing), and Karadžić documented it as early as 1818 in his Srpski Rječnik (Serbian Dictionary). The herb doesn’t heal alone. The words spoken over it activate the cure. Knowledge and nature stay bound together.
Behind the Sun’s Mother stands Mokosh, the only female deity named in the Old Kievan pantheon of 980 AD. Mokosh governed the fertile earth, herbs, moisture, spinning, and fate. When Slavic peasant women went out to gather medicinal plants, they lay on the ground and prayed to Mother Earth to bless whatever herbs could heal. The Sun’s Mother does exactly this, minus the prayer. She just knows.
This tale appears in Illustrated Serbian Fairy Tales Vol. 2, where the illustrations capture that moment in the forest: the old woman bending over the dead girl, herbs in hand.
The Man with the White Beard
Published by Novaković in 1862, this is the strangest of the four. It barely feels like a fairy tale. It feels like a record of something.
A shepherd watches over his flock near water while a child plays on a log. A wolf approaches, the shepherd shouts a warning, and the child panics and falls into the water. Then an old man appears, with a white beard down to his waist and a golden staff in hand. He claims the child as his own, says it hasn’t drowned, and takes over.
What follows reads like a real estate negotiation with the underworld.
The old man strikes the ground with his golden staff and asks the spirit below: How much rent do you ask for a year if I build a house here? Something answers from beneath the earth: The lives of everyone in the house. He moves to another spot and asks the same question. The master and mistress. At another spot: A hen and a chick. Finally, he finds a place where the ground spirit asks only for a clove of garlic and promises good fortune. The shepherd builds there, and no one is happier than him and his descendants.
This is not standard fairy tale material. It is a protocol. The old man negotiates with duhovi tla (spirits of the ground), entities that claimed ownership of specific places and demanded payment for the right to build there. The staff is not decoration. It is the tool that opens the channel between the surface and whatever sits underneath.
In Slavic folk religion, the domovoj (house spirit) guarded the household. But before the domovoj arrives, someone has to make the ground safe. That is what the Man with the White Beard does. He is a specialist, a mediator between the human desire to build a home and the spiritual economy of the land. The golden staff appears again here. It is the same tool the old woman carries in “Friends and the Old Woman.” Both figures belong to the same tradition: authority over the boundary between worlds.
You can find this tale in Illustrated Serbian Fairy Tales Vol. 1, with original illustrations.
The Old Woman and the Snowdrops
Back to Stefanović’s collection. Young shepherds sit by a fire and talk about old things. An old woman appears carrying a golden staff adorned with jewels. Some boys offer her flowers from their grandfather’s garden. Others offer roses. She refuses everything.
Then three small children arrive carrying snowdrops. “The flowers of the old mother.”
“When many snowdrops bloom early in the spring, there will be good harvests and full barns.”
She takes only the snowdrops and gives gems to the children who brought them. Then she ascends to the sky.
The lesson isn’t subtle: what is yours, keep. What is not, don’t claim. But the figure matters too. An old woman with a golden staff reads agricultural futures in spring flowers and then leaves the earth by going up. She teaches the same ecological literacy that the Man with the White Beard practices from the other direction: he talks to the ground, she reads the sky. Between them sits the full vertical axis of the old Slavic cosmos, with earth spirits below, celestial knowledge above, and the human world in the middle where the flowers grow.
The Word Behind the Magic
The Serbian language preserves what the tales show. The vocabulary of folk magic is built on the idea of knowledge, not power.
Vrač means healer, not magician. The Belgrade district of Vračar carries this name, documented since the 15th century, after the healers who practiced there during the Ottoman period.
Veštica (the word typically translated as “witch”) comes from vešt, meaning “skilled” or “knowledgeable.” The original meaning was simply “a woman who knows things.” The Russian cognate ved’ma carries the same root: ved, to know. The Proto-Slavic root věděti meant knowledge, not evil. Christianity changed the meaning. By the Middle Ages, “the woman who knows” had become “the woman who serves the devil.” The knowledge stayed. The label flipped. (A parallel process turned Lilith from a powerful figure into a demon, and the mare from a complex spirit into a simple nightmare.)
Bajanje is incantation healing, practiced across Serbia, Bosnia, and Macedonia. The practice combined herbs with spoken words; neither worked without the other. Healers passed the knowledge down through maternal lines or received it in dreams. The lead-melting ritual (salivanje olova), where hot lead is poured into water and the healer reads the cause of illness from the solidified shape, is documented across the region. Some practitioners still do it today.
You don’t command the herbs. You know them. You don’t control the spirits. You speak with them. The Man with the White Beard doesn’t order the ground spirits around. He asks them questions and negotiates. This is a different model of magic from what the Western tradition imagines.
What the Tales Remember
These four figures are not random inventions. They map onto a specific pre-Christian cosmology. It survived a thousand years of official Christianity because people kept telling the stories to children.
The old man under the fir tree and the Man with the White Beard both echo Veles, the Slavic god of the underworld, cattle, magic, and travelers. In modern reconstructions of Slavic mythology, Veles appears as a gray-haired old man with a white beard and a shepherd’s staff, a characterization drawn from his pastoral and underworld functions. He was a shapeshifter who could become a dragon, a bear, or a snake. His domain was the root of the World Tree, the wet lowlands, and the underworld where the dead grazed like cattle on green meadows.
Veles was not evil. His opposition to Perun, the thunder god, was a cyclical conflict: earth against sky, water against fire, played out each year in the turning of seasons. After Christianity arrived, Veles split into different figures. Saint Blaise absorbed his cattle-protecting aspect, and the first church built on Veles’s shrine site in Yaroslavl was dedicated to this saint. The Devil inherited his trickster and underworld qualities. In East Slavic folk tradition, Saint Nicholas took over his role as wealth-giver and protector of the poor. But in the fairy tales, collected before these transformations were complete, he survives closer to his original form.
The Sun’s Mother and the Old Woman with the snowdrops echo Mokosh, the earth mother. She governed fertility, herbs, moisture, spinning, and fate. Her feast day was Friday. After Christianization, Saint Paraskeva replaced her, Petka in the Serbian tradition, but traces survived. In northern Russia, house spirits called Mokusha kept her name. The custom of praying to Mother Earth before gathering herbs persisted across the south. The znaharka who heals with plants and spoken words carried Mokosh’s function into the village.
The zmaj in Radovan’s tale fits this pattern too. Serbian dragons are not monsters. They are intelligent beings who, according to folk tradition, protect villages from destructive storms. The zduhać of Montenegro and Herzegovina was a man whose soul left his body during sleep to fight the demons that brought destructive storms. If he won, the harvest was saved. These are shamanic traditions, not fairy tale conventions. They echo the Balkan belief system where the boundary between the living and the dead was never as fixed as the new religion tried to make it.
What Karadžić, Stefanović, and Novaković recorded in the 19th century was more than entertainment. They caught the last audible echo of a worldview that Christianity had spent a thousand years burying. The tales kept it alive because nobody thought to censor bedtime stories.
By the Author
Serbian Folk Tales by Đorđe Kojanović Stefanović, ed. Rade Kolbas Illustrated Serbian Fairy Tales by Rade Kolbas
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpske narodne pripovijetke (Serbian Folk Tales), Vienna, 1821; expanded edition 1853
- Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski Rječnik (Serbian Dictionary), Vienna, 1818
- Đorđe Kojanov Stefanović, Srpske narodne pripovetke (Serbian Folk Tales), Novi Sad, 1871
- S. Novaković, fairy tales published in Srpski Letopis, Matica Srpska, Budapest, 1862
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- Primary Chronicle (Povest vremennykh let), entry on the Kievan pantheon of Vladimir, 980 CE
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