Krsnik

The earliest printed notice is from 1854. Among the Slovenes around Görz, now Gorizia on the Italian-Slovenian border, the people told a folklorist that on the night of Saint John, the twenty-third of June, the witches and the Krsniki fought a heavy battle in the air. The Krsniki were twelve brothers, and the twelfth son of a twelfth father was always one of them. On that one night the Krsniki were in great danger, because the witches attacked them with the splintered stakes and stubble left in the fields after harvest. For that reason, the autumn villagers carefully pulled out the leftover stakes and the stumps that remained in the soil and carried them home, so the witches would have no weapons to use against the Krsniki. The pieces that could not be pulled, the villagers hammered deeper into the ground.

A second notice from the same period gives nothing but the function: “The Krsnici protect the world from witches.” A third notice, from the Veglia glasnik in 1860, gives the formula that unlocks the whole figure. Krstnik, človek kterega vile obljubiju. A Krstnik is a man whom the Vile have loved.

The plural form of the figure as a band of twelve brothers is documented only around Görz, and gets its own entry as Krstnici.

The Name

Krauss preserved the etymology in his 1908 chapter. The name is an old Greek loanword that runs through Bulgarian and Slovenian, and in both languages krstnik means the baptized one, the same word the Serbians use for a godchild as kumče. The Krsnik is the baptized one in a strict sense. He is the man whom the vile, the mountain spirits, picked out for love because the baptismal water on him gave the spirits a kind of holiness they could not reach by their own road. Krauss collected a folk saying from inland Croatia that puts it directly. The vile loved the young man so much they took him into the hollow tree with them, and they were in love with him because through him they smelled of baptism. Da su po krstu dišale.

So the Krsnik is not a wizard who learned a craft, and he is not a saint chosen by the church. He is the human channel through which the older mountain spirits hoped to reach grace. The vile recruited him because he had been to the font, and they kept him because he never lost the smell of it.

Appearance and the Mark of Birth

A Krsnik is born, not made. The most commonly recorded sign was the twelfth son of a twelfth son, which the Slovenes around Görz held to be the sure mark. Krauss noted that the twelve was a mythical number used to explain something the storyteller no longer fully understood. The older formula behind it was the caul. A Krsnik was often born with a košuljica, a thin amniotic membrane around his head, the same caul that in the same villages produced the Mora and the witch. The colour of the caul determined the path. A red caul made a witch. A white caul, in the Slovenian version, made a Krsnik. The same physical sign at birth, read by the same midwife, produced a child the village would later either fear or rely on, depending on a colour difference visible only at the moment of delivery.

In daily life he looked like any other man. A farmer, a shepherd, a small craftsman. He often did not know what he was until he had his first night-flight, usually around the age of twenty, on a Saint John’s Eve when he fell into a sleep so deep that nothing in the house could wake him. While his body lay in the bed his spirit went out to fight, and he came back at dawn exhausted and bruised in places no one had touched.

The Night Battles

The fight took place in the air. The Krsniki rose from their sleeping bodies, gathered in groups of twelve, and met the witches over the wheat fields and the high pastures. The witches came from the same direction the Vještice in the Dalmatian tradition came from, the witches’ mountains, in the Slovenian case Slivnica above Cerkniško Lake or the high karst above the Soča. The two sides fought with whatever was at hand in the upper air. The witches used the splinters of harvest stakes, the broken stubble, the dead stalks the farmers had not bothered to clear. The Krsniki fought with bundles of green branches, with sorghum brooms, with the tools of the granary.

The fight had a clear stake. If the Krsniki won, the village’s wheat would be safe and the harvest would come in good. If the witches won, the same hail and storm and crop failure that the Vještica entry describes would follow within days. The Krsnik was the village’s defender against the same atmospheric attack that the men of Split a hundred miles south defended against by firing wax bullets at the lightning. In the Slovenian hills the work was done by a sleeping man, on the Dalmatian coast by a man with a loaded shotgun, and the threat in both cases was the same hailstorm rolling over the same kind of wheat field.

The Italian Cousin

Across the Friulian border, in the same valleys on the Italian side, Carlo Ginzburg found the benandanti in the Inquisition trial records of the 1570s and 1580s. The benandante was a man born with a caul who left his body at night to fight witches in the air over the wheat fields with bundles of fennel against the witches’ bundles of sorghum. He fought four times a year, on the Ember days, including Saint John’s Eve. He won or lost, and the harvest depended on his result. The Friulian Inquisition was confused by him. He insisted he was a good Christian fighting for the church. The inquisitors insisted he was a witch. Over forty years they slowly turned the benandante into a witch by interrogation, and the cult collapsed by the early seventeenth century.

The Slovenian Krsnik on the other side of the border was the same figure, doing the same work, on the same calendar, with the same birth-sign, in the same kind of overnight sleep. He was never put on trial, because the Slovenes were peasants on the edge of the Habsburg empire and no Inquisition reached them. The Krsnik survived in the villages around Gorizia and in the Karst until at least 1908, when Krauss recorded him still active. The benandante was destroyed by court records that are now the most detailed surviving description of a European folk shaman. Ginzburg used the benandante records as the foundation for his argument that the witch sabbath was a Christianized misreading of an older Eurasian shamanic substrate. The Krsnik is the surviving Slavic half of the same substrate, on the same border, in the same generation.

The Stubble

The detail of the harvest stubble is the strangest one. The Slovenes around Görz pulled out the leftover stakes and stumps from the fields in autumn so that the witches would have no weapons in the next year’s Saint John’s Eve battle. Krauss was suspicious of the practice. He noted that no other South Slavic group did it, and that South Slavic peasants were generally reluctant to pull a dead plant out by the roots, because doing so was thought to pull hair out of the head of a dead mother or grandmother in the grave. He suggested the stubble-pulling around Görz might be a corruption of an older field-magic that no one in 1854 understood any more, perhaps a fertility rite involving the burning of the stubble rather than the pulling of it.

What the practice shows, regardless of its origin, is that the village around Görz believed the night battles were real enough to organize their autumn fieldwork around them. They were not telling stories about a metaphor. They were taking practical steps to disarm the enemy of a man they could not see fighting. The Krsnik defended the harvest. The village kept the witches’ weapons out of the field.

Behavior and Defense

The Krsnik did not need to know what he was to do his work. Most of the documented Krsniki in Krauss’s notes were ordinary men who learned about themselves only when an older Krsnik in the village died and the younger one began to dream of fighting in the air. Some carried small marks of their nights, bruises that came from nothing, scratches in places they could not have scratched, exhaustion after a deep sleep. The wife of a Krsnik was usually the first to notice and the last to mention it, because the village knew how to read the signs and had no interest in making the man self-conscious about a job he was doing for everyone.

There was no defense against him because there was no need to defend against him. He was on the village’s side. The defense was for him: keep the field clear of stubble in autumn, light the bonfires on Saint John’s Eve so the smoke would help him in the air, and on the morning after the night-fight, leave a bowl of warm milk and bread on the table for the man who had come back at dawn empty and bruised.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The Krsnik belongs to a wider class of European folk shamans whose existence Ginzburg tracked across the continent in Storia notturna (1989). The Hungarian táltos fought similar night battles, often in the form of a bull or a stallion. The Romanian călușari danced for the harvest in spring. The Sicilian donas de fuera visited the houses of the Sicilian poor in the night and brought luck or took it away. The Livonian werewolf who was tried at Jürgensburg in 1692 told the court he was a hound of God who fought witches in hell every Saint Lucia’s night to bring the grain back. The judge sentenced him for heresy, but the substance of what he said is the substance of the Krsnik tradition almost word for word.

The Krsnik survives in the corner where this entire substrate of European folk shamanism is most legible. He has the birth-sign, the night-flight, the calendar of Ember days and Saint John’s Eve, the air-battle for the harvest, the bond with the older spirits of the mountain. He is the baptized one whom the vile loved, the man who fought for the wheat in his sleep, the white double of the witch he flew out to meet. The Inquisition crushed his Italian cousin and let him alone. The Slovenian villages around Gorizia were still leaving him milk on the table when the twentieth century arrived.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Friedrich S. Krauss, Slavische Volkforschungen (Leipzig, 1908), section on Krstnik in the Hexen und Vile chapter
• Veglia glasnik II, 8 (1860), the earliest folkloric notice of the Krsnik formula
• Notice from the Slovenes around Görz (Gorizia), 1854
• Carlo Ginzburg, I benandanti (1966), for the Friulian parallel