Krstnici

The Slovenian villagers around Görz, today’s Italian Gorizia on the Slovenian border, did something every autumn that puzzled their neighbours in the rest of South Slavic territory. They dug up the harvest stakes from their fields and carried them home. Stakes too solidly anchored to remove, they hammered down deeper. The reason they gave was specific. On St. John’s Eve, the witches of the region would fight an aerial battle against the local Krstnici, a band of twelve brothers, and the witches needed weapons. Removing the stakes denied them. Friedrich Krauss recorded the practice in 1908 from a Slovenian print source dated 1854.

Appearance

The Krstnici are not visible to ordinary villagers in their fighting form. Their bodies remain in their houses, sleeping on St. John’s Eve while their souls rise to combat the witches in the air over Gorizia.

In their daily lives the Krstnici are twelve brothers in a single family. The Slovenian text Krauss preserved is precise: Wenn sich in einer Familie zwölf Söhne von einem Vater befinden, so ist der zwölfte unter ihnen ein Kerstnik. When twelve sons of one father appear in a single family, the twelfth among them is a Krstnik. Krauss noted that the source then immediately contradicts itself by referring to all twelve as Krstniki, then to only the twelfth, and so on. He took the contradiction as evidence of etwas notdürftig zu erklären, was man nicht mehr versteht, something half-explained that the storyteller no longer fully understood. A half-remembered older belief had been refitted with the mythical Twelve.

Origins

A Krstnik in the singular is, in the Slovenian tradition Krauss documented, a man whom the Vile have loved. The 1860 Veglia glasnik preserved the formula: Krstnik, človek kterega vile obljubiju. A Krstnik is a man whom the Vile have promised. The Vile carry off baptized children into hollow trees because the children, in the Slovenian phrase, po krstu dišale, smelled of baptism. Some of those children grow into Krsniks, raised in seclusion under Vila favor.

The Krstnici, the plural collective form unique to Görz, appear to be the same belief restructured around the family. Where the singular Krstnik is one man marked by Vila favor, the Görz Krstnici are twelve brothers marked by family arithmetic. Twelve sons by one father is rare. The Slovenian peasant counted his sons and assumed something supernatural about the twelfth.

Krauss observed that no other South Slavic population practiced this. The Slovenes around Görz alone held the twelve-brothers variant, and no other part of South Slavic territory took up the field-stake harvest-prophylaxis. The combination of belief and practice is geographically tight.

Behavior

The Krstnici do not act as a fighting unit during the year. They live ordinary lives in their parents’ household. Twelve brothers means a large peasant family by any era’s standards, and the Görz Krstnici are presumably busy with the work of farming.

On St. John’s Eve, the night of June 23-24, the brothers’ souls leave their sleeping bodies and rise to combat the witches of the region in the air over Gorizia. The fight is for control of the next year’s weather and harvest. If the Krstnici win, the year will be fertile. If the witches win, the year will fail. The fighting is real and dangerous, even though it happens in spirit-form, and a Krstnik who is killed in the night-battle is found dead in his bed in the morning.

The witches’ weapons are the harvest stakes left in the fields after the previous year’s grain came in. The peasants of Görz, knowing this, removed the stakes in autumn and brought them home. Stakes too solidly anchored to be pulled out were hammered down deeper, so the witches could not wrench them out and use them.

This was the only practical contribution the ordinary villager could make to the night-battle. The Krstnici fought in the air. The peasants on the ground denied the enemy weapons.

A Folkloric Anomaly

Krauss flagged the harvest-stake practice as anomalous. South Slavs across the broader region observed a general taboo against pulling dead plants out of the ground with one’s hand. The reason given was that doing so pulled the hair from a dead grandmother or great-grandmother in the grave. The Görz villagers broke this rule explicitly for the Krstnici stakes. The break is a sign, Krauss thought, that the Krstnici belief was old enough to override the more general apotropaic system.

He also noted that the contradiction in the Slovenian source (twelve brothers / only the twelfth) suggests an older single-Krstnik tradition fitted with the mythical Twelve, possibly under Christian numerological influence (the twelve apostles, the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve days of Christmas). The original belief may have been about a single Vila-loved man whose family role was unclear, refitted in some Görz village around the symbolic twelfth-son.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The Krstnici are the closest South Slavic structural parallel to the Friulian benandanti, the good walkers documented by Carlo Ginzburg from 16th- and 17th-century Inquisition records. The benandanti were also born under specific conditions (with a caul), also fought witches in night-battles for the agricultural year, also used vegetable weapons (fennel stalks against the witches’ sorghum). The geographic distance between Görz and Friuli is small. The cultural border is the Italian-Slavic linguistic line. The two beliefs may share a common Karst-region source.

For the singular form of the same belief in broader South Slavic territory, see Krsnik, the Vila-loved shaman who fights in dream-flight.

Modern Survival

The Krstnici tradition does not survive in living folk practice. The Slovenian-Italian border that Görz sits on saw its population shifted multiple times in the twentieth century, including the post-1945 expulsion of the Italian community and the Cold War sealing of the boundary. The continuous oral tradition that 1854 print source had captured was unlikely to survive these disruptions intact.

The harvest-stake practice itself faded with mechanized agriculture. Combine harvesters do not leave the kind of hand-rammed stakes that the witches were said to use as weapons.

What the Krstnici preserve is one of the small geographically-bounded folk-beliefs that European folklore is full of and that vanish without leaving anything behind except a single early printed reference. Krauss saw the second-hand testimony in 1908 and recognized he was probably documenting something that would not survive him.

Sources

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

• Friedrich S. Krauss, Slavische Volksforschungen (Wilhelm Heims, Leipzig, 1908)
• 1854 Slovenian print source on Görz folk belief
• Veglia glasnik (1860, island of Veglia testimony on the Krstnik-Vile relationship)
• Carlo Ginzburg, I benandanti (1966), for the Friulian structural parallel