Kuga

The Serbian word kuga means plague. It also means a person. In South Slavic folk belief, epidemic disease was not an abstraction or an act of God. It was a woman who walked from village to village, grinding hearts to powder and scattering the dust on the wind.

Appearance

She was enormously tall and emaciated. Her face was eaten away by disease and covered with a white or black veil. Her breasts were entirely black and so long she threw them over her shoulders to walk unimpeded. Her feet varied by region: cow-foot, horse-foot, goat-legs, or both hooves at once. The Dalmatian poet Krunoslav Ivičević described her with wild black hair, cat-eyes with a lecherous gaze, a pointed nose full of snake-venom, a gaping insatiable mouth, and bare withered limbs.

She had several names. Kuga was the blunt one. During plague times, people called her Kuma, godmother, to avoid provoking her. Morija (the killer, from the root mar-, to crush) connected her to the same linguistic family as the Mora and the Latin mors. In parts of Slovenia and Croatia, she was called Kratelj, a name borrowed from the Germanic Schrat, originally a household spirit that crossed into Slavic territory and darkened into a plague-bringer.

Behavior

The Kuga could not attack humans directly. She first had to find a person who had concealed a mortal sin for twenty years without confession. She tore out this person’s heart, ground it to dust, and the dust dispersed in the air. Everyone who inhaled it fell ill and died.

She fed on hearts. Once sated, she absorbed the remaining dust and had to burst. From her stomach emerged a boy dressed entirely in black. He held a bloody sword. The Kuga then fled to another region.

The cycle repeated. She arrived at a village, found her sinner, ground the heart, and moved on when the killing was done. Proverbs tracked her movements. Ne izbiva kao kuga iz Sarajeva. She never fails to appear, like the plague in Sarajevo. Kud će kuga već u Sarajevo? Where would the plague go but to Sarajevo? The Ottoman capital of Bosnia had suffered so many epidemics that its name became shorthand for inevitability.

As an animal plague, she took different forms. A three-legged particolored beast. A dog that visited dung-heaps, mooed like a cow, entered stalls, and kissed cattle on the mouth. Whichever animal she kissed died by morning. Villagers set out bowls of milk on dung-heaps to appease her. Where she found milk, she spared the household.

Dogs

Dogs were the Kuga’s mortal enemies, and this was the most consistent detail across all regions. She came annually but had to retreat quickly or be torn apart. When she traveled, she feared dogs above all and transformed herself to escape them: a bundle of willow withes, a basket, a whetstone box, a bat.

A ferryman once carried the Kuga across the Sava river, not knowing his dog was hidden under his coat. Mid-river the dog woke, attacked the Kuga, and bit her so badly she fell into the water. She barely reached the far shore and swore revenge on all dogs. The story explained why the plague killed dogs too.

Her fear of dogs shaped the central folk narrative around her. Multiple tales follow the same pattern. The Kuga meets a man on the road and asks him to carry her into a village on his back, because dogs would attack her if she walked in alone. In exchange, she spares his household and tells him how the village can protect itself.

The Ritual Plowing

Near Velika Kopanica in Slavonia (recorded 1841), a man met two hideous women outside his village: small, noseless, earless, with deep-set snake eyes, cat-paw hands, and goat-feet. They identified themselves as two plague sisters sent from Sarajevo by their Plague King. They told him the remedy.

Twelve young men and twelve spotless virgins of blameless conduct had to go outside the village on the evening before Sunday after the new moon, at the witching hour. They stripped completely naked, harnessed themselves to a plow, and plowed around the village seven times in the same furrow, in absolute silence, without raising lustful glances or touching one another, until the furrow became a small ditch.

This was not just a story. Krauss confirmed that the ritual was performed in Syrmia during actual epidemics. Vuk Karadžić documented it independently. In 1871, in the Russian village of Davydkovo near Moscow, twelve virgins plowed around their village at midnight against cholera. Among the Mordvins in Simbirsk governorate, the same ritual was performed for cattle plague: venerable elders and innocent youths, a chaste maiden guiding the plow, all in silence. The practice crossed linguistic and religious boundaries while keeping its structure intact.

Creating the Plague

A recipe from the Varaždin region described how plague could be deliberately created. Obtain milk from two sisters, go to the cemetery at midnight on St. John’s Night, pour the milk into a grave, and listen. A wailing of many human voices would be heard. This created human plague. For animal plague, use milk from two cows or two mares born of the same mother.

A priest named Vojskec of Varaždin prayed constantly for the plague because he profited from funeral fees. He sent a servant to pour breast-milk into a grave at midnight. The woman who supplied the milk substituted cow’s milk instead. The servant poured it. Instead of human wailing, there was a terrible bellowing of cattle. A devastating cattle plague followed. Vojskec died. His ghost was seen running around the church cracking a whip. A traveler who accepted a ride from a phantom carriage with four horses learned that one of the horses was named “Pfarrer Vojskec.” For the priest’s full case history and his career as a fire-coach driver, see Vojskec of Warasdin.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The personification of plague as a traveling woman appears across eastern and southeastern Europe. The Romanian Ciumă is a similar figure. The Bulgarian Čuma matches the Serbian Kuga in most details. In Russian folk belief, the plague spirit (Morovaya Deva) was likewise a woman. The Greek Lamia in some regional variants carried plague rather than attacking children.

What distinguishes the South Slavic Kuga is the specificity of her behavior and the practical bargains she struck with humans. She could be reasoned with, redirected, and sometimes appeased. The milk on the dung-heap, the farmer carrying her past the dogs, the ritual plowing: these were negotiations between a village and a force that the village understood as personal and bound by rules.

Modern Survival

The Kuga no longer walks the roads between villages. Modern epidemiology replaced her with microorganisms, and vaccination replaced the midnight plow. The word kuga survives in Serbian and Croatian as the standard term for plague, carrying no supernatural charge in everyday speech.

Her structure survives in the language of epidemics. When COVID-19 reached the Balkans in 2020, older people in rural areas described the virus as something that “came from outside” and “entered through the door,” the same spatial logic the folklore had used. The Kuga’s deepest legacy is the idea that disease is a visitor, something with intention and direction, that can be met at the village boundary and possibly turned away.

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)
• Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (1818, expanded 1852)
• Sbornik za narodni umotvorenija, Sofia (various volumes, 1889-1900)