Pleternica: Krauss's Village

Pleternica is a small town in the Požega-Slavonia County of eastern Croatia. In the 1880s, it produced some of the most detailed folklore fieldwork ever recorded in the South Slavic world, not through any academic institution, but through one woman writing down what her neighbors told her.

Friedrich Krauss and His Mother

Friedrich Salomo Krauss was an ethnographer born in Požega who collected South Slavic folklore on an industrial scale. His most valuable source was his own mother, who lived in Pleternica and recorded accounts from women in the town. These were not secondhand retellings but direct transcriptions of personal experience, told in dialect, with names and locations attached.

The Accounts

Manda Lučić described catching a mora in the act of pressing on her chest at night. Manda Superina told of a hen that wheezed and expanded like a barrel, a sign of witchcraft. A woman from Trapari recounted a female werewolf who ate a ram whole at a crossroads. These stories were published in Krauss’s journals and books, preserving the specific detail that most folklore collections lose in translation.

Why Pleternica Matters

Most nineteenth-century folklore collectors summarized, edited, and romanticized their material. Krauss published the accounts as close to verbatim as the medium allowed. The result is a record of village belief that reads like testimony rather than literature. The moras, vampires, and werewolves of Pleternica are not archetypes. They are things specific people said happened to them.