Steinträger and Kerzenträger

The professional ghost-banner Imro Koprivčević of Pleternica supported his entire family on his exorcism fees by the time Friedrich Krauss interviewed him in the late 1880s. He had given up his earlier trade of opanci-mending. His two best customers were the two kinds of restless dead that walked the Pleternica fields and farmsteads at night. The first carried boundary stones. The second carried lit candles, but had no head.

Appearance

Both classes of revenant appear at night in the Slavonian villages around Pleternica.

The Steinträger is a male peasant figure, often recognizable as a specific deceased man from the village. He carries a single boundary stone under one arm and a candle in the opposite hand. He walks the contested property line with a slow deliberate step. He never speaks.

The Kerzenträger is also a male peasant figure but headless. The body wears the clothes the man was buried in. The neck is closed off above the shoulders. In one hand the figure holds a single tall candle, lit, the flame steady regardless of wind. The candle never burns down.

Origins

The two creatures share an architectural logic: each has earned his afterlife by a specific in-life sin, and each carries the instrument of that sin forever as penance.

The Steinträger was, in life, a Grenzmarksteinverrücker. He moved boundary stones between his land and his neighbour’s land to expand his holdings. The land was his family’s livelihood. The stones were the only documentation of who owned what. By moving them in the night when no one was watching, he stole from his neighbour something the law could not easily get back. After his death, his soul cannot enter rest. He must walk the wrongly-shifted property line every night until someone restores the stones to their original places.

The Kerzenträger was a beekeeper. Beekeeping was a skilled trade in the South Slavic countryside, and a successful beekeeper’s hives had to swarm well in spring or the year’s honey was lost. There existed a folk practice, condemned by the church but apparently widespread enough that Krauss recorded it. The beekeeper would attend All Saints’ communion, hold the consecrated host in his mouth instead of swallowing it, return home, and feed the host to his bees. The bees would then swarm with extraordinary vigor. The beekeeper got his honey. He had also blasphemed the body of Christ.

After the beekeeper’s death, the punishment fit exactly. The host belonged in his head and mouth. He had let it leave through the wrong opening. After death he walks without a head, carrying the false candle of the consecrated host he should never have removed from his body.

The Bilač Case

Krauss recorded a specific Kerzenträger case that Koprivčević resolved. A man in Bilač near Ruševo had given a consecrated host to his mare. After his death he returned to currycomb the mare in her stable. The household heard him and watched him work. He climbed into the loft and began loosening the smoke-flue tiles. The household sent for Koprivčević.

The exorcism that followed was physical. Spindles flew onto the cribs and caps were torn from spectators’ heads, leaving the house in disarray. Koprivčević began to zaklinjat, to bind the spirit with words, and the spectre flew out the door. The man’s grave settled afterward and the visitations ceased.

Krauss noted that Koprivčević’s zaklinjat formula was specific to him and was not shared with other professional ghost-banners. The professional secret was passed down within Koprivčević’s family.

Behavior

Both Steinträger and Kerzenträger walk only at night. Daylight returns them to their graves. They do not attack the living, but their presence on the property line or near the household terrifies the families who see them.

The Steinträger’s behavior is repetitive. Every night, the same path. The boundary stone moves with him. By dawn he is back in the grave, and the stone (in the visions of the witnesses) is back in its wrongly-shifted location.

The Kerzenträger’s behavior varies more. The Bilač case shows him returning to the household to interfere with the property he had blasphemed (the mare, the smoke flue). Other Kerzenträger cases recorded by Krauss show the headless figure standing in the apiary at midnight, holding the false candle over the bees the host was meant to feed.

Krauss’s Aside

Krauss made a pointed historical observation in his Steinträger and Kerzenträger material that bears recording. The desecration of the host has, across European history, been the trigger for repeated cycles of antisemitic violence. Medieval German cities burned Jewish populations on the accusation of stealing and stabbing the host. The South Slavs took the same theological belief about the desecrated host’s terrible power and produced no Jewish persecution from it. As Krauss wrote: nur zu einer bei den Südslaven nicht, zur Judenverfolgung wie in Deutschland im Mittelalter schmachvollen Andenkens. Among the South Slavs the host-desecration belief never produced the shameful memory of Jew-persecution that it did in medieval Germany.

The South Slavic answer to the question “what happens to a man who steals the host” was the Kerzenträger walking headless in his own apiary. It was not a pogrom against people who had nothing to do with him.

Protection

For the Steinträger, the only documented protection is restoration. The wrongly-shifted boundary stones must be returned to their original location. Once this is done, the soul can rest. The neighbour family or the descendants of the original mover are the ones who must do this. The walking continues until they do.

For the Kerzenträger, no in-life remediation is possible. The host is gone. What remains is exorcism by a geisterbanner in the family of Imro Koprivčević or one trained in the same tradition. The exorcism does not always work on the first attempt. The Bilač case took one night.

The Pleternica Cluster

Both creatures belong to a wider cluster of Pleternica-region revenants Krauss collected from named informants. Imro Koprivčević is the recurring expert. Other informants include Mato Nikolčić, Manda Šuperina, and Margita Josipović, all of Pleternica or its neighbouring villages, all interviewed by Krauss’s mother on dated visits between 1886 and 1888.

The Pleternica cluster represents the densest documented revenant tradition in any single South Slavic micro-region. The Steinträger and Kerzenträger are part of a larger taxonomy that includes the vampir, the vukodlak, and case-specific revenants. See Pleternica for the wider geography.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The architectural logic of the two creatures (sin → carry-burden) has parallels in Catholic purgatory iconography. Penitents in late-medieval art are sometimes depicted carrying the instruments of their sin, the false weights of dishonest merchants and the wrongly-marked stones of land-thieves. The Steinträger sits squarely inside this iconographic tradition.

The Kerzenträger has a closer parallel in Jewish folklore: the gilgul, a soul forced to return in degraded form because of a specific sin in a previous life. Both creatures represent the same theological intuition that the punishment must fit the sin and must be visible from outside.

What the Pleternica pair preserve is the South Slavic version of folk-Dante. The cosmology is local and the penance is precise. The witnesses are named, the dates are recorded, and Imro Koprivčević charged a fee for getting rid of either revenant when one settled into a household.

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)
• Imro Koprivčević of Pleternica, professional ghost-banner (geisterbanner), interviewed via Krauss’s mother (1886-1888)