Sviećari

In the fields around Varaždin, in the northwestern corner of Croatia, a dead man was said to walk the boundary lines at night with a burning candle where his head should be. He was a sviećar, and in the plural sviećari, the candle-men. The belief was written down in 1863 by Matija Valjavec, who sent it to Zagreb as one of the answers to Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski’s national questionnaire, printed in the seventh volume of the Arkiv za povjestnicu jugoslavensku. Valjavec set out the rule plainly. The sviećari are people who in life did some wrong at the field boundaries; for that God gives them no rest, but sentences them for years to walk those very edges they had wronged.

Appearance

They do not have proper heads as other people do. In place of a head each carries a great candle. Valjavec’s phrase is exact: mjesto glave imaju veliku svieću, in place of a head they have a large candle. The illustration here follows that record and the wax that runs from it, a gaunt figure in a peasant’s coarse coat, a lit candle rising from the shoulders, standing over a squared boundary stone in the furrowed earth.

The one further physical detail the record gives is what happens when two of them meet. When the candle-heads knock together, many sparks fly out, Valjavec writes, as if a juniper bush had been set alight (kao da se opali kup borovice). A juniper thrown on a fire spits and cracks and throws a shower of sparks, so the comparison is a farmer’s, drawn from the burning of brushwood cleared from a field. The sviećari are lit like the land they wronged.

Function

The wrong they carry is specific. It is a crime of the medja, the field boundary. In a peasant land-society where a family’s survival was measured in the strips of earth it held, moving a boundary marker to take in a neighbour’s row was among the gravest thefts a man could commit, and one of the hardest to prove. The sviećar is the man who did it and got away with it in life. The sentence falls after death: to walk the boundary he moved, year after year, as its unquiet guardian.

They keep a calendar. Valjavec records that they walk mostly in Advent and in the two weeks before All Saints, the two dark passages of the church year when the dead were felt to be nearest. And they are not passive. If they notice a man, they go straight at him.

Here the record turns strange, and it is the detail worth sitting with. If the man then prays, the harder he prays the harder they mean to strike him. But if he begins to curse them, they leave him at once. Prayer draws the blow; cursing drives them off. The reading that suggests itself is that these are the damned, souls under God’s sentence, for whom the sound of prayer is the sound of the judgement they cannot escape, while a curse is the coarse speech of the living world they have been shut out of. That is a reading, not a thing Valjavec explains. He records the rule and explains nothing, and the inversion of the usual folk logic, prayer as provocation, stays exactly where he set it down.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The sviećari are one local name inside a much wider Slavic and European belief in the walking light. Across the South Slavic and Slovene lands the wandering flame that leads travellers astray is the svjetlonoša or svetlonoša, the light-bearer, from svetlo, light, and nositi, to carry. The Czech and Slovak name is the same word, světlonoš, alongside bludička, the little strayer; the Polish is błędny ognik, the erring flame. In European folklore generally these lights, the ignis fatuus or will-o’-the-wisp, were read as the souls of the unbaptised or stillborn dead, caught between heaven and purgatory. The Serbian ethnographer Tihomir Đorđević gathered a great deal of this material in his study of nature in Serbian belief, Priroda u verovanju i predanju našega naroda. The candle-head of Varaždin is that wandering light given a body and a crime.

The crime places the sviećari inside a second, tighter European tradition: the boundary-mover condemned to walk. In German legend he is the Grenzsteinversetzer or Marksteinrücker, the farmer who shifted a boundary stone in life and after death must carry it on his back, wandering the edge of the field and crying wo soll ich ihn hintun, where shall I put it, until a living passer-by tells him to set it back where he took it and so releases him. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm recorded fiery, illuminated spirits as the curse laid on those who disturb boundary stones in their Deutsche Sagen of 1816 and 1817. Polish lore carries a limping monster, the miernik, the surveyor, bent under the weight of the markers it moved. The German ghost carries the stone; the Croatian one carries the light. The offence is the same offence.

Behind all of it sits a very old law. In Rome the boundary marker had its own god, Terminus, whose name was simply the Latin word for the stone. Dionysius of Halicarnassus records that Numa consecrated the termini and made the man who displaced one sacer, forfeit, a person anyone could kill without penalty. The peasant belief and the archaic statute point the same way: the field boundary is sacred, and the man who moves it puts himself outside the ordinary protections of the living. The sviećari are what happens to that idea when it is dreamed rather than legislated.

The nearer kin are in this bestiary. The kozlak and the vukodlak are the other unquiet dead of the Croatian and Dalmatian countryside, restless for their own reasons; the drekavac is the crying thing of the field-edge and the graveyard, often tied to souls that died wrong; the mora is the night-presser who comes for a sleeper as the sviećar comes for a walker. The general shape, a corpse that will not stay in its grave because something in its life was left unsettled, is the revenant.

Modern Survival

The sviećari did not survive into the twentieth century as a living scare the way the vampire did. They survived as a record, a paragraph in a folklore archive, and as one entry in the long ledger of Slavic wandering-lights that folklorists still trace from village to village. The belief that lit them is not folklore, though. A boundary dispute is still one of the bitterest quarrels a rural community can have, and for the same reason: the line in the earth decides who eats.

What the candle-men preserve is a moral fact wearing a supernatural costume. Land theft that no court could catch was handed to a court that never adjourns. The man who moved the medja walks it forever, marked out by a flame that anyone crossing the field at dusk could see, punished in the exact place he sinned and by the exact thing he stole, the quiet of the ground. Whether a farmer near Varaždin in 1863 believed he might really meet one, or only knew the story and knew what it was for, the field-edge kept its meaning either way. And the oddest rule, that a prayer brings the blow and a curse sends it away, is still sitting there in Valjavec’s page, unexplained, waiting for whoever wants to think about it.

Sources

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

• Matija Valjavec, “O sviećarih,” in the answers to Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski’s questionnaire, Arkiv za povjestnicu jugoslavensku VII (Zagreb, 1863), collected around Varaždin
• Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsche Sagen, 2 vols (Berlin, 1816–1818)
• Tihomir R. Đorđević, Priroda u verovanju i predanju našega naroda, 2 vols (Srpska akademija nauka, Belgrade, 1958)
• Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 2.74 (Numa’s consecration of the boundary stones to Terminus)