Vještica

Her name is vještica in Croatia, veštica in Serbia, vještica and vistica on the Dalmatian coast, veshtitsa in Bulgaria, višća in parts of Slovenia. The Düringsfelds traced the Dalmatian form back to the root vest, meaning skilled, knowing, experienced. The vještica is, literally, the woman who knows. Friedrich Krauss recorded the same etymology a generation later from his own informants in Slavonia and Bosnia. Both ethnographers reached the same conclusion. The South Slavic witch is not a borrowing from German or Italian witch-lore. She is older than either, and her name was already in place when the Inquisition arrived in the Balkans.

Appearance

By daylight she is a woman of the village, usually older, sometimes a midwife, sometimes a widow, occasionally a young bride who took her mother’s craft. The marks are small and require local knowledge to read. A red caul on the newborn was the most reliable sign. In the Borghi of Split, a child born with a reddish amniotic membrane around the head had to carry the dried caul for life and stood a good chance of growing into a vistica. Krauss collected the same belief from Slavonia and added that a girl born with teeth was also suspect, as was any infant whose mother had broken a fast during pregnancy.

At night the body she wears can change. The most common transformations Krauss recorded are into a hen, a black cat, a frog, a goat, a horse, and a moth. The horse form is tied to the Klek tradition: a witch who needed to travel a long distance bridled a sleeping man with a zauberhalfter, a magic halter, which turned him into a horse for the duration of the ride. He woke at dawn in his bed with sores on his back where the saddle had sat.

Origins and Initiation

A girl could be born to it through the red caul, or she could be brought into it by an older woman. Krauss preserved an initiation formula from Slavonia: the new witch was led at midnight to a crossroads, made to deny the saints by name, and given a small jar of black salve which she rubbed on her temples and on the soles of her feet before flight. The salve let her pass through walls and over water. She was then taken on her first ride to Klek as a passenger, behind the woman who had recruited her.

Krauss noted that the devil is rare in Slavic witchcraft compared to the western European forms. There is no pact with a horned figure, no contract signed in blood, no Black Mass. The witch’s power comes from her knowledge and her flight, not from a transaction with a master. When a master figure appears at the sabbath, he is more often a goat or a black ram than a man, and the dance around him is the Vražje kolo, the Devil’s round dance, not a worship.

Klek and the Sabbath

The Düringsfelds named Klek, the limestone mountain on the border of Croatia and Bosnia above the Adriatic near Neum. Witches flew there every Friday and every Sunday of the new moon, the mladi petak. Krauss confirmed Klek independently from his own informants in inland Croatia. He recorded a different formula for the flight, a phrase muttered as the witch left the chimney: “U Pulju pod oraje,” which means “to Apulia under the walnut trees.” The Italian destination is not an accident. South Slavic witch flight habitually crossed the Adriatic and landed in Italy, especially under specific walnut trees near Benevento, which were believed across the Mediterranean to be the meeting place of all witches. The Slavic and Italian sabbath traditions had shared a flight path for centuries.

At Klek the witches danced the Vražje kolo, sat at long tables, ate food that turned to dung in the morning, and planned the week’s mischief. The chief mischief was weather. The hail that flattened the wheat the next morning had been arranged at Klek the night before. This is why the men of Split fired wax bullets at lightning. They were shooting the women off their flying mounts as they crossed the sky on the way home from the mountain.

The Innkeeper’s Wife

Krauss recorded the longest single Klek narrative I know of, a folk tale from Croatia about an innkeeper whose wife was a witch. He had begun to suspect her when he found himself exhausted every Friday morning. One Thursday night he stayed half-awake. After midnight she rose, smeared her temples with salve from a small jar under the bed, mounted him, slipped a halter over his head, and rode him out the window. He carried her through the air to Klek and stood as a horse at the edge of the dancing ground for hours while she danced the Vražje kolo. On the way home he managed, by an effort of will, to jerk the halter off his own head and slip it onto hers. She became the horse and he the rider. He took her straight to the village smith and had her shod with iron horseshoes, four nails to each hoof. In the morning he denounced her to the court. The judges asked her to show her hands and feet. The shoes were still nailed on. She was thrown into a lime pit and the village burned the inn down to the foundations to be sure.

The tale has the cruelty of the period and a structural detail that is not from any Inquisition manual. The husband does not pray, he does not call a priest, he does not consult a church book. He uses the witch’s own halter against her. The defense is symmetric to the offense. This is a folk system, not a clerical one.

Behavior

A vještica did three kinds of harm. She broke weather over the wheat at harvest, which was the largest economic crime in any peasant village and the reason most witch-hunting energy in Dalmatia ran on the agricultural calendar. She drank the blood of children and ate their hearts. The Düringsfelds collected the formula from Ragusa: a baby that was wasting for no reason, a mother who could remember a moment when an old woman in the street had looked at the child with a particular kind of attention. There was no medicine for it. The third harm was the ride. A witch who needed transport and did not feel like turning her husband into a horse could turn anyone she had grudge against, and the man would wake at dawn with the marks of the saddle and a memory of the night that he could never quite assemble.

Krauss added one detail the Düringsfelds did not. The witches of inland Slavonia cooked their feast at Klek in eggshells, and when they crossed water on the way home they used the same eggshells as boats. This is why old peasant women in the Slavonian villages of Krauss’s time crushed every empty eggshell with the back of a spoon as soon as the egg was eaten. An uncrushed eggshell was a witch’s pot and a witch’s boat. The same custom was recorded in Germany, in the Netherlands, and in northern Spain. The Slavic version was the same custom with a Slavic name.

Vile and Vještice

Krauss treats the witches and the vile, the mountain spirits, in a single chapter. He had a reason. In the South Slavic system the boundary between the two is not as firm as a modern reader expects. A young girl loved by the vile could grow into a powerful witch, or into a healer, depending on the moment of her recruitment. Krauss divided the vile themselves into three classes: zračne vile (air-vile), pozemne vile (earth-vile), and povodne vile (water-vile), each with its own habits and weaknesses. The witch who had been initiated by the air-vile could fly without salve. The witch initiated by the water-vile could call rain or stop it. The witch initiated by the earth-vile knew the herbs and could heal the village.

The bestiary entry Mora sits next door to this one. In Herzegovina the two were sisters. A girl born to a witch was a Mora during her unmarried years and became a full vještica the day the bridal wreath went on her head. On the islands of Korčula and Brač, the two were kept strictly separate, and a Mora could never become a witch. The system is local. The pattern is regional.

How to Spot Her

The vještica left signs. Her footprint had four toes and no big toe, and the print she left in dust or sand on a dirt path was the same shape a wild goose, a swan or a wild duck would leave. The peasant of Warasdin knew where the print came from and believed at the same time that the witch had taken the bird’s shape to leave it. Both could be true. The bird was a real bird the witch had borrowed.

Inside the chest of her sleeping victim she worked in a single recorded gesture. With her zauberrütlein, the small magic switch, she struck the man over his left nipple. The chest opened. She tore out the heart, ate it, and the chest wound closed again over the empty space. Some of the eviscerated died on the spot. Others lived for the period the witch had decided to allow them, and she also chose the manner of death. A man who could find his stolen heart and eat it himself would have it returned to its place.

Her meeting was at fixed times of year. Witches gathered on St. John’s Eve, on St. George’s Eve, at Christmas, and at Pentecost, on broad open plains and at crossroads, where they brewed their potions. The Croatian peasant of Warasdin who chanced on a meeting was given a precise rescue protocol. Cover the head at once, make the sign of the cross, take three steps backward, and then a fourth step forward. Do this and the witches cannot harm you. Forget any step and you fall straight into the witches’ bowl.

Protection

The apotropaic calendar is built around the same four feast nights. On St. George’s Eve old women in Vinica and Warasdin cut thistle branches and fixed them to the doors of the courtyard and the stable. They drew crosses in cow dung on those same doors. They tied a wreath of thistle around the neck of every cow in the byre, laid thistle branches on the windowsills, the fences, and on each other’s heads. Some used iron nails in the stable door instead, but thistle was held to be the stronger guard. A man who refused to put thistle out was milked dry every night for a year by witches he could not see.

To watch the witches without being watched, the same Warasdin tradition gave a stranger procedure. Before sunrise on St. George’s Day, walk to the cow pasture. Strip naked. Turn every garment inside out and put it back on. Cut a square of green sod from the ground and lay it on the head. Then crouch behind the stable door at the moment the cows are let out. The witches will think the watcher is below ground and will pass without seeing.

The defenses against the vještica are the defenses of the working village, not of the church. Garlic at every door. A sewing needle placed under the church threshold with the eye outward, recorded by the Düringsfelds in Ragusa, would force any vještica entering the church for Mass to reveal herself. Bonfires on the eves of Saint John and Saint Peter, with the requirement that an old man leap the fire first while cursing the witches by name before the younger people followed. Wax bullets blessed at the altar and fired at lightning during the storm.

A whitethorn branch or a handful of madder root scattered in the path of a suspected witch was thought to slow her or make her stumble. The protective curse Krauss collected from a Bosnian peasant, “Na putu mu broč i glogovo trnje,” translates as “may madder root and whitethorn thorns be on his path,” and was used against any night-walking spirit. The same plant pair appears in the protections against the vampire and the Orko.

The defense most often forgotten is the proverb. Krauss collected dozens of fragments of folk speech that work as low-grade apotropaics, and the most common is so plain that it is easy to miss: bez bijeloga luka nema žive duše, “without garlic there is no living soul.” The peasant version of antibiotics, household magic, and theology in nine words.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The vještica is not the same as the western European witch of the Inquisition manuals, even though the two systems traded details across centuries of Adriatic and Alpine contact. The Inquisition’s witch sells her soul. The vještica inherits her power or is initiated by older women. The Inquisition’s witch is examined for the devil’s mark. The vještica is identified by a red caul at birth or a needle in the church threshold. The Inquisition’s witch is burned. The vještica, in the surviving folk tales, is more often thrown into a lime pit, ridden into the smith’s, or shot off her flying mount with a wax bullet over the wheat field.

The closer parallels run east and south. The Roman Strix is older than the vještica and bequeathed her the child-killing function. The Greek lamia and the Bulgarian veshtitsa shade into each other along the Macedonian border. The Italian strega and the Dalmatian vistica shared the flight path to Benevento and may have shared salves and formulas as well. The nightmare-pressing Mora is her younger sister or her unmarried form. The Hungarian boszorkány is a Magyar word for the same kind of woman doing the same kind of work in the next valley north.

What is particular to the vještica is the agricultural focus. She is a weather-breaker and a wheat-killer in a way that the western European witch is not. In a peasant economy where one bad hailstorm could starve a village through the winter, the witch was not a theological problem. She was the explanation for the weather and the focus of a defensive system that ran on garlic, whitethorn, blessed wax, and bonfires lit on the right night. Two hundred years after the last burning, the men of Split were still loading their guns with wax and firing at the lightning. The court records had stopped, but the belief was on the same hillside as the wheat, and the wheat was the thing the storm came for.

Sources

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

• Friedrich S. Krauss, Slavische Volkforschungen (Leipzig, 1908), chapter on Hexen und Vile and chapter on Vampire
• Otto Freiherr von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld and Ida von Düringsfeld, Ethnographische Curiositäten (1879), chapter Aberglauben der Küsten- und Inselbewohner Dalmatiens
• Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (1818, 1852)
• Tihomir Đorđević, Veštica i vila u našem narodnom verovanju i predanju