On the ridge between Carniola and the Žumberak hills there is a stone the local people call Krvavi kamen, the Blood Stone. The legend that explains it was written down in 1863, in the seventh volume of Zagreb’s Arkiv za povjestnicu jugoslavensku, by a contributor angry enough about a garbled version printed in 1838 to set down what the Žumberak folk actually told.
In his telling, the year is 1650. The Uskoci, borderland fighters settled in the hills a century earlier, cannot agree with their Carniolan neighbors where the border should run across the Gorjanci meadows. So the two sides agree on a procedure: each side chooses one young man; on St Mark’s Day at first light, both walk out from home; where the two meet, there the border shall run. Both must wait at the meeting spot until commissions from the two sides arrive to record it.
The Uskok youth rises far earlier than his rival and is already descending into Carniola when the Carniolan appears hurrying uphill. The two meet and wait. The Carniolan commission, with half the road to cover, arrives first, and the men in it do the arithmetic: no Uskok officials will come for hours, and the meeting spot, deep on the Carniolan side, gives the meadows away. So they bury both young men alive, only so it should not be known where they had met.
A third body lies in the grave: a girl in love with the Uskok youth had seen him set out and gone with him, and at the pit, the teller says, she resolved to die too, “and folding her white wings she leapt in to him.” The Kranjci rolled an enormous stone over the grave, and when they set it on top, three drops of blood showed upon it. Some kind of red spots, the 1863 text adds, are seen on it still.
The Žumberak legend puts a young woman into the earth so that a line will hold; it is a border story rather than a building story, but any singer from Skadar to Arta would have recognized the shape at once.
The city that would not stand
Around 1820, on a collecting trip through the young Serbian principality, Vuk Karadžić sat down with a singer known as Starac Raško, Old Man Raško, at Prince Miloš Obrenović’s manor in Kragujevac. Raško had come out of Kolašin in Montenegro during the uprising years, and he carried a song about the building of Skadar, the fortress town on the Bojana river that is now Shkodra in Albania. Vuk printed it in 1823 in the second volume of his Narodne srpske pjesme.
The song follows the three Mrnjavčević brothers, Vukašin, Uglješa and Gojko. The first two are historical fourteenth-century magnates; Gojko, the scholarship suspects, was invented for the song. For three years the brothers build Skadar, and every night a vila, the mountain spirit of South Slavic song, throws down what the masons raised by day. Our bestiary entry on the vila traces this being through the Sava plain, where watching her kolo on Ascension Day could turn a boy to stone and a sudden collapse in the hayfield was read as her arrow; toppling a king’s fortress is well within her range.
First the vila sets her condition: the walls will stand only if the builders find a brother and sister named Stoja and Stojan and wall them into the foundation. Both names grow from the verb stojati, to stand. The pair cannot be found, so the vila names her second price: whichever of the three wives brings the masons their lunch tomorrow goes into the tower wall.
The brothers swear to keep the bargain from their wives and let chance decide. Vukašin and Uglješa go home and warn theirs; Gojko keeps the oath. His young wife, unwarned, comes up the meadow with the lunch, and her brothers-in-law wall her in while she pleads, then bargains: leave a window for her breasts, so the child can still be brought to her to nurse. In the song the milk still flows after her death.
In the ballad the vila’s first demand is a brother and sister named Stoja and Stojan, from stojati, “to stand”; the bride is only her second price. Aromanian singers who borrowed the song kept the wordplay by naming the pair Constance and Constantine.
The same wall, told twice
The same fortress keeps the story across the language line. In Albanian tradition the castle above Shkodra is Rozafa’s castle, and the legend runs on the same rails: three brothers build by day, the walls fall by night, and an old man tells them the work will hold when the wife who brings tomorrow’s lunch is built into it. The brothers give their besa, the Albanian oath, not to warn their wives, and the two elder break it.
Rozafa, the youngest brother’s wife, hears what is waiting for her and answers with conditions. Let them leave free her right eye, her right hand, her right foot and her right breast, so she can see her infant son, stroke him, rock his cradle and feed him. The castle gateway repays her to this day: limestone deposits seep through the old masonry, and local women have long scraped this white residue, mixed it with water, and drunk it to bring their own milk in, because it is held to be Rozafa’s.
One hill gave two peoples national poems out of the same story, and generations of scholars fought over which side told it first; we will come to how that fight ended.
A monastery and a bridge
The Romanian branch of the family put the sacrifice under a church. In the ballad of Meșterul Manole, the prince Radu Negru orders a monastery at Curtea de Argeș more beautiful than any other, the walls crumble each night, and Manole, the master mason, learns in a dream that the building wants someone loved. The first wife to bring lunch will be walled in. Manole watches the road at dawn and sees his own wife Ana coming, prays for storms to turn her back, and the storms fail. The masons build around her as a joke, then keep building. The Romanian telling adds an ending of its own: when the prince asks the masons whether they could build something finer still and hears yes, he strands all ten on the roof, and they fall to their deaths on wings of roof shingle. A spring is shown where Manole struck the ground.
In Greece the structure is the bridge of Arta and the messenger is a bird with a human voice, which tells the head builder that the bridge will stand when his wife is in the foundations. Buried, she curses the bridge to tremble like a leaf, then remembers her brother abroad, who might one day cross it, and talks her own curse down into something a bridge can bear. Hungarian singers walled Kelemen the mason’s wife into the fort of Déva, and in some of their versions the masons burn her first and mix her ashes into the lime.
Folklorists have collected these songs in the hundreds, in Serbian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Romanian, Hungarian, Romani, Armenian and Georgian versions, with parallels as far as India. The oldest hard trace anywhere is an oral narrative version recorded from fifteenth-century Albania, found in archival records by Jovan Tomić in 1908, and the comparative scholarship puts the pattern’s spread through the Balkans somewhere in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. In Bosnia the story bent to local ground and faith: there the victims are two children, and the buildings are the great Ottoman bridges at Višegrad and Mostar. That is the legend Ivo Andrić found waiting for him in Višegrad, still told about the bridge he put in a novel.
The poem Europe could not stomach
In March 1824 Vuk sent his first two song volumes to Jacob Grimm, who was teaching himself Serbian from them at the urging of the Slovene censor and philologist Jernej Kopitar. Grimm seized on the Skadar ballad and translated it into German. He called it one of the most outstanding songs of all peoples and all times, a judgment the folklorist Alan Dundes liked to quote. Goethe printed his own assessment the next year in Ueber Kunst und Alterthum: the spirit of the poem struck him as superstitious and barbaric.
Both men were reacting to what the song refuses to soften: the masons are no monsters, and the sacrifice, demanded by a vila nobody defeats, works. Grimm heard a tragic depth Homer would recognize; Goethe, a people singing approvingly about walling up a nursing mother. Dundes observed that Grimm’s verdict is the one that prevailed; the ballad became a fixture of European folklore scholarship and of the school curricula of half the Balkans.
It also became a battlefield: for a century and a half, Serbian, Hungarian, Romanian and Greek scholars each tried to prove the story born on their own soil, and each bent the evidence until it fit. The folklorist Dorian Jurić, whose 2020 study is the best modern map of the tradition, calls the whole scholarly history chauvinistic and reads the song as a migratory legend that attaches itself to whatever famous wall, bridge or monastery stands nearby, everywhere it goes. On that reading there is no original nation and no Urform to recover, only a story-pattern that found the Balkans congenial and settled everywhere at once.
What the belief did to people
Songs are one kind of evidence, and in 1887 the Slavonian-born folklorist Friedrich Salomo Krauss went after another: he published a short study, “Das Bauopfer bei den Südslaven,” in the journal of the Anthropological Society in Vienna, and filled it with what people around him actually did.
A Bosnian farmer breaking new land threw half a silver coin onto the field as payment to the sahibija zemlje, the lord of the earth, and kept the other half as a receipt. Another man choosing a house site laid big stones around the plot and came back on the third day; where worms had gathered under a stone, the earth’s lord had accepted, and the worms counted as the first building sacrifice. A correspondent from Bosnia sent Krauss instructions for founding a bee-house: bury a suckling piglet and a hedgehog alive beneath the hive stand, then seal a living bee into a hole bored in the doorpost. In Slavonia, Krauss found householders who threw a cat, a dog or a hen through the door of a finished house before anyone stepped in, because the first creature across a new threshold was expected to sicken and die. Jacob Grimm had already collected the northern relatives of these customs: a lamb under the altar in Denmark, a living horse under the churchyard.
Then there is the shadow: in Bulgarian tradition, Krauss reports, builders no longer needed the person, only the person’s shadow, measured or caught against the wall and mortared over; the owner of a walled-in shadow wasted away and died within the year. He passes on a report by the Bulgarian scholar Karanov of a bridge foundation in Macedonia where the lot fell on one girl of the town, who stood facing the sun while the masons walled her shadow in, and of a folk song about “long Neda without a shadow.” Vuk had noted the same fear half a century earlier: people kept away from building sites.
Krauss had also seen for himself how alive the belief still was. Around 1884 a weaving school for peasant girls opened in Brod on the Sava, and twelve girls from the surrounding villages enrolled. Townspeople hostile to the school spread word that the girls had been lured there to be sold and immured in the fortifications the empire was then building in Bosnia. The girls fled home in terror, and it took no small persuasion, Krauss writes, to bring them back: twelve families in the 1880s had decided that the story about builders needing bodies was plausible enough to act on.
Friedrich Krauss’s 1887 study of the building sacrifice records that a Bosnian beekeeper founding a new bee-house was advised to bury a suckling piglet and a hedgehog alive beneath it, and to wall a single living bee into the doorpost.
What the spades say
If builders once put brides in walls, the walls should occasionally say so, and they do not. Excavation does find foundation deposits under medieval European buildings, and plenty of them: coins in post-holes, deliberately inverted pottery vessels, even whole chickens under church floors. Ritual attention to foundations is real and archaeologically ordinary, which is roughly what Krauss’s half-coin and piglet would lead you to expect. Human remains are another matter. Where skeletons do turn up inside old walls, investigation has tended to dissolve the sacrifice reading: charnel bones moved respectfully when churchyards overflowed, clergy re-interred within the fabric of their own church, the occasional walled-up abbot who reads more like punishment or concealment than consecration. The claims attached to famous structures have fared worst of all; the case for foundation burials under London Bridge did not survive re-examination.
The two halves of the evidence refuse to merge. Archaeology does not confirm the ballads as the memory of a routine practice, yet the belief was no literary ornament either: coins and piglets went into the ground, people feared for their shadows, and in 1884 twelve girls ran home to their villages. Somewhere between the excavated chicken and the sung bride runs a seam nobody has convincingly stitched: how a practice of small payments to the earth and a story about the ultimate payment lived side by side for centuries and kept each other plausible.
Three ways into a wall
The ballad family has neighbors on our own shelves, and each gives the same gesture a different meaning.
One is punishment: the most famous walled-up woman in the region’s popular imagination is Erzsébet Báthory, bricked into her chamber at Čachtice in the retellings. As our article on the Blood Countess lays out, the documented reality was closer to house arrest in her own castle; the hermetically bricked room is the legend’s contribution. The legend took a judicial confinement and pushed it toward the older, darker image of a woman in a wall, as if the story-pattern exerted its own gravity.
Another is choice. In the Hagiographia we keep the life of Avramije the Recluse, a fourth-century Syrian who walled up the door of his own cell and lived half a century behind a small window through which bread was passed. The Orthodox tradition honors him for it. The picture matches the ballad’s, a person alive inside a wall with one small opening left, and the meaning is inverted: the enclosure is voluntary, the wall a door to God rather than a grave.
The version closest to the bride is a woman. Wiborada of St Gallen had herself sealed into a cell beside a Swiss abbey church, with no door and one small window, and bound the monastery’s books with her own hands. When the Magyar horsemen came in 926 she sent the monks to hide the library and stayed where she was; they broke through the roof of her cell and killed her at prayer. In 1047 she became the first woman a pope ever formally canonized, and she is the patron saint of libraries. Her wall inverts the ballad’s terms: she chose it, and its one window served her books and her warning instead of a child at the breast; the room she died guarding was one she had helped fill. Whether the ascetic cell and the sacrificial foundation ever fed each other is a question we have not seen anyone answer; the resemblance is old and exact. The gesture is the same each time, and what changes is who decides.
The line that drank blood
That brings us back to the stone in the Žumberak, because the 1863 legend belongs to this family and slightly extends it: nothing is being built on the Gorjanci meadows, and what must stand is a border.
The logic underneath is the one Krauss spelled out for buildings: a line drawn by men has no force of its own, and something must be paid into it before it will hold. The Krvavi kamen legend pays three lives into the border, and the teller is explicit that it worked twice over. The border was then drawn quickly, and the Kranjci agreed “at once willingly” out of fear of what had been done; the grave got its stone witness, which showed three drops of blood when it was set down and shows the red spots still. A church of St Nicholas nearby collects the memory; the 1863 contributor insists it was built to still a raging lake, since Nicholas protects on the water, but adds that the buried pair are remembered at every service, “for it was truly so.”
Our pages hold other traces of the same idea. The Steinträger of Slavonian belief carries a boundary stone through the night because he moved it in life, and the Sviećari wander as lights along the field margins they cheated. The earth that holds things down has a file of its own too, from Zosia of Pień, buried under sickle and padlock so she would stay, to the Skadar bride, buried so that a wall would stand.
The Žumberak teller closed his account with an apology: if in time a more skilled pen is found to describe it more fully and better, he would be glad. For now, he wrote, let this be enough. That was 1863, more than two centuries after the year the legend names, and the red spots, whatever mineral or lichen makes them, were still being shown to anyone who climbed the path.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Dorian Jurić, “Back in the Foundation: Chauvinistic Scholarship and the Building Sacrifice Story-Pattern,” Oral Tradition 34 (2020), 3–44.
- Friedrich S. Krauss, “Das Bauopfer bei den Südslaven,” Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 17 (1887), 16–24.
- Alan Dundes (ed.), The Walled-Up Wife: A Casebook, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1996.
- Alan Dundes, “How Indic Parallels to the Ballad of the ‘Walled-Up Wife’ Reveal the Pitfalls of Parochial Nationalistic Folkloristics,” Journal of American Folklore 108.427 (1995), 38–53.
- Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Narodne srpske pjesme, vol. II, Leipzig 1823 (“Zidanje Skadra,” collected from the guslar Starac Raško).
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Serbische Lieder,” Ueber Kunst und Alterthum 5.2 (1825), 35–63.
- Arkiv za povjestnicu jugoslavensku, vol. VII, Zagreb 1863 (the Krvavi kamen legend of the Žumberak, pp. 180–184).
- Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 4th ed., Göttingen 1854 (on animal building-sacrifices).
