Kresnik

Two men lay down in the shade after a morning’s mowing, the cut grass still hot and sweet around them, and only one of them woke by himself. The other slept on while a caterpillar worked its way up his shirt toward his open mouth. His friend flicked it away. It came back. He tried to shake the sleeper and could not rouse him at all, and when the thing finally crawled between the man’s lips he opened his eyes at once and said, quite calmly, that if it had been kept out he would never have woken again. The woman who told that story to ethnographers in inland Istria in the early 2000s had it from her grandfather, who was the one doing the flicking.

The sleeper was a krsnik. In Istria, on the Kvarner islands and across the border in Slovenia, where the word is more often kresnik, that is what it means before it means anything else: a person whose soul goes out of the body at night and comes back, and whose village is safer for it.

He was marked before he could speak. A child born still wrapped in the amniotic membrane was born in a caul, and in these villages its colour settled the matter. White meant a krsnik. Black meant a štrigun, and a tail along with it made that certain. The caul was dried and sewn under the child’s arm or hung at his neck in a small bag called a janjuš, and it had to stay with him, because the power lived in it. Then there was the midwife. If she cried out that a krsnik had been born, he would never become one. If she said nothing, he came into his strength in his seventh year, when the others arrived after dark and called him out of the house by name. Parents who wanted no part of it answered three times that he was not home. The voices outside would shout that in that case may he never be home again, and go.

The work happened at crossroads after eleven at night. They fought with whatever a farm yard offered, the wooden handles of ox yokes, the twisted withe rings, the hazel bindings, and in the fight nobody kept his own face. The krsnik went as a dog, a cat or an ox, white or piebald; his opponents went black. One krsnik was counted a match for twelve witches. People walking home heard the whole battle and saw none of it, and it was the noise they remembered afterwards, a sound that frightened anyone caught out on the road.

A man curious about which of his neighbours were štriguni could be told to stand at that same crossroads with a pitchfork braced under his chin and keep absolutely silent. They would circle him and ask what he was doing there, hanged bird. Answer, and the fork went up through his skull. Hold his tongue, and by morning he knew every face in the village.

His hour was midsummer. Around St John’s Day the krsniks were fiercest and the witches shut themselves in black holes and stayed there, and kres, the word most scholars hear inside the name, is the bonfire lit on exactly that night.

Between fights he did the quieter half of the job, healing people and livestock by prayer alone and never asking a fee. Men and women both could hold the gift. An eighty-two-year-old man in Motovun said his had come to him at Midnight Mass, while he watched the priest drink from the chalice, and that for a serious illness two or three krsniks pray over the patient together. He had handed his ability on at Christmas 2003 to a woman from a family that had produced a krsnik before, which is the only way it can be handed on; give it outside that line and the giver loses it forever. The parish clergy were sceptical of all this. He was untroubled. I do good and I live in faith in God, he said.

Štriguni, for their part, were said to be buried face down with nails driven into the mouth so they could not return. Archaeologists excavating medieval sites near Bale could not confirm a single grave of the kind. The belief was real; the nails, mostly, were not.

Two hundred kilometres north, in Styria and Carinthia, the same name carries something else entirely. That Kresnik rides a golden chariot behind four white horses with a brother, Trot, beside him and a four-eyed dog running ahead. He keeps a palace on a mountaintop in the ninth country, grazes a herd there, hunts, and loses his wife or sister to a demon who drags her underground or under water. He fights in the air, and when he wins it rains, or golden wheat falls out of the sky onto the fields. The best known telling is nailed to a real hill. A great white snake crossed the Drava and coiled itself around the castle at Vurberk; Kresnik met it in the air on St George’s Day, took the golden crown off its head and chained it in the castle well, where the story insists it remains. Mid-fight the dragon shouted that the woman in the tower was Kresnik’s own sister. He married her anyway.

Whether any of that is ancient has been argued over for a century and a half. Davorin Trstenjak, who did most to publicise the northern Kresnik in the 1850s, also identified him with Krishna, and later Slovene folklorists came to treat his material as the least trustworthy in the file. Maja Bošković-Stulli, working from her own Istrian fieldwork, concluded that much of the Slovene record was the product of romantically inclined nineteenth-century collectors. The documentary reply is narrow and stubborn: the Vurberk story was written down by the local vicar Johann Georg Donau, who held that parish only from 1831 until his death in 1835 and passed the text to a Maribor professor years before Trstenjak began publishing, and the castle carried a dragon on its arms as early as 1204. Nikolai Mikhailov pushed the other way and set Kresnik at the centre of the reconstructed Slavic myth in which the sky god Perun beats the serpent Veles back down into the water, which would make the yard-tool brawls of Istria the last worn-down remnant of a thunder god. Zmago Šmitek, laying out both cases, keeps the two Kresniks apart as separate traditions that share a name and little else.

What he can do follows from what he is. The soul travels while the body sleeps; it wears animal shape; it turns hail off the fields and drives storms back onto somebody else’s crops. He lifts curses at a distance from a lock of hair or a photograph, cures a lame cow by cutting the earth out of her hoofprint and turning the sod over, and knows on sight which of his neighbours are not what they appear.

The limits are just as tight. His body lies helpless and unguarded for as long as he is out, and if the way back is blocked he simply never wakes. Lose the caul and the power goes with it. A midwife’s single sentence at the birth cancels him; so do three denials at the door in his seventh year; so does giving the gift to the wrong family. He may not charge, which keeps him poor. And the plainest limitation is not mythological at all. The old woman at Zamaski Dol who spent thirty years lifting curses with thirteen Our Fathers and coals dropped hissing into water died in 2005 without finding anyone to take the work on.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a kresnik?

A kresnik, or krsnik, is a person in Slovene and Croatian folk belief whose soul leaves the sleeping body in animal form to fight witches and warlocks for the village’s harvest, weather and health. The tradition is strongest in Istria, the Kvarner islands and Slovenia. In older Slovene material the same name also belongs to a mythological sky hero who fights a serpent and brings rain.

How does someone become a kresnik?

He is born in a white caul, the amniotic membrane still wrapped around him, which is then dried and sewn under his arm or worn at his neck in a pouch called a janjuš. If the midwife announces the birth aloud he never becomes one; if she stays silent he comes into his powers in his seventh year, when other kresniks call him out of the house at night. A child born in a black caul, or with a tail, becomes a štrigun instead.

Who does the kresnik fight?

He fights štrige and štriguni, the witches and warlocks of neighbouring villages, at crossroads after eleven at night. Both sides take animal shape, the kresnik appearing white or dappled and his enemies black, and they use ox-yoke handles and twisted withes as weapons. Ordinary people cannot see the fight but can hear it, and one kresnik was reckoned a match for twelve witches.

Is Kresnik a Slavic god?

That is disputed. The Russian scholar Nikolai Mikhailov placed Kresnik at the centre of the reconstructed Slavic myth of the thunder god Perun fighting the serpent Veles, which would make him a degraded storm deity. Others, including Maja Bošković-Stulli, regard the divine Kresnik of the Slovene songs as largely a nineteenth-century reconstruction, and the Istrian krsnik as the genuinely inherited figure.

What does a kresnik do besides fight?

He heals people and cattle by prayer, and takes no payment for it. Both men and women can hold the ability, serious illnesses call for two or three kresniks praying together, and a kresnik can work at a distance from a lock of hair or a personal belonging. The gift can only be passed to someone from a family that has produced a kresnik before.

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