Baba Tomor

A squall hit the top of the mountain without warning. It was August 1931, the sun had been shining a moment earlier, and the summit was crowded with pilgrims busy over their sacrifices when the wind came across the ridge nearly hard enough to fling a person into the gulf between the two peaks. A man went pale and muttered that HE was angry today. The English ethnographer standing beside him, Margaret Hasluck, asked who HE was. The mountain, said the pilgrim. Father Tomor, said a bolder one. Abbas Ali, said a dervish, correcting them both. Clouds came racing past, the crowd agreed that HE was angry, and they packed up and went down.

All three answers were right, which is the whole story of Baba Tomor in one gust of wind. Mount Tomorr stands over the town of Berat in southern Albania, about twenty miles long at its base and rising in clean lines to a platform with twin summits shaped like pyramids, both close to eight thousand feet. Low hills surround it on almost every side, so it seems to stand alone in the sky. For nine months of the year the snow on top glitters in the morning sun. In August, when the lowland villages bake, the summit can still be lashed with hailstones and biting wind. To the people who lived in its shadow that contrast was not weather. It was somebody.

That somebody was Baba Tomor, Father Tomor, also called the Saint of Tomor. Hasluck, writing in 1939, recorded what the older generation told her with complete solemnity: he lives on the top, he lets only the good into his solitude, and the wicked fall by the wayside or are driven back with hail, fierce winds, mountain sickness and strange bleeding at the nose. Many would not say his name at all. They spoke of “he” and “that peak”, with their eyes turned away. Nobody describes his face. Nobody needed to; he was standing over them every day.

His real power was the oath. A hardened sinner, Hasluck noted, might perjure himself on the Gospel or the Koran, but no one would swear falsely by Baba Tomor or by that peak. Her husband, the scholar F. W. Hasluck, had been told the same thing a decade earlier: in the district around the mountain the most binding oath for every religion and sect was the oath by Mount Tomor. In 1907 the young Albanian nobleman Ekrem bey Vlora climbed to the summit and heard Muslims and Christians alike swear “për Baba Tomorr”, by Father Tomorr.

What Vlora found at the top was modest. A ring wall of well-cut stones laid without mortar, with a narrow gap on the southeast side, enclosed a niche of rough stonework. In the niche stood two candlesticks and a tin plate with a few coins on it, left as alms. Nobody touched them. Even the most unscrupulous robbers in the region, Vlora was told, would never steal from that plate, because Tomorr would strike them dead with a bolt of lightning. Everyone in central Albania was also convinced that before any great event the mountain released a ball of fire that burst in a deafening clap of thunder. More than ten men in his party swore they had seen and heard it just before the last Russo-Turkish War.

The mountain kept other treasures. A bird haunted it that was too sacred for human hands to catch. Near the top grew a sacred apple tree whose fruit only the pure in heart could pick, and as of 1939 no one pure enough had been found. Sometimes a ripe apple rolled down onto the path below, unusually large and heavy with scent, and it worked miracles: a childless woman had only to eat one to conceive. People disagreed on where the tree stood. Some put it in the black gully between the twin summits, others at the mouth of a cave above a sheer rock face between the villages of Bargulas and Kapinova, and those people added that it could be seen from either village through field glasses.

Each August more than a thousand people climbed, children among them, leading rams. Some had promised the climb to the saint when they were ill and he had cured them. Others went to ask for a good year for their families, their flocks and their fields. At the summit the ram’s throat was cut, and pilgrims dipped pebbles from the mountain in the spurting blood and wore them afterwards as amulets against disease. They laid a handful of wheat on the tomb at the highest point and took away a few grains from the pile already there, to mix into their seed corn so that the next harvest would be good. For people that poor, Hasluck observed, the promise was not a small thing.

The tomb belonged by then to Abbas Ali, a son of the Caliph Ali and half-brother of Husayn, whom the Bektashi dervishes said had escaped the slaughter at Karbala and wandered until he chose Tomorr as the place to die. Another telling had him ride in from Arabia on a great white horse, which left its hoof-prints on the mountain, defeat the local barbarians, rest five days on the summit and leave for Mount Olympus, returning every year for five days in August. The dervishes kept a tekke on the slope from 1916, and the pilgrimage fell on the Christian feast of the Assumption, when Christians climbed beside them to pray to the Virgin. F. W. Hasluck suspected that the Christian saint of the summit had been Saint Elias. Ekrem bey Vlora’s verdict on Abbas Ali himself was brisk: historically speaking, the figure is unknown.

The French historian Nathalie Clayer traced the shrine as far back as the early seventeenth century, through the story of a Sadi sheikh, Demir Han, executed in 1630, who was sent to visit the mekam of Abbas Ali on Tomorr. A local legend says a missionary buried a sack of soil from Karbala on the summit because he learned the Albanians already held the mountain holy. The pilgrimage itself is recorded with certainty only from the late nineteenth century. Clayer’s conclusion is careful in both directions. The people around the mountain swore by Father Tomorr long before Abbas Ali was attached to it, but there is still no concrete evidence of an ancient pagan sanctuary on the summit.

That did not stop the nineteenth century from building one. The writers of the Albanian national awakening made Tomorr their Olympus. Naim Frashëri wrote that behind the Greek name Olympus lay Mount Tomorr, eternal home of the gods of the ancient Pelasgians, and a couplet of his claimed that Herodotus had placed the house of God on Tomorr. Konstandin Kristoforidhi put the oracle of Dodona there. In 1902 the poet Andon Zako Çajupi published his collection Baba Tomorri in Cairo, opening it with a long poem of that name that calls his countrymen to wake up and fight for their country. The pagan Father Tomor of modern pamphlets owes a great deal to these patriots. The frightened shepherd on the ridge owed them nothing.

Around Berat a different tale is told about the mountain’s shape: Tomorr was a giant who fought another giant, Shpirag, over a young woman, both of them died, and her tears became the river Osum that runs between their two mountains.

Under the communist ban on religion the pilgrimages stopped altogether from 1967 to 1990. When they returned, a party led by the few surviving babas climbed back to the summit, and about a hundred and fifty animals were slaughtered on the ridge where the rams had always died. His strength is the oath that cannot be broken and the weather that cannot be argued with, the hail, the wind, the fireball before a war. His limit is that he has never needed a single name, a single face or a single religion. He answers to all three.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Baba Tomor in Albanian folklore?

Baba Tomor, meaning Father Tomor, is the sacred power believed to live on the summit of Mount Tomorr above Berat in southern Albania. Local people described him as a dread being who lets only the good reach the top and drives the wicked away with hail, wind, mountain sickness and nosebleeds. He is spoken of as the mountain itself as much as a being living on it.

Why is the oath by Baba Tomor so important?

The oath “për Baba Tomorr”, by Father Tomorr, was the most binding oath in the region around the mountain for Muslims and Christians alike. Margaret Hasluck recorded that people who would lie on the Gospel or the Koran would never swear falsely by Baba Tomor. F. W. Hasluck and Ekrem bey Vlora reported the same oath in the early twentieth century.

What happens at the Mount Tomorr pilgrimage?

Every August pilgrims climb Mount Tomorr to sacrifice rams, pay vows made during illness and ask for a good year. In the 1930s they dipped mountain pebbles in the sacrificial blood to wear as amulets and took grains of wheat from the summit tomb to mix with their seed corn. The pilgrimage is now run by the Bektashi order, and Christians have taken part as well.

Is Baba Tomor the same as Abbas Ali?

Not originally. The Bektashi dervishes identify the shrine on the summit as the tomb of Abbas Ali, a son of the Caliph Ali, but historian Nathalie Clayer notes that local people swore by Father Tomorr before Abbas Ali was associated with the mountain. Pilgrims in 1931 named the same angry power as the mountain, Father Tomor and Abbas Ali all at once.

Was Baba Tomor an ancient Illyrian or Pelasgian god?

That claim comes mostly from nineteenth-century Albanian patriotic writers such as Naim Frashëri and Andon Zako Çajupi, whose 1902 collection Baba Tomorri made the mountain a national symbol. The folk belief and the oath are older than the Bektashi shrine, but Nathalie Clayer found no concrete evidence of an ancient pagan sanctuary on the summit.

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