Balaur

Lower a bucket into certain Romanian wells and the rope goes slack too soon. The village knows what that means. Something down there in the cold has a body thick as a beam and more heads than it needs, and it has been waiting under the stone lip since before anyone alive was born, breathing the smell of wet clay up the shaft. The water is still good. That is the trouble. The village cannot simply leave.

The balaur is the great serpent of Romanian belief, and the first thing to understand is that it is a snake. Not a lizard on four legs, not the armoured beast of the western heraldic tradition, and not the zmeu, that other Romanian monster who walks upright, forges his own weapons and rides a horse to court the girl he intends to marry. The balaur has no such manners. It is coil and scale and appetite, sometimes fitted with wings, and Romanian tradition gives it one head or three or seven or nine or twelve, each on its own heavy neck, all of them working at once.

It was not born that way. In the country belief it began as an ordinary snake, a thing you might step over in a hayfield, and became a balaur by one of two routes. In the first, snakes gather on a spring day and mingle their spittle into a single bead, and the snake that swallows the bead begins to grow. In the second, a snake simply hides for six years where neither the sun nor a human eye can find it, and comes out changed. Both versions carry the same quiet warning. The monster is not an intruder from elsewhere. It is the local wildlife left alone too long.

Further back than the wells there is an older balaur, and he is not evil at all, merely enormous. In the Romanian cosmogonic legends the world begins as water, and at the root of the first tree, down in the dark under the flood, lies a serpent. He is the chaos that came before anything was made. In one telling Fârtatul, the divine maker, punishes him by casting him into the deep and ordering him to wrap himself nine times around the earth and hold back the drowning waters, which is a sentence and a job at the same time. Andrei Oișteanu reads him as one half of a matched pair, the chaos against which the hero defines himself. Christianity had no use for that arrangement. Under the pressure of the church the primordial serpent hardened into a plain devil, and the solomonari, the weather-wizards who had ridden him, were demoted from priests to warlocks who had sold their souls. The old religion became magic, and the old gods became monsters.

Those solomonari kept riding him regardless. Simion Florea Marian, writing in 1879, recorded that when a solomonar wished to go up into the clouds he took his golden bridle and went to a bottomless lake, because that is where the balauri live. He rode it as another man rides a horse. From up there, the two of them together brought the hail. Tudor Pamfile, gathering beliefs for the Romanian Academy in 1916, sorted the creatures into three kinds, of the water, of the land and of the air, and it is the airborne ones that matter to a farmer: when two of them meet and fight above the fields, trees come out of the ground. There is a much older picture of this. On a silver plaque from Letnița in northern Bulgaria, buried in the fourth century BC among the Thracian treasures, a goddess stands with her hand laid on the neck of a three-headed serpent. On another, a woman holds a dragon by its bridle and rides it side-saddle.

That laying-on of the hand is the piece the fairy tales lost. Before there was a hero, there was a girl, and she did not scream. The community brought her to the riverbank or to the mouth of the cave, dressed as a bride, and she bound the serpent with a cord or a chain or the belt from her own waist, and it lay quiet. The versions with the sword came later, and with them the young man who kills the monster and marries the girl he saved from it.

The best of those versions survives as a ballad from the Cerna valley. Iovan Iorgovan, arm of the mace, hears something in the forest that is neither a man’s voice nor a woman’s, and rides toward it. The river Cerna is roaring too loud for him to cross, so he bribes her, promising a silver distaff that spins by itself and a golden pike with a balaur’s eyes, and the water goes still and lets him over. He finds the serpent with a girl in its coils. Before he strikes, the balaur bargains, then curses him: kill me, and out of my split head will come a fly, and the fly will poison your oxen at the yoke and your horses at the plough, and it will kill your horse as well. Iovan tells it that he will teach the people to make smoke and be rid of the fly. Then he brings the sword round and cuts the body into pieces. The head, still moving, rolls down into the Danube, and the river takes it into a cave in the gorge at the Cazane, where it rots quietly for centuries and lets the flies out every summer, exactly as promised. The Golubac fly is real, and it did kill cattle by the thousand.

The balaur’s power is the power of a chokepoint. It sits on the water and the community must come to it, so it eats a girl a year and nobody stops it. It can rise into the clouds on a rainbow and pull the rain up out of the ground; it can hold the rain back and burn the harvest; its venom is in its spittle and its ruin outlives it. What it cannot do is leave. Every account chains it to water, to a well, a lake, a cave mouth, a river, and a thing that cannot leave can be found. It can be bound with a woman’s belt. It can be split with a mace or a sword by anyone willing to go down and look at it, and its heads, for all their number, come off one after another like anything else. In Romanian gardens the day lily is called the dragon’s mouth, and the lords-and-ladies is the dragon’s herb, and the great pale puffball that swells overnight in the pasture is the dragon’s egg. The word survives on a personal name in a document of 1480 and in the sermons of Varlaam and Dosoftei. That is what became of the serpent that once held back the flood: a bridle in a wizard’s hand, a fly in a cave, and a weed you pull out of the potatoes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a balaur?

A balaur is the many-headed dragon of Romanian folklore, a huge scaled serpent with one, three, seven, nine or twelve heads and sometimes a pair of wings. It lives in water, most often at the bottom of a well, a lake or a cave, and it demands victims from the people who need that water. It is a serpent rather than a four-legged dragon, which is what separates it from the zmeu.

What is the difference between a balaur and a zmeu?

The balaur is a snake, enormous and many-headed, while the zmeu is broadly human in shape, with arms and legs, who makes weapons, rides a horse and wants to marry the girl he has carried off. Romanian tales confuse the two constantly, and both are killed by the same heroes, but the older distinction holds: the balaur is the beast in the water, the zmeu is the rival in the house.

How do you kill a balaur?

In the folktales the hero cuts off its heads, one after another, with a sword or a mace. The older belief offers a stranger method: a maiden binds the creature with a cord, a chain or her own belt, and it lies still for her. Since the balaur is tied to its well or lake and cannot leave, it can always be found and confronted on its own ground.

Do balauri control the weather?

Yes. Romanian tradition holds that balauri rise into the storm clouds and bring hail and rain, and that the weather-wizards called solomonari fetch them out of bottomless lakes with a golden bridle and ride them through the sky. The folklorist Tudor Pamfile recorded a whole class of airborne balauri, and when two of them fight overhead, trees are torn out of the ground.

What happens in the ballad of Iovan Iorgovan?

Iovan Iorgovan, the hero known as arm of the mace, crosses the river Cerna after promising it gifts, finds a balaur coiled around a girl and cuts the creature to pieces. Before dying the balaur warns that flies will come out of its severed head and poison the oxen and horses, and Iovan answers that he will teach people to drive them off with smoke. The head is carried into a cave on the Danube, and the ballad explains the deadly Golubac fly as the result.

Sources & Further Reading

Iovan Iorgovan, folk ballad, in Balade populare românești (anthology of Romanian folk ballads), Radu Drăgulescu, Analysis of the Connotative and Denotative Meanings of the Term Dragon (Balaur) as It Appears in the Romanian Phytonymy, Journal of Romanian Literary Studies 10 (2017), 104-110, Ana R. Chelariu, Mitul eroului care omoara balaurul in balada romaneasca: Iovan Iorgovan, Limba Romana 15 (2018)

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