Baloz

Also Known As: also Bajloz; Balozi i Zi, “the Black Baloz”; traced by Maximilian Lambertz to Italian bailo, the title of the Venetian ambassador to the Ottoman court
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Albanian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Enormous strength and a cudgel blow heavy enough to drop a warhorse on its knees, backed by a sea it can always retreat into.
Role in Mythos: The enemy from outside in the northern Albanian frontier epic, extorting tribute from whole districts until a kreshnik answers its challenge.
Relation to Humans: It taxes them in roast mutton, maidens and dead heroes, and burns a district a week until somebody refuses. Every telling ends with one man riding out to meet it in single combat, which is the only transaction it seems to respect.

Word came up from the coast the way bad water comes up a well. A black baloz had risen out of the sea, and it had terms: one roast ram from every household, one girl from every household, a kreshnik cut down every day and a whole district burned every week. The songs never say what it looked like while it made these demands. They say it came out of the sea, they say it was black, and then they go straight to the arithmetic, because the arithmetic was the part that had to be lived with.

That is the baloz as northern Albania sang it. Not a riddle, not a haunting. A creditor with a coastline.

The songs are the Kângë Kreshnikësh, the Songs of the Frontier Warriors, still performed in the highlands to the scrape of the one-stringed lahuta and set down in print by two Franciscan priests, Bernardin Palaj and Donat Kurti, who published them in Tirana in 1937. Their heroes are the thirty agas of Jutbina, Gjeto Basho Mujo and his brother Halili chief among them, holding a frontier between empires against Slav and Magyar raiders. Into that world the baloz arrives from the wrong direction entirely, out of the water, and the word itself may remember why. Maximilian Lambertz traced baloz to Italian bailo, the title of the Venetian ambassador to the Ottoman court. Before it was ever a monster it was a foreigner with authority and a ship. The derivation that circulates most widely online, from Albanian blozë, soot, after the colour of its armour, has no scholar’s name attached to it and no citation behind it.

The collecting went household by household. A ram off the spit, still hot, carried down to the tideline. A girl handed over by people who had run out of arguments. Week after week a district went up, and the smoke told the next district what was coming.

The fullest account was recorded in Nikaj, in the district of Tropoja. Gjergj Elez Alia has lain nine years in his tower with nine wounds, tended by his sister, who washes them with spring water and dries the blood with her own hair. One night he feels water on his face and curses the roof for letting the rain in. It is not rain. It is her, crying, because her turn has come and the baloz has asked for her. Gjergj gets up. He sends her into town to have his warhorse shod with brass shoes and steel nails, sends his greeting to the baloz, and names the meeting place.

They met at first light with the mountains just going pale. The baloz swung first and its cudgel took Gjergj’s horse to its knees, then went over both their heads and buried itself two dozen yards down the field, throwing up a column of dust as high as it had flown. Then it was Gjergj’s turn. He pivoted, threw, hit, and the ground shook when the baloz went down. He had the head off with a sabre before it could move, dragged the trunk away by the feet and sank it, horse and all. The blood ran the whole river black. For three years afterwards the country stank of it.

That is as close to a body as the record gets. No scales, no coils, no count of heads. The baloz of the songs has a head that can be severed, a torso heavy enough to need dragging by the ankles, blood in industrial quantity, and a colour. Everything else people picture has arrived later, most of it through Mitrush Kuteli’s Tregime të moçme shqiptare, a literary retelling published in 1965 in which a modern author worked the old material into polished prose. It is a fine book. It is not a field record, and the vivid baloz belongs to it rather than to the singers.

The corpus is not even consistent about what kind of thing it is. In the song of Zuku Bajraktar, recorded in Shala in the district of Shkodra, the baloz is a man: Baloz Sedelija, a Slav fighter whom Zuku takes prisoner on a hunting trip and locks in the ninth chamber of his tower with his hands and feet bound. This baloz is frightened of a thirteen-year-old. He survives only because Zuku’s mother falls for him and blinds her own son with heated pokers to clear the way, and he dies in the dark when Zuku comes home with his sight restored by the oras and a blade dipped in poison. Two strokes take off the head and one arm, and the head goes bumping down the staircase by its whiskers. A third song, from the Kosovo collections printed in Prishtina, is titled outright for the killing: Muja slays the bajloz of the Black Sea.

What the baloz has is not sorcery. It has size, it has reach, and it has the sea at its back, which means it can never be starved out or besieged or followed home. It has the tribute system, which does much of the work for it, because once a district is paying, the district is also feeding it, and every week that passes makes refusal costlier than compliance. One blow of its cudgel puts a warhorse on its knees.

And it accepts a duel. That is the flaw the songs keep circling. For all its appetite the baloz fights on the mejdan by the frontier’s own rules, one rider against one rider, greetings sent and received, dawn agreed in advance, the challenged man swinging first. A monster that would not come ashore and would not stand still could not be beaten by anyone in the cycle, and the baloz always comes ashore and always stands still. A man nine years in his sickbed kills it with a single throw. Sedelija dies asleep beside the woman who wrecked a household for him. Neither death needs an enchanted weapon; one takes a cudgel and one takes a sharpened sword, and in both the creature loses because it agreed to be somewhere a hero could reach it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a baloz in Albanian mythology?

A baloz is the monstrous outside enemy of the northern Albanian frontier epic, described as rising out of the sea and demanding tribute from the districts along the coast. Its demands are specific: a roast ram and a young woman from every household, a hero killed daily and a region burned weekly. It is always eventually killed in single combat by an Albanian hero.

Who killed the baloz?

In the best known song, recorded in Nikaj in the district of Tropoja, Gjergj Elez Alia kills the baloz. He had been bedridden for nine years with nine wounds and rose only when the baloz demanded his sister, then met it on the duelling ground at dawn, struck it down with a thrown cudgel and beheaded it with a sabre.

What does the name Baloz mean?

Maximilian Lambertz derived Baloz from Italian bailo, the title of the Venetian ambassador to the Ottoman court, which would make the name a memory of a powerful foreigner arriving from overseas. A second derivation, from the Albanian word blozë meaning soot, circulates widely but carries no source. The songs themselves simply call it the black baloz.

What does the baloz look like?

The songs do not describe it. They record only that it is black, that it comes out of the sea, that its head can be cut off and that its body is heavy enough to drag by the ankles. The detailed monstrous portraits that circulate today come mainly from Mitrush Kuteli’s 1965 literary retelling Tregime të moçme shqiptare rather than from the recorded oral tradition, and in at least one song the baloz is not a monster at all but a Slav warrior named Baloz Sedelija.