Baš Čelik

Also Known As: Serbian Cyrillic Баш Челик; Englished by nineteenth- and twentieth-century translators as Bash-Chalek, Bash Tchelik, Bashtchelik and Steelpacha; the second element is *čelik*, steel, while *baš* carries two readings at once, the Turkish *baş* meaning head or chief and the native Serbian intensifier meaning very, real or true
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Balkan Mythology, Slavic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: Water restores a strength that iron cannot hold, he opens wings and flies, and the thing that keeps him alive is not in him at all but folded inside a bird inside the heart of a fox on a distant mountain.
Role in Mythos: He is the antagonist of the Serbian tale that carries his name, the captive whose freedom the hero purchases by accident and then spends the rest of the story trying to undo.
Relation to Humans: He bargains with the man who frees him and keeps every term of the bargain, granting three lives for three drinks and then spending them one at a time as pardons. He is also the reason a young woman is kept in a cave far from anyone, and he takes her back three times without raising his voice.

The room had a spring in it. That is the strange part. Behind the ninth door of a fortress where eight other rooms held nothing but silver and gold and weapons, there was water running out of a golden spout into a golden trough, and a jug set with precious stones standing near enough to see and too far to reach, and a man fixed in place so that he could watch it run.

Putting him there had cost an emperor a great deal of army and a great deal of money, by that emperor’s own account. His knees were riveted into iron and his elbows were riveted into iron, and four pillars stood at four corners with a chain running from each of them, and the four chains met and closed around his neck. He could not turn his head. He could hear the water.

The young man who opened that door had been told not to. His father-in-law had handed him nine keys and said that eight were his to use and the ninth was not, and he had gone through the first eight room by room, past the silver, past the gold, past the armouries, until the only thing left in the world worth wanting was the thing behind the last lock. He had killed nine giants by then, one at a time, cutting each of them down by the neck as they came over a city wall on a fir tree they had uprooted themselves. He was not a cautious person.

The man in the chains asked him for a cup of water and offered him a life for it, and that is the whole engine of the story. The prince did the arithmetic out loud in his head, decided that two lives were better than one, and poured. Then he did it again. Then, at the door, he was called back a third time and told to pour the last one over the prisoner’s head. The water went across the man’s scalp and the rings sprang apart, all of them, the neck iron and the arm irons and the leg irons together, and he came up off the floor like something released from a trap and said his name was Baš Čelik. Then he opened his wings, took the prince’s wife under one of them, and was gone out of the room before anyone could shut the door.

The name is a small trap of its own. *Čelik* is steel, plainly enough. *Baš* is two words wearing one spelling: a Turkish loan meaning head or chief, and an ordinary Serbian intensifier meaning real, true, very. Victorian translators heard the second one and gave English readers True Steel and Real Steel; one American version simply gave up and called him Steelpacha. There is no way to settle it, which is a fair description of the character.

What follows is a long chase conducted with enormous courtesy. The prince finds his three lost sisters married to the Emperor of Dragons, the Emperor of Falcons and the Emperor of Eagles, and every one of these vast winged in-laws tells him the same thing over dinner: leave it. The dragon emperor met Baš Čelik in the air with seven thousand dragons and did nothing to him. The falcon emperor met him with five thousand falcons and the blood stood knee-deep and he did nothing to him either. Each of them presses a single feather into the prince’s hand and tells him to burn it when it gets bad.

It gets bad. Three times the prince steals his wife out of the cave and three times Baš Čelik overtakes them without hurrying, and three times he says a version of the same thing: I promised you three lives, here is one of them back, now go home. He even offers a choice of methods once, arrow or sabre, before deciding not to use either. On the fourth attempt the prince burns all three feathers, and the sky fills with dragons and falcons and eagles, and in the middle of that Baš Čelik cuts him in half at the waist and leaves with the wife anyway.

His brothers-in-law hold an auction over the body. One dragon can fetch water from the Jordan in half an hour, another in a quarter, a third in nine moments. The third goes. The water is poured along the cut, the halves knit, and the prince stands up with no lives left but the one God gave him.

So they stop fighting and start asking. The wife is coached to ask her captor where his strength lies, and he lies twice, first naming his sabre and then his arrow, and both times she sets about praying to the weapon in question, and both times he laughs at her. Then he tells the truth, and the truth is that his strength was never in the room with him at all. Far off there is a high mountain, and on it a fox, and in the fox a heart, and in the heart a bird, and in the bird is everything he is. He adds, almost helpfully, that the fox is difficult, because she does not stay a fox.

She does not. The eagles put her out of cover and she runs for a lake and comes up out of it as a six-winged waterbird; the falcons drive her off the water and she climbs into the cloud, and the dragons are already there; she drops back to earth as a fox again and the eagles are waiting on the ground. They open her and take out the heart. They light a fire and open the heart and take out the bird and put it in the flames, and somewhere else entirely, with nobody laying a hand on him, Baš Čelik dies.

Nothing in the story ever says a blade cannot cut him. The point is smaller and colder than that: cutting him would not have mattered. He is the only figure in his own tale who cannot be reached by anything happening in front of him, and the water in that first room, running past a man who could not lean forward far enough, is the shape of the whole thing in miniature.

The text we have is Vuk Stefanović Karadžić’s. He collected it, and he also shaped it, replacing words he thought weak and smoothing what he found obscure, so the sentences are an oral teller’s story wearing Vuk’s prose. It is not among the forty-nine tales of his 1853 Vienna collection; it arrives at the head of the addendum to the enlarged second edition of 1870. The villain it introduced there has an obvious cousin further east in Koschei the Deathless, who is likewise let out of confinement by a man who should have known better, likewise carries off that man’s wife, and likewise keeps his life somewhere nobody thinks to look.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Baš Čelik?

Baš Čelik is the winged antagonist of a Serbian folk tale of the same name, collected by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. He begins the story riveted into iron in a locked room and is freed when a young prince gives him three drinks of water in exchange for three extra lives.

What does the name Baš Čelik mean?

It cannot be pinned down, and that ambiguity is in the Serbian itself. *Čelik* means steel; *baš* is simultaneously a Turkish loanword meaning head or chief and a native Serbian intensifier meaning real or true. Early English translators rendered the name as True Steel, Real Steel and Steelpacha.

How is Baš Čelik killed?

His strength is kept outside his body: on a distant mountain there is a fox, in the fox a heart, in the heart a bird, and in the bird his life. The prince’s three brothers-in-law, who rule the dragons, the falcons and the eagles, run the shape-changing fox down, cut out the heart, and burn the bird, and Baš Čelik dies at a distance.

Why does Baš Čelik spare the hero three times?

Because he agreed to. He promised the prince one life for each cup of water, and he treats those three lives as a debt to be paid in pardons, letting the prince go after each failed rescue attempt and warning him each time not to come back. On the fourth attempt, with the debt settled, he cuts him in two.

Is Baš Čelik the same as Koschei the Deathless?

No, they are separate figures from separate traditions, but they are built the same way. Both are released from confinement by a hero who should have left the door alone, both carry off the hero’s wife, and both keep their life or their strength hidden outside their own bodies, so that killing the body in front of you achieves nothing.