Bauk

Also Known As: Баук; dialect ба̏ӯк; from the interjection bau, with the verb baukati, “to go bau, to terrify”
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Balkan Mythology, Slavic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A heavy, clumsy thing in animal form that lies up in darkness and takes hold of whoever comes close enough.
Role in Mythos: It is the creature Serbian and Montenegrin adults named at the door of every unlit place to keep children out of it.
Relation to Humans: It preys on children who go alone into holes, streams and abandoned houses, and it is driven off with shouting, banging and light. A child frightened by it was cured with the smoke of burning bear hair.

The cure was smoke. A child who woke shrieking in the night, and who said the bauk was after it, would be held over a smouldering tuft of bear hair until the fright let go. That was the medicine recorded in Gruža, in the hills of central Serbia, and nobody who used it seems to have found it strange that the antidote to a nameless thing in the dark should be a bear.

By day the bauk kept out of sight. It lay up in the corners of derelict houses, in holes in the ground, in the cut of a stream, anywhere the light did not reach. What the people of Gruža described was fat and clumsy and patient in the way that nothing good is patient. At night it came out to watch for a victim, and the verbs the collectors wrote down are unpleasantly specific: to snatch, to carry off, to throttle, to devour. It preferred disobedient children, which meant children who went alone to the places it lived.

A house stands empty at the end of a village. The roof has gone soft, the door hangs off one hinge, and at noon in high summer the inside of it is still cold enough to raise the hair on your arms. In the far corner, all day, something does not move.

Beyond fat, clumsy and animal-shaped, the record gives almost nothing. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, gathering the language into his dictionary in the first half of the nineteenth century, glossed the word with two German nursery terms, Baubau and Wauwau, and with the Latin terriculum, a thing that terrifies. That is the whole portrait. It is a weight, a shape and a noise. Nobody ever described its face.

The noise is bau. Everything else in the word grows out of it. From bau comes baukati, to go bau, to terrify, which Vuk rendered into Latin as terrifico. From it also comes bauljati, which in modern Serbian means to blunder or lumber about, but which Vuk recorded in Šumadija with a narrower and much stranger sense: to go on all fours, said above all of small children who cannot yet walk properly and so crawl. In the mountain speech of Prošćenje in Montenegro it means to creep, to drag yourself, to move along on your belly. The word for how the bauk got about is the word for how an infant crosses a floor.

The same word does one other job, and it is the sort of thing that makes a dictionary worth reading for pleasure. When a baby’s teeth begin to come through, Vuk noted, the women had a pet name for them: bak, or baučak, or bauk. In the Bay of Kotor they called them vučići, little wolves. So the word for the thing that eats children is also the word for the small hard points pushing up through a child’s gums, and in one corner of the Adriatic those points are a litter of wolf cubs. No source links the two meanings on purpose. The sound simply does both jobs and has always done both.

The standard reference on this material, the Srpski mitološki rečnik assembled by Špiro Kulišić, Petar Ž. Petrović and Nikola Pantelić in 1970, takes the whole pattern and reads a real animal underneath it. The argument is cumulative rather than clever. There is the bau. There is the lumbering. There are the dens in holes and hollows and the appetite that goes with them. Above all there is the method: you get rid of a bauk by shouting, by banging things together and by bringing a light, which is precisely how a village gets rid of a bear. The dictionary insists on the bear and not the wolf, against earlier writers who had argued the other way.

That reading rests on a habit older than either animal’s name. Dangerous beasts were not called by their proper names, in case naming them fetched them, so the snake, the fox and the wolf all collected softer substitutes, and the bear collected baja and bauk. What began as a way of not saying a word ended up as a creature in its own right. It helped that the bear itself was vanishing. By the time the folklorists went out with their notebooks it had been hunted out of most of Serbia and survived in whole districts only as something the old people talked about. A proverb from those districts keeps the measure of it: the village is stronger than the bear.

The bauk kept better company than that in verse. One fragment has scrub grown up around a tower with wolves and bauci together in the thicket. A lullaby asks the water to carry the child’s sleeplessness away to where there is neither wolf nor bauk. A folk riddle runs: from over there comes the bauk, and the children set up a wail. The answer is walnuts. The word has since gone on working long after anyone stopped believing in the thing, and Serbian translators reach for it whenever a text needs a goblin, an imp or an ogre. Its most famous outing is the first line of the Communist Manifesto, where the spectre haunting Europe is, in Serbian, a bauk.

What the creature can actually do is narrow, and all of it follows from where it lives. It owns the unlit interior of things: the hole, the culvert, the roofless house, the black water under a bank. It does not hunt so much as occupy, and the child who meets one has almost always walked into the one place it was told to stay out of. Once it has hold, the accounts give it strength enough to carry a child off and throttle it, which for a thing of its size is not much of a boast.

Its limits are the same list read backwards. Fire beats it. Light beats it. A raised voice and a beaten pot beat it, and for all its greed it runs from noise like something with weak nerves, which is the closest the tradition comes to admitting that it was never very frightening in daylight. Its last weakness was the one it could not do anything about. The animal underneath it left. The bears went out of the Serbian hills and took the sense of the word with them, and what remained was a sound made at a doorway to stop a child going through. It still works.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the bauk in Serbian folklore?

The bauk is a bogey from Serbian and Montenegrin folk belief, a fat, clumsy creature in animal form that hides by day in dark corners, holes, streams and abandoned houses. At night it waits there for a victim, preferring children who wander alone into those places, and it snatches, carries off, throttles and devours what it catches. Adults used its name to keep children away from dangerous ground.

Is the bauk really a bear?

The Srpski mitološki rečnik, the standard Serbian mythological dictionary of 1970, argues that it is. Its case rests on the creature’s lumbering gait, its dens in holes and hollows, its appetite, and the fact that a bauk is driven off by shouting, banging and light, exactly as a bear is. Dangerous animals were commonly given substitute names so that the real one need not be spoken, and the bear collected both baja and bauk.

How do you get rid of a bauk?

Noise and light. Shouting, banging objects together and bringing fire or a lamp into the dark place will drive it out, because for all its greed the bauk is easily startled. A child left frightened after an encounter was treated separately, by being held in the smoke of burning bear hair until the fear passed.

What does the word bauk mean?

It comes from the interjection bau, the noise the creature makes, which also gives the verb baukati, to go bau or to terrify. The related verb bauljati meant in Vuk Karadžić’s day to go on all fours like a crawling infant, and today means to lumber about. Confusingly, bauk was also a nursery word for a baby’s emerging teeth, called vučići or little wolves in the Bay of Kotor.