Bibi

Supper was nearly finished when someone knocked and asked whether anyone was home. This was winter in Kloka, a Romani settlement in central Serbia, and the woman of the house was called Kona. She died in 1935 at the age of ninety-nine, which is the only reason her account survives at all. Her husband opened the door onto the cold and found a woman standing there, bony and very tall, barefoot on frozen ground, long dark hair down her back and a red dress on her. Two small girls in white stood in front of her. Two lambs stood behind.

He asked her in. He asked whether she was tired, whether she was hungry, and told her to sit and rest. She said she wanted shoes, because she had none, and Kona went and found a pair of opanci and put them into her hands. The instant the leather changed owner the room was empty. The door had not opened. From somewhere outside a voice said that God should always give them whatever they might need.

The couple went out to look for her and saw her a little way off, knocking at the door of the wealthiest Serbian household in the place, asking for somewhere to spend the night. The woman of that house swore at her and drove her off. Bibi cursed the house, walked back to Kona’s fire, warmed herself, put the two girls and the two lambs down to sleep, and then said plainly what she was. She was Cholera. She had suffocated the gadže children. Before she slept she left instructions: keep my day, cut a zapis into a tree, bring your children to stand under it and shout *An’ Bibijako satipe, taj ande laće ćavore*, to the health of the Aunt and of her children. In the morning the floor where she had lain was bare. The shouting came from the other house, where the children had died in the night.

The name is a piece of politeness that hardened into a person. Serbian villagers held that cholera travelled as a woman, and because saying the disease’s name aloud invited it, they called her Tetka, Aunt. Their Romani neighbours took the same figure and used their own word for the same relation, *bibi*. Aleksandar Petrović, who collected more of these legends than anyone else and published them in the *Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society* in 1937, thought the borrowing ran in exactly that direction. Eight decades later a man interviewed in Knjaževac put it without any scholarly apparatus at all: we call her Bibi, and the old gadže called her Čuma.

She does not hold one shape. Petrović’s informants in Kragujevac, Kruševac, Jagodina and the Belgrade edge settlements of Rušanj, Resnik and Mirijevo gave an elderly woman with long hair, wandering with two children, usually girls, sometimes with the lambs at her heel. Rade Uhlik and Ljiljana Beljkašić, working in Čajniče and in the Tamari community at Čačak in 1958, recorded something colder and further away: a tall woman in enormous gowns, shining like gold, who does not walk or eat or drink or speak or sing, who flies at night without anyone seeing her, who is rich and beautiful and has neither husband nor child. By 2016 she had shrunk. The last person in Knjaževac who could still tell any of the story described a small, feeble woman going house to house with a sack, begging, and the sack so heavy that three men together could not lift it. Those who gave her something she left alone. Those who did not, and they were mostly gadže, she answered from the yard with one movement of her hand, and the house burned.

The arithmetic is not subtle. Feed her and your children live.

Her territory is precise. The belief runs through the Romani communities of Serbia south of the Sava and the Danube and north of Niš, and the Roma of Vojvodina do not keep her at all. In Belgrade, Smederevo, Smederevska Palanka and Kragujevac her day falls on the third Friday of Lent and moves with Easter; in Niš, Svrljig, Knjaževac, Minićevo, Bor, Zaječar, Negotin, Boljevac and Paraćin it is fixed to 31 January. The cult place is a pear tree, occasionally an apple, cut with a zapis and standing at the centre of ground the settlement keeps clear. The day before, the houses are scrubbed and the attic first of all, because when Bibi comes into a house she goes up there before anywhere else, and she expects to find a kilim spread with a basin of water, a mirror, a clean towel and a cake of soap nobody has used. Women sew small bags, put a mirror and a comb and a little face cream inside, and hang them in the branches. Where the date is Lenten the food is Lenten. Where it is 31 January it is poultry, most often turkey and in some places goose, and the bird must not be black and must be plucked rather than singed. At Svrljig there is no music, no shouting, and no sweeping for three days; what has been swept into a corner is carried out on the third day and the leftovers are buried in a place that is ritually clean, and that part of the evening is called her sendoff.

Everything she does to people follows from that bargain, and it runs in both directions. She comes into dreams and tells a man how to lay on her supper, and the provisions cost him nothing. She comes to a woman in Županjac whose husband will not let her go to the feast because they are childless and Bibijako Djive is a children’s day, and tells her how long she has left. She visits a man who tore up her picture and instructs him to buy another. She breaks every dish a woman failed to wash before her day. An outsider once cut down the pear tree the Belgrade Roma gathered under, and died on her feast, and so did his whole family. A woman in Resnik laughed at her and did not walk again. Against all that, a conscript serving in a distant garrison prayed to be home for her day and had his orders the next morning.

The limits are the same as the powers. She asks for objects worth almost nothing and a little attention once a year, and she has no hold whatever on a household that supplies them. What is actually wearing her away is not defiance. Ten interviews conducted at Knjaževac and Minićevo in 2016 found the feast still being kept and almost the whole story gone from memory, and newspaper reporters had noticed the same hollowing decades before, when they asked the crowd at the celebration who Bibi was and nobody could tell them. Her image is younger than she is: Roma in Belgrade bought a plot on Pašino Brdo out of membership dues after the First World War and raised a shrine there, and until 1929 the icon at the centre of it was Saint Parascheva’s, because Parascheva’s day was already kept as a women’s feast across Serbia. Bibi’s own icon, which Petrović credited to a painter called P. Daničić, shows a Romni in braids and earrings with her hands spread above a child’s grave. Serbia entered Aunty Bibi in its National Register of Intangible Cultural Heritage in December 2019. The chapel her Belgrade association had used since the 1920s, on Gospodara Vučića, lost most of its roof to an excavator in 2019 and was padlocked against the people who built it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Bibi in Romani belief?

Bibi is a protective figure venerated by Orthodox Christian Roma in Serbia as an uncanonised saint who guards the health of children. Her name is simply the Romani word for “aunt”. In the oldest recorded legends she identifies herself as cholera in person, and she spares the children of households that treat her well while killing the children of those that turn her away.

Why is Bibi called Cholera?

Serbian folk belief held that cholera moved through the country in the shape of a woman, and because naming the disease was thought to summon it, people called her Tetka, or Aunt, instead. Romani communities adopted the same figure and the same euphemism using their own word, bibi. The ethnographer Aleksandar Petrović argued in 1937 that the belief passed from Serbian neighbours to the Roma in exactly this way.

What is Bibijako Djive and when is it celebrated?

Bibijako Djive, Aunty’s Day, is the feast held in Bibi’s honour. In Belgrade, Smederevo and Kragujevac it falls on the third Friday of Lent and therefore moves with Easter, while in Niš, Svrljig, Knjaževac and much of eastern Serbia it is fixed to 31 January. Families gather around a pear tree marked with a carved cross, light candles, cut ritual bread and ask for the health of their children.

What do people leave for Bibi?

Households scrub the house and the attic before her day, because Bibi is believed to enter through the attic first, and lay out a basin of water, a mirror, a clean towel and an unused cake of soap. Small sewn bags containing a mirror, a comb and face cream are hung in the branches of the cult tree, along with miniature skirts, blouses and towels. The offerings are deliberately modest, and the point is that refusing them is what brings the disease.

What happens to people who disrespect Bibi?

The legends are consistent about the consequences. A woman who failed to wash her dishes before the feast had every one of them broken, a woman in Resnik who laughed at Bibi was left paralysed, and an outsider who cut down the pear tree the Belgrade Roma gathered under died on her feast day along with his entire family. In the older stories, whole houses and villages were emptied of children after their people drove her from the door.

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