Bogatin

Also Known As: from Slovene bogat, rich; its higher neighbour Mahavšček is also called Veliki Bogatin, Great Bogatin
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Slovenian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: Bogatin is a real peak of the Julian Alps said to hold a great hoard of gold, locked inside the mountain, guarded by a hundred-headed dragon and opened only by the golden horns of Zlatorog.
Role in Mythos: It is the prize in the Zlatorog story that Karl Deschmann printed in 1868, and the gold mountain of older Tolmin tales about Venetians and local diggers.
Relation to Humans: People reach it on foot from the Komna plateau or the Tolminka valley, and for centuries some of them came with picks. Nobody in the tales or in life has carried the treasure home, and a good few went poor trying.

On one side of the mountain the stones flash when the sun catches them. A boy herding on the Dobrenjščica pasture, at the foot of the slope, watched a small man with smoke-reddened eyes climb to that place with a pick and hammer at it until dark. In the morning the man was asleep by the fire in the cheese hut, his sack of rock beside him. Then he went up again.

The mountain is Bogatin, and its name comes from the Slovene word for rich. It stands 1,977 metres high in the Julian Alps of Slovenia, at the western end of the Lower Bohinj range. To the north lies Komna, a high, cold limestone plateau of hollows and dwarf pine. To the south the ground drops hard into the valley of the Tolminka. A saddle at 1,803 metres lets walkers cross between the two, and a broad ridge leads from it to the top in half an hour. Next door stands Mahavšček, a clean pyramid of 2,008 metres that some call Great Bogatin. There is nothing on the summit but pale rock, wind and a long view.

Under that rock, the story goes, is gold. A great deal of it. The fullest telling was printed on 21 February 1868 in the Laibacher Zeitung, a German-language daily in Ljubljana, by Karl Deschmann, a naturalist and politician known to Slovenes as Karel Dežman. In it the high pastures by the lakes are a paradise kept by the White Women, who help the poor and drive off intruders with storms. Their white goats graze the ledges, led by a buck with golden horns called Zlatorog. The horns are the point. They are the key to the gold in Bogatin, and the gold has a second lock: a dragon with a hundred heads lies on it.

A young hunter from the Trenta valley wants that key. He loves an innkeeper’s daughter, and a rich Italian merchant has turned her head with pearls and dancing. She laughs at the hunter. A man of bad name, the Green Hunter, finds him in that mood and fills his ears with the wealth of Bogatin. The two climb after Zlatorog together, and the young man shoots him.

The buck drags himself onto a narrow ledge, bleeding into the stone. Wherever the blood falls, flowers push up, the Triglav roses. Zlatorog eats one and is whole again. He turns and charges with the light blazing off his horns, and the hunter, dazzled, steps back into nothing. In spring the river brings his body down past the inn with a bunch of Triglav roses still in its hand. Zlatorog, in his rage, tears up the high pastures with his horns and leaves them as bare rock. The White Women go, and their goats go with them. The mountain stays shut.

A later hand added a hope. When Anton von Mailly retold the tale in his collection of legends from Friuli and the Julian Alps in 1922, he gave it an ending that Deschmann’s did not have: a spruce, a cradle, and a child who will find the treasure of Bogatin seven hundred years on.

How much of this the shepherds ever told is another matter. The priest and writer Jože Abram lived in the Trenta from 1899 to 1904 and went looking for the story among the people it was supposed to belong to. He reported that there was no trace of Zlatorog left. Folklorists tried again around Triglav after the Second World War and met the same silence. In 1986 the Slovene folklorist Milko Matičetov drew the plain conclusion: a tale that well made does not vanish in two generations, so Deschmann must have been its author as well as its compiler. The poet Rudolf Baumbach turned it into a German verse epic in the 1870s, Anton Funtek put that into Slovene in 1886, and it went on to become five operas and a national emblem.

The gold of Bogatin is older than Deschmann, though, and it needs no golden horns. Abram, writing about the mountain in 1927, found that foreign and local adventurers had been poking about in it for centuries, drawn by tales of fabulous wealth that may have given the peak its name. Farmers on the Tolmin side told of Venetians who knew the secret way in, and of a charcoal burner from Zalaz named Šrauf who walked up on them at the very moment they uncovered the hoard. In 1882 the believers got organised. Men from Kanal to Kobarid formed a company, drove a tunnel sixty metres into the mountain, and then gave up. Some of the farmers were ruined by it.

Šrauf was a real man, and he is the one the herd boy watched. He sold his charcoal, bought flour and lard, and went back up to dig. He gave his best stones to neighbours walking to Udine and never saw a coin for them. Once a stranger asked him for a piece of his ore, scraped it onto paper with a knife and set it alight, then held it under his nose. It stank of sulphur. It was pyrite. Šrauf kept digging anyway. When he died his house was full of rock, and he had carried so much of it into his bed that the bed gave way. The naturalist Fran Erjavec heard such stories on the Tolmin side and made a cautionary tale of them, published in 1887 under a title that says it all: not all that glitters is gold.

What Bogatin can do is draw people. It promises a rich man’s life to a jilted hunter, a company of farmers and a charcoal burner alike, and it does so with nothing more than a name and a glint on a slope. Its limit is just as clear. The door has one key, and the key belongs to an animal that cannot be killed. The glitter that can be reached with a pick is worth nothing, and the gold that is worth something has, in every telling, stayed where it is.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Bogatin?

Bogatin is a 1,977-metre peak in the Julian Alps of Slovenia, between the Komna plateau and the Tolminka valley. In Slovenian legend it holds a great hoard of gold. Its name comes from the Slovene word for rich.

What is the treasure of Bogatin?

The treasure of Bogatin is a hoard of gold hidden inside the mountain. In the Zlatorog story it is guarded by a hundred-headed dragon, and the golden horns of the white buck Zlatorog are the only key to it. No telling has anyone carry the gold away.

How is Bogatin connected to Zlatorog?

Zlatorog’s golden horns are the key to the gold in Bogatin. In the story printed by Karl Deschmann in 1868, a young hunter from the Trenta valley shoots Zlatorog to get the horns and the treasure. Zlatorog heals himself with a Triglav rose, the hunter falls to his death, and Bogatin stays shut.

Did people really dig for gold on Bogatin?

Yes. Adventurers searched Bogatin for gold for centuries, and in 1882 men from Kanal to Kobarid formed a company and dug a sixty-metre tunnel into the mountain before giving up. Some farmers were ruined by it. The glittering stone a local charcoal burner named Šrauf dug there turned out to be pyrite.

Is the Bogatin legend a real folk tale?

Partly. Tales of gold in Bogatin were told on the Tolmin side and drew diggers for centuries. The Zlatorog story that made the treasure famous was first printed by Karl Deschmann in 1868, and the folklorist Milko Matičetov concluded in 1986 that Deschmann largely composed it himself, because later collectors could find no trace of it among local people.