Bolla

For three hundred and sixty-four days of the year the creature lies in a crack of limestone with its eyes shut. It can hear the goats coming down the scree and the spring water moving under the rock, and it can feel the cold of the stone soaking into its coils, but it cannot look at any of it. Then the twenty-third of April arrives, the morning that opens the Albanian summer, and the lids come up.

The bolla is blind on purpose, and the purpose is not kindness toward the bolla. Robert Elsie’s dictionary of Albanian belief states the reason without decoration: it keeps its eyes closed because otherwise it would spend every hour of its life devouring people. One day a year the restraint lifts, and whatever the bolla sees on Saint George’s Day it eats where it stands.

The blindness is a sentence. When Saint George had fought the dragon down he did not simply finish it. He cursed it as it lay there, condemning it to be blind for ever and to open its eyes on his day alone, which turns a single bad afternoon into a permanent condition and makes the saint’s feast the one crack of light in an otherwise sealed life.

Everything odd about the bolla begins with how ordinary its name is. Bollë, definite bolla, is just a word for a snake, and Elsie’s dictionary glosses it with an old zoological label for the Aesculapian snake, the long grey climber that lives in dry walls across southern Europe. On Poros, a Greek island whose population was once mostly Albanian, bullar still means a water snake. In the northern Albanian mountains, bolla and bollar are what people call grass snakes. Albert Doja arrives at the same place from the other direction and notes that bolla, bullar and ershaj all mean serpent, or one particular kind of serpent, depending on the valley. The monster and the harmless thing under the doorstep share a noun.

Which is why the bolla is less a species than a stage. Folk belief across the Albanian lands runs the change as a ladder with one rule at every rung: do not be seen. Twelve years after it hatches, a snake becomes a bolla. If the bolla then survives fifty years without a human eye falling on it, it becomes a bollar, and here the accounts turn oddly specific. The bollar is the reptile from which ordinary snakes draw their poison, feeding it to them the way a mother feeds milk. Another fifty unseen years and it is an errshaja, which does not bite at all. It wraps a person, opens the chest and eats the heart. A hundred years more and what comes out of the cave is a kulshedra, the many-headed drought demon that holds whole villages to ransom for their water.

The arithmetic is not fixed, and the Albanian ethnographer Mark Tirta is careful to say so. Working from his own fieldwork in the highlands he found the required span given as three years in one district, seven in another, then nine, then twelve, then fifty, then a hundred. What never varies is the condition. Being looked at is what stops it.

So the ordinary life of a bolla is a long exercise in being nowhere. It lies up in scree, in the roots of an old tree, in the wet dark behind a spring where the rock sweats, and it grows. Tirta’s informants describe a heavy snake of thick forest and water margins that kills by winding round its prey and squeezing until the prey stops. Past that the record is close to silent about its body, and the silence is the point, because this is an animal defined by nobody having looked at it. What gets described instead is size, and the size is frankly legendary. Tirta says as much: no one has ever seen a serpent of the dimensions people give it, and the exaggeration is doing symbolic work rather than zoological work.

That is the second strange thing. The same word names the gentlest being in the Albanian house. Through central and northern Albania, and in Kurvelesh and Himara in the south, the guardian serpent of the household is the bolla e shtëpisë. Every house was thought to have one, living in a hole in the wall of the hearth room, its whereabouts known only to the oldest woman of the family, fed three times a day with milk and crumbs of bread and whatever else was going. A prospering household got the compliment: what a bolla that house has. A family struck by deaths and dead oxen was said to have a bolla gone weak. Killing it was a heavy sin, and people could list the consequences without pausing, the house burned, the master dead, the plough ox down in the furrow.

Tirta put the obvious question to the old men and got a firm answer. The bolla of the house is one kind, they told him, and the bolla that becomes a kuçedra is quite another. His own notes show a single word doing both jobs anyway. At Bendë and Tomadhe above Tirana, when a family moved house, two great bollas were seen coming out of the old walls, crossing the neighbours’ gardens and going in through a hole in the wall of the new one, and an old woman named Malja went out to meet them and spoke to them fondly. That is the same animal that eats a shepherd on the feast of Saint George. Nobody in those villages seems to have found this a problem.

The defence against it has always been the eye. One human glance resets a century. In the Kastrati highlands the eye did not even need to be human, since a snake seen by a wren lost its capacity to become a kulshedra for good, and the reason kulshedras were so scarce in the northern mountains, people said, was that the mountains are full of wrens. The calendar helped as well. Rites for serpents clustered on the fixed days of the year: on Summer Day in mid March, when the snakes were bound; on Llazore, when they were weakened by spoken formulas; and on Saint George’s Day itself, when charms were worked with a snake’s head or a shed skin. In Dukagjin and the Great Highlands a man meeting the first snake of spring swore a truce with it, promising never to kill it if it would never bite him or anyone of his household, and counted himself covered for the year.

Behind all of it stands the saint who started the trouble. Saint George’s Day, the twenty-third of April, opens the Albanian summer and once opened the year, a date thick with rites for growth and cattle and children. In Mirdita they said that thunder between the two Saint George’s days meant no snakes that summer. He took the serpent’s mountains as well as its sight, and along the Adriatic coast peaks that had been called Snake Mountain came out of the Middle Ages renamed for him. One morning a year, the bolla gets to look back.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the bolla in Albanian folklore?

The bolla is a serpent of Albanian folk belief that keeps its eyes shut all year and opens them only on Saint George’s Day, devouring the first person it sees. The word bollë is also an ordinary Albanian noun for a snake, and in the northern mountains it is used for harmless grass snakes.

Why is the bolla blind?

Because Saint George cursed it. In the Albanian telling of the dragon fight, the saint beats the beast and condemns it to be blind for ever and to open its eyes on his feast day alone, which falls on the twenty-third of April.

Does the bolla turn into a kulshedra?

Yes, if it is never seen. Albanian folk belief makes the bolla one rung of a ladder: a snake becomes a bolla, then a bollar, then an errshaja that eats human hearts, and finally a kulshedra, with each stage requiring decades unseen by any human eye. The number of years varies by region, from three to a hundred.

What is the bolla e shtëpisë?

The bolla e shtëpisë is the guardian serpent of the Albanian house, carrying the same name as the man-eater. It was believed to live in a hole in the wall of the hearth room, was fed milk and breadcrumbs by the woman of the house, and brought the family prosperity, while killing it was thought to ruin the household.

How was a bolla stopped from becoming a kulshedra?

By being seen. A single human glance ended the transformation, and among the Kastrati of northern Albania even a wren’s glance was enough, which was the explanation people gave for how rare kulshedras were in the mountains.

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