Bukavac

Also Known As: Serbian Букавац, from buka, “noise”
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Slavic Mythology, Balkan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It leaves deep still water after dark with a booming noise and kills by landing on people and animals and strangling them.
Role in Mythos: Serbian folk belief in Srem placed it among the beings kin to the vampire, a night-comer that takes the living by the throat.
Relation to Humans: It is hostile without condition and without negotiation, going for anything alive that is near its water once the dark is down. No source records a charm, a weapon or an hour that stops it, so the only relation on record is that of prey.

Everything the record actually says about the Bukavac fits inside a single paragraph, printed in Belgrade in 1970. The Srpski mitološki rečnik, the Serbian mythological dictionary compiled by Špiro Kulišić, Petar Ž. Petrović and Nikola Pantelić for the publisher Nolit, is where it lives, and the paragraph runs like this. In Srem, the flat wet country between the Sava and the Danube, there was a known belief in a demon-being called the bukavac, close in kind to the vukodlak, which is to say the vampire. Some imagined it as a monster with six legs and knobbly horns. It lived in lakes and in the big standing marshes. At night it came up out of the water with a noise, which is where the name comes from, and jumped on people and animals and strangled them. The drekavac of Bosnia, the entry adds, is much the same thing. Then it stops.

The name is not a puzzle. Buka is noise, bukati is to boom, and a bukavac is a thing that booms. The word was already doing ordinary work in the language long before a demon was hung on it. Vuk Karadžić printed it in the second edition of his Srpski rječnik, Vienna, 1852, and gave it two senses. One is a bird, the bittern, which he glosses in Serbian as the water bull and in German as the reed-drone. The other is a rabble-rouser, the sort of man who gets a room shouting. Neither of them is a monster, and nothing in the record joins the bird to the demon. What they share is a voice with no visible throat behind it, coming out of reeds nobody can see into.

The same dictionary returns to the bukavac in its long article on the vampire, and that is where its real address appears. Beings kin to the vampire, or identical to it in their properties, it says: the bukavac, a belief recorded in Srem, which comes at night and strangles people; the drekavac, mottled and long and thin as a loom beam, screaming through the graveyard and the village in the voice of a goat, a small child, a cat; the plakavac of Herzegovina, going round and round its mother’s house crying like an infant; the nekrštenici, the unbaptised dead, who take the milk from nursing mothers. That is the shelf the bukavac sits on. It was never a lake beast in a bestiary. It was filed with the returning dead, and it does the thing they all do, which is to arrive in the dark and put its weight on a throat.

The marsh does nothing for hours. Black water with no current in it, reed stems going grey as the light goes, the cold lifting off the surface faster than off the bank. Then the noise, low and wet and far too big for the space it comes out of, and after the noise the sound of something heavy leaving the water.

What that something looked like, the dictionary is careful about. Some imagined it as a monster with six legs and knobbly horns. Some. The six legs are offered as a picture that existed in certain heads, not as a description of the creature, and past them the entry gives nothing at all. No size. No colour. No hide. It never mentions eyes. Six legs is two more than the job needs, which may be exactly the point of them, since a thing built with more legs than it can use has been imagined by somebody who wanted it to come out wrong.

The attack is three verbs long. It comes out of the water, it jumps, it strangles. A horse standing to drink at the edge on a still night, then weight arriving on its back out of the dark, then nothing moving on the bank at all. Nothing is bargained for, nothing is lured, nothing is asked. No victim is named, no village, no night, no witness. Not one story attaches to it.

Its powers are the ones the paragraph grants and no others. It can leave deep still water under its own strength. It can reach a full-grown animal. It kills by pressure and by its own weight, which is a slower and more intimate way of going about it than teeth. Its limits are drawn by the same sentence: lakes and large marshes, and the hours after dark, and the record puts it nowhere else and never in daylight.

What it does not have is a weakness. The vampire, in this same book, is hedged about with procedure. It is cut or pierced while it is still on the bier so that it cannot rise. Dogs in the village smell it first and go frantic. Cockcrow sends it back into the ground. In eastern Serbia they said the wolf could eat it. Against the bukavac there is nothing: no herb, no iron, no hawthorn, no hour it is obliged to keep, no man born to hunt it. Nobody wrote down where it came from and nobody wrote down how to kill it.

That absence is the most interesting thing on the page. Serbian folk belief was seldom short of a remedy, and every other being standing near the bukavac in that dictionary comes with something a person can do about it. What survives of the bukavac is a place, an hour, a sound and a grip, which between them make a fairly complete account of what it is like to stand near deep water in the dark and hear something you cannot put a shape to.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Bukavac?

The Bukavac is a demonic being from Serbian folk belief, recorded in Srem, the lowland region between the Sava and the Danube. It was said to live in lakes and large marshes, come out of the water at night making a loud noise, and strangle the people and animals it landed on. Serbian ethnographers classed it with the vampire rather than with ordinary water monsters.

Where does the name Bukavac come from?

The name comes from the Serbian word buka, meaning noise, and the verb bukati, to boom or bellow. The creature was named for the racket it made coming out of the water after dark. The same word is also an ordinary Serbian name for the bittern, a marsh bird, and for a rabble-rouser, both of which Vuk Karadžić recorded in his dictionary in 1852.

What does the Bukavac look like?

Some believers imagined it as a monster with six legs and long knobbly horns, and that is the whole of the description on record. No source gives its size, its colour, its skin or its eyes. Details such as blue eyes and slimy hide are later additions that do not appear in the Serbian ethnographic entry the creature comes from.

How do you protect yourself from the Bukavac?

No protection against the Bukavac is recorded. Serbian folklore supplies detailed defences against the vampire, including hawthorn, piercing the corpse before burial and the return to the grave at cockcrow, but nothing comparable was ever written down for the Bukavac. The record gives it no weakness, no counter-charm and no origin.

Is the Bukavac the same as the Drekavac?

They are closely related but not the same. The Serbian mythological dictionary that records the Bukavac says the drekavac of Bosnia is much the same kind of creature, and lists both among beings akin to the vampire. The drekavac is known for screaming through graveyards and villages in borrowed voices, while the Bukavac belongs to standing water and kills by strangling.