Caddos Birdes

Somewhere on the basalt uplands around Ozieri, an argument has gone badly, and one of the parties reaches for the heaviest thing in the language. Istruidu chei sos caddos birdes. May you be destroyed like the green horses. The words come out flat and practised, the way a curse does when a village has been using it for longer than anyone can count. Nobody present has seen a green horse. Nobody’s grandfather had either. That is rather the point.

The green horses of Sardinia are remembered almost entirely by their absence. The oldest printed notice of them is four lines long. In 1903 the Sardinian folklorist Giuseppe Calvia, gathering the marvellous beings of Logudoro for the Sicilian journal Archivio per lo studio delle tradizioni popolari, set them down directly after the giants, and for good reason: the green horses were what the giants rode. Their breed died out, he recorded, after the destruction of Bisarcio. He added the curse, and a second home for them at Sivennero, near Ploaghe. Then he moved on to a seven-headed dragon.

It is a small record, but a suggestive one. The giants of Logudoro were the builders of the nuraghi, the great dry-stone towers that still stand across the island in their thousands, and the tradition gave those builders mounts to match. So the picture, such as it is, belongs to an older Sardinia: a rider too large for any ordinary animal coming down off a hill at dusk, the tower dark behind him, the horse under him the colour of new barley, its hooves ringing on rock that is still warm from the day. No telling says what the giants and their horses did together beyond that. They rode, and the towers went up.

Then Bisarcio fell. Bisarcio was a real place, a cathedral town on a spur of rock east of Ozieri, and today only its Romanesque basilica of Sant’Antioco stands, alone among fields and broken walls. The tradition does not describe the end. It only marks the aftermath: the town gone, the wind moving through an empty nave, and no green horse anywhere on the plain from that day on. Whatever tied the animals to the town, they did not survive it. In Bonorva a version of the same curse was in use, and local memory there links the horses with another lost settlement, Truddas. The pattern holds. Where a town disappears, the green horses disappear with it.

What did they look like? Green. That is all the older record offers, and even that was contested early. In 1911 the lexicographer Luigi Ruffini, writing about words rather than wonders, argued that there had never been a green horse at all. The Latin for a post horse was veredus, and he proposed that Sardinian speakers had heard in it the word for green. When the mounted post was abolished the name stayed in people’s mouths and its meaning drained away, leaving the island with a curse about animals nobody could picture. He noted, with some amusement, that people had done their best anyway: some imagined horses with green coats, and others, unable to swallow that, decided the phrase must be about green meadows. His derivation is one man’s proposal. The curse, he confirmed, was still alive in Ozieri in his day.

Later writers have been no more certain. Antonangelo Liori, surveying Sardinian demons and rites in 1992, called the memory of the green horses vague and admitted it is not even known whether they had the shape of horses. Several Sardinian insects carry the name caddu, he pointed out, the mantis among them. Elsewhere he lists the green horses among the beings that crowd the Sardinian night, beside giants and pagans. A creature that may have been a giant’s charger, a relay horse or a praying mantis is hard to draw with confidence.

Newer tellings draw it anyway. Around Monteleone Rocca Doria, a hill village above the Temo valley that was a Doria stronghold until it fell to Aragon in 1436, the green horses have become small wild ponies, smaller than the famous herds of the Giara, with coats turned green by algae growing in the hair. A rock on Monte Germinu is shown as bearing the hoofprint of one. Near Villanova Monteleone, stepping over such prints is said to bring a lifetime of bad luck. At Lodè horses draped in green cloth are said to have raced on the feast of Saint John. In Ozieri the fall of Bisarcio is now explained by wars fought to own the animals. They are called untameable, never once ridden, and one of them is expected to accept a rider only when a shepherd king arrives. Calvia and Ruffini carry none of this. It may be old talk that reached print late, or it may be the legend growing new limbs. The giants, at least, would be surprised to hear the horses were never ridden.

The power of the green horses, in the older layer, is simple strength and scale: they could bear riders who built towers from boulders. In the later layer it becomes luck, good or ruinous depending on the village, and a wildness no rope could answer. Their limit is the same in every version. They are finite. The breed ends, the town falls, the print in the rock is all that is left, and no telling offers a way to bring them back. Sardinian speech has kept the lesson in a second saying, a refusal: to be told you will be given the green horse is to be told you are asking for something that cannot be had.

Nobody alive has seen one. On the plain below Bisarcio the grass comes up green every spring around an empty church, and that is as close as anyone gets.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Caddos Birdes?

The Caddos Birdes are the green horses of Sardinian folklore, known mainly from the Logudoro region in the north of the island. The oldest printed record, by Giuseppe Calvia in 1903, says they were ridden by giants and that their breed died out after the destruction of Bisarcio. Today they survive mostly as a curse and a figure of speech.

What does the name Caddos Birdes mean?

Caddos Birdes means “green horses” in Logudorese Sardinian. The singular is caddu birde or caddu irde. In 1911 Luigi Ruffini proposed that the name began as a mishearing of the Latin veredus, a post horse, as the word for green, but that derivation is one scholar’s proposal.

Who rode the Caddos Birdes?

In the 1903 record the Caddos Birdes were the mounts of the giants, the same giants Logudorese tradition credits with building the nuraghi. Later tellings disagree and say the green horses were untameable and never ridden by anyone.

What is the Sardinian curse about the green horses?

The curse is istruidu chei sos caddos birdes, meaning “may you be destroyed like the green horses.” It was recorded in 1903 and was still in use in Ozieri in 1911, with a variant known from Bonorva. It wishes on an enemy the same total disappearance that overtook the Caddos Birdes.

Where in Sardinia are the Caddos Birdes said to have lived?

The older record places the Caddos Birdes at Bisarcio near Ozieri and at Sivennero near Ploaghe. Newer tellings centre on Monteleone Rocca Doria, where a rock on Monte Germinu is shown as the hoofprint of a green horse, and also mention Villanova Monteleone and Lodè.

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