Garabonciás

A stranger in a torn cloak stands at the kitchen door with a book under his arm and asks for a little milk. He does not want much. The one thing the household must not do is pour him a cupful and hand it over. The whole jug goes on the table in front of him, and he takes what he takes. That is the rule in the Hungarian legends, and the legends have a name for the stranger.

He is the garabonciás, or in full the garabonciás diák, the garabonciás student. Other districts say barboncás or verboncás. He is a man, born of a woman, and that is the first thing to understand about him. He was not a spirit and he was never a god. The stories give him a mark at birth, a tooth or several teeth already in his mouth, the same sign that singles out the táltos, the born seer of older Hungarian belief. What sets him apart is schooling. A garabonciás has completed thirteen schools, one more than any honest scholar needs, and the thirteenth is not listed anywhere respectable.

The legends describe that last classroom. It is a cave, the teacher is the devil, and the class numbers thirteen. At the end of the course the students climb onto a wheel of fortune and it turns. One of them always falls, and that one stays behind. The other twelve walk out into the daylight with a book each.

The book is the whole of his power. With it open in his hands he can rise into the air. Out of it he can read a dragon into being, a great serpent that he bridles and rides, and when he passes over a village on its back the long tail drags across the rooftops, strips the thatch and twists trees out of the ground by their roots. To fly near the sun without suffering he keeps a piece of dragon flesh under his tongue, because dragon meat cools. One tale sends him on his serpent all the way to the land of the Saracens, where the people cut the beast up and tuck its meat under their own tongues against the heat.

Between flights he walks the roads and knocks. A typical visit goes quietly. He asks for sour milk or an egg at a farm gate, the woman sets the jug down, he drinks, thanks her and goes on, and that evening the hail that hammers the neighbouring fields stops at her boundary ditch. The other kind of visit is the one people remembered. The woman says there is no milk in the house. He tells her, mildly, that there is, and that she will want to give it soon enough, only by then it will be too late. In some tellings the milk in her pantry turns to blood, with a frog sitting in the crock. Then the sky goes the colour of slate, the wind gets up, and ice comes down on the wheat. Whoever refused takes the worst of it. Whoever gave is spared.

He is not simply spiteful. Legends have him stop at the edge of a field to warn the reapers that a storm is on its way, and the ones who shrug and keep working are the ones who lose their harvest. In another story a cloud settles on the pasture, three garabonciás step out of it, have a shepherd roast them a lamb, eat, and leave the same way they came. He pays his debts in gold, too, though he does it sideways. A cobbler who would accept only three potatoes from the sack he offered found three gold pieces in his pocket.

The book is as dangerous to borrow as it is to own. A carter gives the stranger a lift, and while his passenger sleeps he opens the book and reads a line. The cart lifts off the road, horses and all, and goes on climbing until he stops reading. A child who leafs through the pages fares worse: a small snake crawls out, then a large one, and it winds round the child and chokes it. Dragons themselves begin humbly in these tales. Villagers kill some lizards hatched from a black hen’s egg, and the next day a boy comes asking after them and says those would have been his horses.

Some stories give him older habits. His walking staff grows until it reaches the moon and he climbs it into the clouds. Two garabonciás fight in the shape of bulls, one pale and one black, the pale one calling on his companions to strike his rival’s hooves. These are táltos motifs, borrowed whole.

That borrowing is the key to where he came from. Hungarian folklorists see three layers in him. Underneath is a storm demon of the kind found across pagan Europe, cousin to the German Wild Huntsman. Over that sits the medieval wandering student, the clerical drop-out who tramped from town to town and let it be thought he had studied with the devil. The top layer is native, bits of the táltos stuck onto a foreign frame. His name tells the same story. It reached Hungarian from Italian, and behind the Italian stands a Greek word for calling up the dead, which the Middle Ages turned into a term for a pupil of the black school. Writers who imagined an ancient pagan priesthood of garaboncok were building on nothing. Across the border the Croats tell of the same man as the grabancijaš dijak, tied in their tradition to the Zagreb seminary, and the scholar Jagić studied those legends in print in 1877.

For all the roofs he has ruined, he is easy to stop. Ring the church bells and he cannot work. He admits as much himself, complaining that the village dogs bite hard, meaning the bells, and that the smallest one bites hardest. His power is on loan from a book, so anyone holding the book has it and he, without it, is a tired man in a wet cloak. Shooting his dragon out of the sky is no answer, though. The man who tried it heard a threat through his window that night and was dead by morning. The cheaper course has always been the jug of milk.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a garabonciás in Hungarian folklore?

A garabonciás is a wandering student-wizard of Hungarian folk belief who controls storms and hail and rides a dragon. He is a human being who learned magic by completing thirteen schools and owning a spell book. He is also called garabonciás diák, barboncás or verboncás.

How does someone become a garabonciás?

A garabonciás is said to be born with one or more teeth and then to complete thirteen schools. In legend the last school is held in a cave by the devil for thirteen students, who finally sit on a wheel of fortune from which one always falls. The survivors each leave with a magic book.

Why does the garabonciás ask for milk?

The garabonciás knocks at houses asking for milk or an egg as a test of hospitality. The household must set a whole jug before him and not measure out a portion. If he is refused or lied to, he raises a storm or hail that does the most damage to the people who turned him away.

How do you protect a village from a garabonciás?

Ringing the church bells protects a village from a garabonciás. In the legends he calls the bells the village dogs and says the smallest one bites hardest. Giving him the milk he asks for also keeps a household safe from his hail.

Where does the word garabonciás come from?

The word garabonciás came into Hungarian from Italian and goes back through Latin to a Greek term for someone who calls up the dead. In the Middle Ages it came to mean a student of the black school. It does not come from any ancient Hungarian pagan priesthood.

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