Iele

By morning the ring is easy to find. The grass inside it lies flattened and blackened at the roots, and the leaves of the nearest walnut have curled as though a fire came close and then changed its mind. Cattle will not graze there. When the grass grows back it grows back wrong, red or a green so dark it looks wet, and mushrooms crowd the rim. Romanian villagers knew perfectly well what had passed through in the night, and they were careful not to say the word out loud.

So they said “they”. *Iele* is nothing more than the feminine third-person plural pronoun, the Romanian for “they”, pressed into service because the real names were too dangerous to speak. The other names are all sidelong in the same way. Frumoasele, the beautiful ones. Vântoasele, the windy ones. Fetele Codrului, the girls of the forest. Milostivele, the merciful ones, which is flattery rather than description. Împărătesele Văzduhului, the empresses of the air. Personal names do circulate, Ana and Bugiana and Ruxanda and Trandafira and Rujalina among them, and the belief ran that a witch kept nine of these by heart and built her charms out of combinations of them. The philologist Adrian Poruciuc has argued that the word is not a pronoun at all but a loan from Old Germanic. Either way the practice in a village was the same: the names were said sideways, or not at all.

They are young, beautiful and immortal, and they are almost never seen properly. Most of the time they have no bodies. When they do appear it is at night and by moonlight, in glades and at crossroads, over springs and along riverbanks, above abandoned hearths, now and then in the crowns of maples and walnut trees, with their hair down over their breasts, small bells at their ankles and candles burning near their feet. One strand of the tradition puts them in coats of chain mail, which sits oddly against everything else. They come in threes, sevens or nines, depending on who is telling it. They fly with wings and without them, and there are accounts of chariots of fire.

What they do is dance the hora, the closed ring, and they dance it for themselves. A man walking late past a spring hears music with no players behind it, and above it a woman’s voice better than any voice he knows. His feet slow. Then he is inside the ring and the ring is turning, and the last thing he registers is the ground going soft and warm under him.

Where they came from depends on the county. Marcel Olinescu’s collection of Romanian mythology preserves an account in which they are the nine daughters of Iraclie, or of a king named Rusalim who owned the fountain of immortality. Alexander the Great went to fetch a jar of that water and took the nine girls with him, and told them not to touch it while he was away at war. They touched it. They went up as falcons, *șoim* in Romanian, which is why one of their names is Șoimanele, the falcon women. In Oltenia there are only three of them and they are Alexander’s own daughters, Catrina, Zalina and Marina.

They are not devils, and the tellings are firm about it. They take revenge, and only that. The offences are precise: watching them dance, stepping on ground they have danced on, sleeping under a tree they consider theirs, drinking from a spring they use, mimicking their movements, or refusing an invitation to join the ring. The punishments are equally precise. Whoever hears their song by accident is struck dumb on the spot. Others are left blind, deaf, crippled, twisted with rheumatism, paralysed down one side, or simply emptied out. Romanian still carries the residue in *zănatec*, a word for someone whose wits have been taken by contact with the fairies.

Their season is Rusalii, Pentecost, fifty days after Orthodox Easter, running seven to nine days as spring turns over into summer. Tudor Pamfile recorded the belief sitting underneath it: the dead have been loose on the earth for those fifty days and must now go back into their graves. During that week the village stops. No sweeping the house, no work in the fields, no handling of animals. Breaking the interdiction was how people got taken. Anyone who worked through Rusalii was said to be lifted off the ground and spun, and worse followed behind it, cattle dead without a mark on them, hail flattening the crop, rivers coming up, trees browning inside a week, houses catching for no reason anybody could name.

Against all of that there was garlic, and there was wormwood, *pelin*, bitter enough to taste on the fingers an hour after handling it, worn in the belt or at the breast or tucked into a hatband, hung about the house, and in some places a horse’s skull went up on a pole in front of the gate.

When prevention failed there was the căluș. In the Olt country of southern Romania, and among the Vlachs across in Bulgaria and Serbia, a sworn brotherhood of men gathered on the eve of Rusalii at a crossroads or a mound on the edge of the village, at sunset, and took a secret oath binding them for nine years. They raised a pole with a white cloth at the top, and inside the cloth a bunch of green garlic and wormwood. Their leader, the vătaf, held the post for life and had inherited the charms and the steps from the man before him. For the length of the season the dancers obeyed him, never went anywhere alone and kept away from women entirely, on pain of losing the ability to dance at all. Bells were sewn to their trousers. They stamped, clicked their heels, leapt and swung their legs, and went courtyard to courtyard while parents held children out to be danced with for luck.

The cure itself was quiet. The vătaf first had to be certain the illness was the fairies’ work, and tested it by having the tunes played to see whether the sick body answered them. If it did, the dancers circled the patient and stepped over her in silence, and at the end two of them lifted her to her feet. Sometimes, at the exact moment the sickness broke, one of the călușari dropped in a trance and took it into himself. Alongside them all week went the Mut, the mute, masked and ugly, dressed half in men’s clothes and half in women’s, forbidden to speak, carrying a red wooden phallus with which he revived the fallen and mocked anyone who fumbled a step.

The oppositions are almost too tidy to be accidental. The iele are female, nocturnal, lunar, and belong to the woods and the water and the uncultivated ground beyond the fence line; the călușari are male, work by daylight under the sun, and dance inside the village. One side deals in illness and the other in health. That is the shape of the iele’s limits, in the end. They are bound to a season, to the dark and to the land nobody has ploughed, they strike only at people who have crossed them, and a bitter weed in a man’s belt is enough to turn them aside.

On the last day of Rusalii the flag came down and was buried where the oath had been sworn, and the dancers ran from the spot without once looking back, then walked into the village greeting one another like men who had been apart for years. The căluș is still danced at Whitsun in the Olt and Dolj villages, and the cloth at the top of the pole still holds its garlic and its wormwood.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Iele in Romanian folklore?

The Iele are a class of beautiful, dangerous fairy women in Romanian folklore who dance a closed ring, the hora, by moonlight in glades, at crossroads and beside springs. They are usually invisible or only half seen, appear in groups of three, seven or nine, and are immortal. They are not considered evil by nature, but they punish anyone who offends them.

What happens if you see the Iele dancing?

Someone who watches the Iele dance, or steps on the ground where they danced, is struck with illness: madness, paralysis, rheumatism, blindness, deafness or crippling. Anyone who hears their song by accident is said to be struck mute on the spot. In Romanian the word *zănatec* still means someone whose wits have been taken by contact with the fairies.

Why are they called Iele?

*Iele* is simply the Romanian feminine third-person plural pronoun, meaning “they”. The name is a euphemism, used because speaking their true names was thought to be dangerous. Their other names work the same way, among them Frumoasele “the beautiful ones”, Milostivele “the merciful ones” and Șoimanele “the falcon women”. The philologist Adrian Poruciuc has proposed instead that the word is a loan from Old Germanic.

When are the Iele most dangerous?

The Iele are most active during Rusalii, the Romanian Pentecost season, which falls fifty days after Orthodox Easter and lasts seven to nine days. Villagers observed work interdictions through that period: no cleaning the house, no work in the fields, no handling animals. Breaking those rules was believed to invite paralysis, dead cattle, hail, floods and house fires.

How were people protected or cured from the Iele?

Prevention meant garlic and wormwood worn in the belt, at the breast or in the hatband, hung about the house, and in some places a horse’s skull raised on a pole by the gate. The cure was the căluș ritual of southern Romania, in which a sworn brotherhood of male dancers, led by a vătaf, danced over the sick person in silence until the illness broke. The căluș was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008.

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