Kallikantzaroi

Under the floor of the world there is a tree, and something has been sawing at it since last January. The blade is most of the way through the trunk. A few more nights and the whole weight of the earth comes down. Then a cock crows on a hillside far above, the twelve days have begun, and the crew drop the saw and go up instead, because there is pork roasting in the villages and they would rather ruin a supper than finish the work of a year. Some tellings put a column there instead of a tree, or several columns. Either way the wood knits itself whole while they are away, and at Epiphany they climb back down and start again.

The kallikantzaroi are the most monstrous things in the Greek folk repertoire and the best known, familiar enough that grown men in the villages of the early twentieth century had not entirely stopped being afraid of them. They come in two sizes. The large sort runs from the height of a man up to something whose loins clear the chimneypots: lean, black, shaggy, with a head and a set of genitals out of all proportion to the rest, black faces, red glaring eyes, the ears of a goat or an ass, tongues lolling past tusks, long thin tails. Their arms and hands are a monkey’s, their nails twice the length of their fingers and hooked like a vulture’s. Below the waist they are goat or donkey, or one leg human and one bestial, or both legs human with the feet wrenched round so the toes sit where the heel should be. Most are lame and none of them is slow. Leo Allatius, writing in 1645 about the Chios of his boyhood, said they “devour their road at the pace of Pegasus.” Where they are strong, one Maniot village called them the iron ones. The second sort is rarer and much smaller, pygmies no taller than a five-year-old, and around Parnassus every one of them carries a defect to match the defects of the animals they ride: lame, squinting, one-eyed, mouths and noses set askew, one of them mounted on a cock with his legs trailing in the dust, another perched on a donkey too big to climb back onto when he falls off. That cavalcade is funny. It is also, on the evidence, a late softening of something that was not.

Because in the older accounts they kill people. They break into a lonely mill, frighten the miller into showing them his store, bake themselves cakes and urinate on everything they cannot eat. They tie a publican to his chair, gag him with dung, stave in every cask and leave the wine running across the floor. Going through a hamlet they swarm in by chimney and door together, smash the furniture for the pleasure of it, take the Christmas pork, foul the water and the wine and whatever food is left, and leave the household half dead of fright. Men who meet them outside may get off with dancing until cockcrow, since for all their ugliness the kallikantzaroi love to dance and often go looking for the Nereids to do it with. Others are torn and beaten first. Women are carried off to be wives. In some tellings the monsters eat what they catch.

The best of the stories turn on outwitting them, and the same trick recurs from island to island. A man of Skyros walking his laden mule home from the mill on the eve of Epiphany saw them on the path ahead, climbed up, lay flat between the two sacks and pulled a rug over himself. They came around the animal and said there was a pack this side and a pack that side and the top load in the middle, but where was the man, and ran back to the mill to look; then returned, said it again, and ran on ahead; and so on, up and down the path, while the mule walked steadily home. He got through his own door with the goblins at his heels. His wife, hearing them start on the timber, promised to open up if they would first count the holes in her sieve, and lowered it to them on a cord from the window. They counted the outermost ring round and round and never worked their way inward, growing more frantic and getting no further, until dawn came. Elsewhere the sticking point is not the ring but the number: they dare not say three, so they count one, two, one, two until the light takes them. Nobody in the record explains why three defeats them, and the two versions of the obstacle do not agree with each other.

Fire is the real defence and everything else is secondary. A single great log was set on end in the chimney to burn through the whole twelve days, sometimes with a second fire by the door, because a live hearth shuts the chimney against them and the most they will then attempt is to urinate down it and hope to put it out. Salt and heather went on the flames to crackle, and leather, an old shoe, wild-cherry wood or ground thistle to stink, a demon being routed by a worse reek than its own. A cross was marked in black on the door on Christmas Eve, and on the jars of food, and on the forehead of an unbaptised baby so it would not be stolen or strangled. Incense worked indoors and three Paternosters out of doors. Herbs hung at the chimney. Above all, if something was heard moving outside, nobody answered it, because the kallikantzaroi can take the speech of anyone who talks to them. The hearth ash was left unswept for the twelve days and carried out only after the priest had been, though some districts held that ash which had kept such company must be good for the fields and scattered it there. And in several places the household simply fed them: a pork rib hung inside the chimney on Mount Pelion, the first sweets of the New Year in Samos, waffles and sausages in Cyprus on the eve of Epiphany, a farewell meal for guests nobody wanted.

Where they come from has two answers and the Greek record has never chosen between them. The first is that they are men. The madness is seasonal, returning each Christmas, and while it holds the sufferer takes on the appetites and sometimes the shape of an animal; the mountain men of southern Euboea had the reputation along the coast. Worse, it can be congenital. A child born on Christmas Day, or by some accounts on any of the twelve days, was thought likely to grow into one, which was called a fair punishment for a mother presumptuous enough to bear a child in the season reserved for the Mother of God. Such children were the feast-stricken, and they were held to be especially dangerous to their own brothers and sisters. In seventeenth-century Chios, Allatius records, they were carried to a fire lit in the market place and held over it until the nails of their feet singed, which was thought to settle the matter. A gentler version put the child in an oven, lit a fire outside to frighten it, and asked whether it wanted bread or meat; bread meant all was well, and meat meant the treatment continued until the answer changed. The second answer is that they were never human at all, but things from below, lumped in with the other paganá, coming up when the year loosens and going down when the priest shuts it again.

The name has defeated everyone who has tried it. Adamantios Korais made it kalos and kantharos, a fine beetle, which is phonetically clean and semantically hopeless. Nikolaos Politis tried wolf and beetle, then gave up on the second half as a foreign word, then settled on boots, so that the creature either wears good ones or has hooves where boots should be. Bernhard Schmidt argued it came from Turkish karakondjolos. Phaidon Koukoules traced it to beetles harmful to vines and fields, then to demons in beetle shape, then to the medieval masqueraders. John Cuthbert Lawson took kantzaros to be the modern descendant of kentauros, which makes kallikantzaros a polite way of saying Centaur, formed exactly as the Nereids are called the good ladies by people who do not want their attention. No proposal has won general acceptance. What is not in doubt is that the politeness is real, and it is the joke at the centre of the word: in Greek the good and the beautiful share a noun, and the ordinary word for beautiful means well-formed, so the most deliberately misshapen being in the whole inventory goes about under a name that calls it lovely.

Lawson went further, and a reader should know where the further part comes from. Writing in 1910, in a book subtitled a study in survivals, he identified the kallikantzaroi with the Centaurs and with the satyrs and sileni who attended Dionysus, and ran the line through the Kalends revels that the Church spent seven centuries failing to suppress, to the young men he watched himself at carnival in Skyros in goatskin capes and horn-sized bronze bells, sixty or seventy to a man, leaping in the alleys to make as much noise as possible. It is a seductive chain and it is one scholar’s argument, made when tracing modern peasant custom back to ancient cult was the fashionable thing to do. Later anthropologists have been cooler about it, reading these beings instead as part of a living population of exotiká, the things that belong to the outside, which surface predictably at the seams of the calendar and the seams of a life.

Their powers are endurance, strength, speed, and a talent for roofs and walls and chimneys, plus the theft of speech and, in the districts that still remember it, the ability to take any shape they like, which is probably why their descriptions vary so much. Against that, they cannot bear fire, or the cross, or the censer, or the blessed water; the third cock, the black one, scatters them; and they are stupid, which is the flaw every story exploits. Their own chieftain is no help. He is called Mantrakoukos in some accounts, or simply the lame one, and he is short, fat, bald, goat-footed, grotesquely priapic and too like his followers to control them, limping along at the back of the mob instead of the front. So the tree goes on healing, the counting never reaches three, and in a house with a log burning and everyone keeping quiet the worst they manage all night is to urinate down the chimney and hope.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Kallikantzaroi?

The Kallikantzaroi are malevolent beings of Greek folklore who live underground and come to the surface only during the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany. They are described as black, hairy and lean, with goat or donkey legs, monkey arms, huge hooked nails and red eyes, and they range from the size of a man to something taller than a house. A rarer second kind is tiny and deformed and rides lame animals.

Why do the Kallikantzaroi saw the world tree?

They spend the rest of the year underground trying to cut through the tree, or in some accounts the column or columns, on which the world rests, so that it will collapse. They never finish, because Christmas arrives when they are almost through and they abandon the work to go up and cause trouble among the living. By the time they return at Epiphany the wood has healed and they have to begin again.

How do you keep Kallikantzaroi away?

Fire is the main protection: a single large log was kept burning in the hearth for all twelve nights, since a live fire closes the chimney to them, and salt, heather, leather, old shoes or wild-cherry wood were added to crackle and stink. Households also marked a black cross on the door and on food jars, burned incense, hung herbs at the chimney, and above all refused to answer anything that spoke from outside, because the Kallikantzaroi can take away the speech of whoever talks to them. Leaving a sieve for them to count is the standard trick, since they cannot get through the counting before dawn.

How does someone become a Kallikantzaros?

Greek belief held that a child born on Christmas Day, or by some accounts on any of the twelve days, might grow up to become one, which was treated as punishment for a mother who bore a child in the season belonging to the Mother of God. Such children were called the feast-stricken and were thought most dangerous to their own siblings. In seventeenth-century Chios the remedy was to hold the infant’s feet over a fire until the toenails singed; a milder form put the child in an oven and asked whether it wanted bread or meat.

Are the Kallikantzaroi demons or people?

The Greek record gives both answers and does not choose. In many places they are demons from below, grouped with the other beings called paganá and expelled when the priest blesses the waters at Epiphany. In many others they are men afflicted with a madness that returns every Christmas and gives them the appetites and sometimes the shape of animals, a reputation that attached to the mountain villages of southern Euboea.

When do the Kallikantzaroi disappear?

They go at Epiphany on 6 January, when the Greek Orthodox blessing of the waters ends the unbaptised days and the priest goes round the houses with censer and sprinkling vessel. The hearth ashes that were left unswept through the twelve days are then carried out, and in some districts scattered on the fields.

Related Entries

Nereid, Centaur, Onocentaur, Satyr, Silenus, Dionysus, Werewolf, Vrykolakas, Gello, Lamia, Empusa, Kobalos, Karakoncolos, Perchta, Krampus