Karakoncolos

In the first hard week of the Anatolian winter, the combs came down off the wall. Wool combs, the heavy kind with long iron teeth for carding fleece, were taken from where they hung and pushed to the back of a chest, and they stayed there until the weather turned. Food went out too, set on a tray beyond the threshold in the cold: buttered cornmeal, cabbage, a squash, a boiled beet. None of it was superstition in the loose sense. It was a list of specific precautions against a specific visitor, and every item on the list answered something the visitor was known to do.

The visitor walks at night, through the weeks Turkish reckoning calls zemheri, the pit of the cold. It does not hide. It stands in the lane, and when someone comes past with a scarf over the mouth it speaks, and what it says is almost polite. Where are you coming from. Where are you going. What is your name. The questions are ordinary and the trap is in the grammar of the answer, because every reply has to carry the word kara, black, somewhere inside it. I am coming from Karabağ and going to Karadağ. I come from the Black Village, I am walking to Blackwater, my name is Kara Hasan. Say that and the Karakoncolos lets you by. Say anything else and it brings down the comb.

Girls caught alone got a different treatment, and a worse one. The creature liked to comb their hair, working the iron teeth down past the hair into the scalp, taking its time. That is why the combs were hidden. Children in the Black Sea villages simply did not go out on winter evenings, which is presumably the entire point of the story and does not make it less frightening to be told.

Its most feared trick costs it nothing at all. On a black night it comes up to the window of a house where people are sleeping and calls, in the voice of someone inside that house: a mother, a husband, a son, pitched exactly right. Answer it and it takes your voice for itself. Open the door and go out and it takes the rest of you, walking you away from the light until the drifts close over the path. Pertev Naili Boratav, collecting these accounts in the middle of the last century, recorded the ending plainly. If the sleeper does not wake, the sleeper freezes. Bodies found stiff in a lane at dawn were not thought to have lost their footing in the dark. They had been called out, and they had gone.

What it looks like depends on who is describing it, and the descriptions are stranger than the generic hairy monster the name suggests. The common version is short rather than towering, ugly, wild-haired, its face and legs black as soot, its clothes or its hide shaggy like a bear pelt, big animal bells strung at its waist so that it announces itself, a long stick in its hand. The palms of its hands are pierced through. Along the eastern Black Sea it is simply the Yaban Adam, the Wild Man, a hairy thing likened in the same breath to a jinn, a bear and a monkey, and it comes down out of the forest to the coast villages on a storm, or up out of the sea itself. Elsewhere the whole apparition is an old woman with a bent back.

It has been on the calendar a long time, which is the most solid thing anyone can say about its age. Old Ottoman almanacs fixed its season with two headings: Evvel-i Koncolos, the beginning of Koncolos, and Ahir-i Koncolos, the end of it, twelve days apart at Christmas and Epiphany. In the Black Sea the gale that blows off the water around the middle of January is still called the Karakoncolos Storm. Around Yozgat the cold snap between the tenth and the seventeenth of January is the congolos month, and people once dated the season by saying that congolos had come in, or that congolos had gone out.

Where the name came from is an old and genuinely unsettled argument, and it is worth saying so rather than picking a winner. Turkish scholarship has derived koncolos from the verb konmak, from a mountain pass called a kon, and from a Kipchak Turkish word konç, giving kara konçlu, the black-trousered one. Against that, J. C. Lawson argued in 1910 that the traffic ran the other way, that the Turkish word came from the Greek kallikantzaros and not the reverse, on the grounds that the Turkish form carries a Greek ending and that Turkish speakers timed the creature’s season by Christian feast days they did not otherwise keep. Öcal Oğuz, writing on the problem more recently, notes drily that both camps have produced work describing the moment of borrowing as though they had personally attended it. Nobody has settled it. The creature travelled with the name, whichever direction it went, and it is at home in Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian and Turkish mouths alike.

Evliya Çelebi put it in writing in the seventeenth century, which makes it comfortably older than anything modern. He counted the karakoncoloses of zemheri among the talismans of Istanbul. Travelling through Bulgaria he stayed a night in the village of Çalıkkavak and watched a frightful old woman lift ash from the hearth and scatter it over the young people sleeping in the corner, turning them into chickens, until a neighbour undid the whole business by urinating on them. Evliya asked about her the next morning. That woman is of another stock, he was told. On winter nights, once a year, she used to become a kara koncoloz. This year she became a chicken. She harms nobody.

The Ottoman poets used the word as an insult and clearly expected every reader to get it. Nef’î called a grand vizier he despised a compound of demon and koncolos. Sâbit described enemy soldiers so thickly furred that a hand slipped into the breast was a lobster going into a sack of hair. Tırsî wrote a whole winter poem on it and asked his reader, did you see, the kara koncolos has arrived with the forty days of cold. The Ottoman dictionaries file koncolos under cadı, witch, and leave it there.

The powers all follow from a creature that is winter with a voice. It mimics; it fouls; it freezes; it carries the comb. A house it gets into loses its luck along with its stores, and it spits or urinates into whatever vessel was left uncovered, so that the people who drink there sicken afterwards. Set against that is a short list of things it cannot do. It cannot touch anyone who works the word kara into an answer. It will not cross a threshold where food has been left out for it, and it will not enter a house that has beet in it. It cannot bear noise, and can be driven out of a room by racket and a dragged chain. In the Trabzon tellings it is a simpleton as much as a terror, so eager to copy whatever it sees that a man plagued by one need only rub a lit pine splinter down his own arm and wait for the creature to do the same, at which point it sets its own coat alight and runs. And it cannot outlast its weather. When the thaw comes the Karakoncolos is nothing, and the combs go back on the wall.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Karakoncolos?

The Karakoncolos is a malevolent winter spirit of Turkish folklore, best known in Anatolia and along the Black Sea coast. It appears during the coldest weeks of the year, roughly between Christmas and Epiphany, and is usually described as a short, black-faced, hairy creature with bells at its waist and a wool comb in its hand.

How do you survive meeting a Karakoncolos?

The Karakoncolos stops people in the street and asks where they are coming from, where they are going, and what their name is, and every answer must contain the Turkish word kara, meaning black. Replies such as “I am coming from Karabağ and going to Karadağ” satisfy it and it lets the traveller pass. Anyone who answers without the word risks being struck with the comb it carries.

Why did people hide their combs in winter?

Households in the Karakoncolos regions took their heavy iron wool combs down and put them away for the coldest weeks of the year. The belief was that the creature used such a comb on people it caught, and was especially fond of combing the hair of girls it found alone, pressing the teeth into the scalp. Hiding the combs removed the tool.

Is the Karakoncolos the same as the Greek kallikantzaros?

They are the same creature under related names, and the two words are certainly connected, but which language borrowed from which is still argued. J. C. Lawson maintained in 1910 that Turkish took the name from Greek, while Turkish scholars have proposed native etymologies including kara konçlu, “the black-trousered one”. The being appears across Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian and Turkish tradition in the same twelve-day winter season.

How old is the belief in the Karakoncolos?

It is attested in Turkish writing at least as far back as the seventeenth century. Evliya Çelebi records karakoncolos stories from Istanbul, Bulgaria and the Caucasus in his Seyahatnâme, Ottoman poets including Nef’î, Sâbit and Tırsî use the word as a byword for ugliness and deep winter, and old Ottoman almanacs marked the start and end of its season by name.

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