Kukudh

Also Known As: definite form Kukudhi; from Greek κουκούδι, a pustule or plague swelling; also used in the south as a name for the plague itself
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Albanian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: A dead thing that kills by breath rather than by force, and in its southern form a blindness that moves sickness through a district.
Role in Mythos: One of the two named classes of walking dead the Gegs of Elbasan recognised in the 1850s, and the Albanian word for the plague in the south of the country.
Relation to Humans: It comes back to the lanes and houses it used while alive, which makes it a domestic danger rather than a wild one. Its name still does daily work in Albanian, standing in for a wicked man, for a fear with nothing behind it, and for a person left completely alone.

In January the lanes around Elbasan froze hard, and people lay awake listening for chains. What dragged them through the ruts was not a prisoner and not an animal. Johann Georg von Hahn, an Austrian consul who spent the 1840s and 1850s writing down Albanian speech and belief, set out what the townspeople told him: the kukudh walked in that month, loaded with iron, and its breath was fatal. It did not bite. It did not feed. It only had to come close enough to be breathed in.

The word never settled on one body. In Hahn’s own Albanian lexicon the kukudh is a hairy black caterpillar whose bristles leave the skin itching for hours, and it is also a spectre, and the two senses sit inside the same entry without apology. The standard dictionary of the Albanian language keeps a different picture again: a short man with a tail who comes up out of his grave after dark and wanders the neighbourhood, which is to say a lugat under another name. Further south, and among the Albanian speakers of Greece, the kukudh was no man at all. She was blind, and what she carried was the plague.

Gustav Meyer, compiling his etymological dictionary of Albanian in 1891, followed the name down to something a great deal smaller than a demon. Behind kukudh stands the Greek κουκούδι, a pustule, a blister, the hard swelling that comes up under the skin, and a medieval gloss records it among the people of Epirus as a plain word for plague. Behind that lies κόκκος, a grain or a pip. Meyer put the Albanian kukul, a rash, in the same entry, and gave the underlying sense as boil, blister, eruption. The creature grew out of a symptom. Somebody looked at the black lump in an armpit, gave it a name, and the name stood up and walked.

The walking itself is undramatic, and that is most of the horror in it. A man six weeks dead rises in the dark, gets the soil off himself, and goes back down the lane he always used, towards the house that is still called his. Nobody meets him. In the morning there is nothing left but a thin light hanging over the grave, the sort of glimmer that will be there again the next night, and the night after that.

The whole machinery of return belonged to a wider belief that Hahn found everywhere he went. His Tosk informants called the walking dead vurvolak, borrowing the Greek. A corpse became one if a cat or any other animal jumped across it before burial. Such a body did not rot. A light showed over its grave every night, and on the fortieth day it got up, went into its own house or a relative’s, made what trouble it could, and in some tellings climbed in beside the wife it had left behind. The remedy was old and physical. Dig it up and burn it, on the night between Friday and Saturday, the one night of the week the thing lay still in the ground.

At Prilep, Hahn was told, several families went by the name Vampiri. They were reckoned descendants of such corpses and everyone avoided them, and they were quietly expert at putting the restless back down. They kept the method to themselves. Other towns sent for them.

The Gegs of Elbasan did not use the word vurvolak at all. They kept two named classes instead, and they sorted them by whose body it had been. The lugat, in their account, were Turkish dead with enormous nails, moving about still wrapped in their shrouds, eating whatever they found and throttling whoever they met. The kukudh and the karkanxholl were the Romani dead, out in January under their chains with that killing breath. It is prejudice, plainly, a village in the 1850s sorting its neighbours into monsters, and it is worth knowing because it shows the kukudh was never a free-floating horror. It had an address. Hahn added one more line from the Christian Gegs: no Christian could become a ghost at all. Among the Tosks, he noted, religion bought no such exemption.

A disinterment left a smell, and the men who did it worked quickly. Wet earth first, then cut wood and resin, then the other thing that came off the fire and stayed in the wool of a coat for days. Saturday morning was the deadline. Nobody wanted to be standing over an open grave when the week turned.

What the kukudh has is not strength. Hahn’s informants were explicit that these were not blood-drinkers and not eaters of corpses, which takes away the two functions a European revenant usually exists to perform. It has the chains, which announce it. It has the month, which is January. It has the breath. In its southern form it has the sickness itself, moving through a district the way an epidemic moves, unable to see where it is going and under no obligation to.

The word outlasted the belief and kept working. A cruel man is a kukudh. A household gone wrong has had the kukudh come into it. A person gripped by a terror with nothing whatever behind it is said to have the kukudh in him. And a man left with no one at all is left kukudh, which is the bleakest of the four senses and the only one with nothing supernatural in it.

The limits are the limits of a body. It can be dug up, and it can be burned, and it keeps to a season and to a fixed night of the week. Timing is the whole defence, since a corpse dealt with before the fortieth day never becomes anything. Past that point the record thins out fast. The fuller portrait that circulates in English, the goat’s tail, the invulnerability broken only by a noose of vine, the miser’s soul haunting the house he was too mean to leave, the brave boy who kills it and is made heir, the tale that Alexander the Great brought the sickness into the world, all of it rests on one article by Maximilian Lambertz published in 1973, and nothing older has surfaced to check it against.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Kukudh in Albanian mythology?

The Kukudh is an undead being of Albanian folk belief, recorded by Johann Georg von Hahn in 1854. In the north it is a corpse that walks in January weighed down with chains and kills with its breath, and in the south it is a blind female demon who carries the plague. The standard Albanian dictionary describes it as a short man with a tail who comes out of the grave at night.

How does the Kukudh kill?

By breath. Hahn’s informants in Elbasan were specific that the Kukudh was neither a blood-drinker nor a devourer of corpses, and that the danger was simply being close enough to breathe what it exhaled. In its southern form it kills at a much larger scale by spreading plague through a district.

Is the Kukudh the same thing as a lugat?

Not quite, though the two words overlap. The standard Albanian dictionary glosses Kukudh as a lugat, but the Gegs of Elbasan kept them apart as separate classes of walking dead, with the lugat being shroud-wrapped corpses with huge nails who strangle people, and the Kukudh going about in January under chains.

Why is the Kukudh connected to the plague?

Because the name began as a word for a swelling. Gustav Meyer traced Kukudh to the Greek koukoudi, a pustule or blister, which a medieval source records among the people of Epirus as a straightforward word for plague. The demon grew out of the symptom rather than the other way round.

How do you stop a Kukudh?

By dealing with the corpse before it rises. In the belief Hahn recorded, a body suspected of walking was dug up and burned on the night between Friday and Saturday, the one night the creature rested in its grave, and a corpse handled before the fortieth day after death never became anything at all. At Prilep, certain families were held to be specialists at laying the restless dead and were called in from other towns.