Kulshedra

Thunder in the northern Albanian mountains was never only weather. During heavy storms in 1908, Edith Durham’s guides told her exactly what was happening overhead: a female monster was working to destroy humanity with torrents and tempests, and a male being was beating her back. They told her twice, on two separate storms, in the flat tone people keep for facts.

The monster is Kulshedra, and she lives wherever water can be kept away from people. A cave in the limestone, a lake with no daylight on it, the still middle of a swamp. She is a serpent grown past all reason, carrying seven heads and sometimes as many as twelve, and every one of them spits fire. Coarse red wool covers her face and her body. Her breasts hang low enough to drag along the ground behind her. Nobody in any account calls her anything but hideous.

A woman climbs to the spring above the houses with an empty vessel and finds the basin dry and the stone warm under her palm. Nothing has been broken and nothing has been carried off. The water has simply been stopped, the way a hand stops a tap, and everybody in the village understands what the stopping means and roughly what it is going to cost.

She is not born a dragon. She is promoted into one, and the promotion runs entirely on not being noticed. In the Great Northern Mountains they told it as a ladder. A snake that manages fifty years without a human eye on it becomes a bullar, the creature that suckles the venomous snakes and is the reason they carry poison at all. Fifty more unseen years and the bullar becomes an ershaj, which winds itself around a person, opens the chest and eats the heart. A century after that, still unseen, the ershaj is finally a kulshedra. Other districts ran the clock at their own speed. Around Tirana the young ones hid in a dark hole, were snakes at six months and kulshedras six months after that. In Prishtina the thing went by the name bolla for its first twelve years. In Zadrima she began as an eel in the deep water of a spring and grew until she could only leave her hole by scraping the skin off her back on the rock, losing a great deal of blood on the way out.

Being seen is the only thing that stops her. Among the Kastrati it was said that a snake sighted by a wren lost the ability to become a kulshedra at all, which leaves the fate of a whole valley resting in the eye of a bird the size of a fist.

In the south they imagined her larger still, a serpent wound right around the world with her mouth close to her own tail, and if she ever closed that circle the world would go with it. She could also put the size away and walk about as an ordinary woman, a trick reported from Dukagjin in Kosovo, or take the shape of an eel, a frog, a tortoise, a lizard. The shapes vary. The sex never does.

Only the drangue can handle her. He is a man born in the caul, with small wings under his arms, and he goes to war carrying farm equipment: the beam of the plough and the ploughshare, the pitchfork, the post from the threshing floor, the heavy millstones. When those run out he throws lightning, meteors, whole trees, boulders and houses pulled off their foundations. He also carries his own cradle as a shield. He needs it, because her weapons are her urine and the poisoned milk of her breasts.

In the Çermenika mountains near Elbasan they said a drangue once beat her senseless with trees and boulders and still was not done, because a kulshedra left breathing gets up again. He hauled her to the Shkumbin and held her under until the water finished the argument. Further north the fight is pinned to the bend of the Drin near the Vizier’s Bridge, at the place called Rana e Hedhme, where the boulders strewn through the riverbed and along the banks are simply what the two of them have thrown at each other and never cleared away.

Thunder on a black winter night was their weapons meeting. In the northern villages there was a worse possibility, which was that she would take the sun or the moon into one of her mouths and keep it. Against that, men fired rifles into the sky, beat metal against metal and rang the church bells, on the reasoning that a creature that size can still be startled.

Some tellings have her charging rent. A village whose spring she has closed pays in young people, a fixed number every year, handed over to keep the water moving, and the hero who finally refuses to pay is the one the story turns out to be about. That bargain is old and well travelled, and the Andromeda story is plainly mixed into the Albanian versions of it.

Durham noticed the gender arithmetic and wrote it down without softening it. Men and male animals could become drangue; women, serpents and other noxious creatures became kulshedras. The belief underneath, she reported, was in the innate depravity of everything feminine. The word still does ordinary work in Albanian as an insult for a quarrelsome woman.

Being likened to her was not always an insult. The old texts call Skanderbeg the Kulshedra of Albania, and Barletius passed on a legend that his mother, before his birth, dreamed of a kulshedra whose body covered the whole country, its bloody mouth away in Turkish lands and its coiled tail dropped into the Adriatic. What the fifteenth century wanted out of the image was the terror, not the morals.

Her powers all come from one place, which is her grip on water and the weather that moves it. She holds back springs and rivers, brings the cloud in ahead of herself, throws storm and hail and flood, burns what the water leaves, and poisons whatever comes close enough to be touched by her milk. Her limits come from the same place. She is an aquatic thing, so water is what finishes her, and a drangue who walks away while she is still breathing has not finished her at all. She is slow to build and easy to interrupt at the start, since one pair of human eyes anywhere in that two-hundred-year climb ends it. And she can be driven off by noise, which is the least dignified weakness available to a creature with twelve heads and no rival in the Balkans.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Kulshedra?

The Kulshedra is a huge multi-headed female dragon of Albanian folklore, known across the Albanian-speaking Balkans and among the Arbëresh of southern Italy. She functions as a storm demon: she brings the cloud with her, spits fire from every mouth, and withholds the water that villages depend on.

How do you kill a Kulshedra?

She has to be drowned. Her usual enemy is the drangue, a man born in the caul with small wings under his arms, who batters her with ploughs, pitchforks, millstones, uprooted trees and lightning, but a kulshedra knocked unconscious will recover. In the tradition around Elbasan the drangue only destroyed her by holding her under the Shkumbin river.

How does a snake become a Kulshedra?

By going unseen for a very long time. In the northern Albanian mountains a snake that lives fifty years without being noticed becomes a bullar, another fifty unseen years turns it into an ershaj, and a further century unseen makes it a kulshedra. Other districts told it faster, and among the Kastrati a snake glimpsed by a wren was said to lose the ability to transform at all.

What does the Kulshedra look like?

She is described as an enormous serpent with seven to twelve heads, her face and body covered in coarse red woolly hair and her long breasts hanging down to drag along the ground. Fire comes out of all her mouths. She can also appear as an ordinary woman, or as a female eel, frog, tortoise or lizard.

Why is the Kulshedra blamed for droughts?

Because she takes possession of the water. The Kulshedra lives in caves, underground lakes and swamps, stops springs and rivers, and in many tellings only releases the water when a village pays her a yearly tribute of young people. The same power runs the other way as well, producing torrents, tempests and flooding.

Related Entries

Drangue, Bolla, Ljubi, Stihi, Djall, Kukudh, Zana e Malit, Ala, Zduhać, Balaur, Zmey Gorynych, Hydra, Illuyanka, Vritra, Saint George