Marzanna

The straw rustles when the girls lift her, and she weighs almost nothing. She is a woman built out of a harvest: bundled stalks bound at the waist and throat, wrapped in white cloth, dressed in an old skirt somebody’s grandmother had finished with, a red coral necklace at the neck, ribbons at the wrists, a wreath or a headscarf over a face that is not really a face. They carry her out through the village on a pole. At every puddle in the lane they stop and dip her, and the water goes into the straw, and with each dipping she gets heavier and darker and less like a doll.

The end of the walk is a river, a pond, or if the village has nothing better, a ditch. There her clothes may be torn off her and her body pulled apart. In some places the juniper twigs the children have been carrying are set alight and she is burned first, so that she goes into the water already ruined, hissing. Then everyone turns for home, and the rules begin. Do not touch her once she is in the water, or the hand that touched her will wither. Do not look back at her. Do not stumble, or somebody in your house will be dead within the year, and whoever reaches the village last is dead already, they simply have not been told.

The children run.

Her name is not really a name. It is a word. Behind Marzanna, Morana and Marena stands Proto-Slavic morъ, death, plague, murrain, and behind that the Indo-European root that gives Latin mors, Lithuanian maras for pestilence, and Russian mor for a dying-off of cattle or people. The same root reaches sideways into the Slavic mara, the phantom that sits on a sleeper’s chest. So the thing being drowned in the ditch is not a personality. It is a common noun that somebody put a skirt on.

That matters, because she has no story. This is the strange fact at the centre of her. There is no myth in which Marzanna does anything: no birth, no marriage, no quarrel, no descent, no theft of anything from anyone. For a goddess of her fame across Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Silesia she has an entirely empty dossier. What she has instead is a rite, and a five-hundred-year argument about what the rite means.

The argument begins with Jan Długosz. Writing his Annales around 1455, the great Polish chronicler handed his country a pantheon cut to a Roman pattern: Dziewanna was their Diana, and Marzanna was their Ceres, mother and goddess of the harvest, and both enjoyed particular cult and devotion. He goes further. When Mieszko I accepted baptism in 966 and ordered the idols smashed, Długosz says the images of the two goddesses were carried out on a long hazel pole and thrown into a swamp. Read that again with the straw woman in mind. The chronicler’s account of how paganism was abolished is a photograph of the rite that never stopped. It is entirely possible that he watched a village drown a doll and wrote it down as the end of the old religion.

Around 1900 Aleksander Brückner took the whole structure apart. He refused Długosz any authority at all and argued that his gods were assembled by medieval preachers out of half-heard refrains from folk songs, exclamations nobody understood any more, cheerfully matched to Latin equivalents. On that reading Marzanna is not an ancient goddess who left behind a rite. She is a doll who was later promoted. The question has never been fully settled. Andrzej Szyjewski and others hold that something real stands behind the effigy, that a figure of death and renewal is too structurally embedded in the Slavic year to be a clerical accident. But the honest position is that we drown her far more confidently than we can define her.

One piece of evidence usually offered on her behalf should be handled with tongs. A thirteenth-century Czech glossary, the Mater Verborum, is repeatedly cited as equating Morana with Hecate and tying her to sorcery and poisonous herbs. The manuscript is real. That gloss is not. It was inserted in the nineteenth century by Václav Hanka, the most industrious forger of the Czech national revival, and Antonín Baum and Adolf Patera demonstrated as much in 1877. It is still quoted everywhere, including by people who ought to know better.

What survives the scrutiny is the paperwork of people trying to stop her. In 1420 Polish church statutes told the clergy not to permit the Sunday custom, not to allow them to carry around the image they call Death and drown it in puddles. That is the firm ground. Not a goddess in a grove but an offence in a synodal register, described so precisely that a Silesian schoolteacher could stage it tomorrow. Around 1700 the Church tried substitution instead of prohibition, offering a Judas effigy to be flung from a church tower on the Wednesday before Easter. The villagers took the Judas and kept the straw woman.

James Frazer collected the Silesian form of it. In the Polish districts of Upper Silesia, he reports, the effigy went by the name Marzana and was made in the house where the last death had occurred, then carried on a pole to the edge of the village and thrown into a pond or burnt. At Polkwitz the custom lapsed. Then sickness came through the village and people began to die, and the connection was obvious to everyone, and the following spring Polkwitz built her again.

The old date was the fourth Sunday of Lent, called White Sunday, or in some places Death Sunday. Only in the twentieth century did the thing slide to the twenty-first of March and into the hands of schoolteachers. Around Gliwice and Racibórz the girls carrying Marzanna were followed by boys carrying a male effigy, the Marzaniok. And the procession did not come home empty: it returned with a small spruce or pine hung with ribbons and blown eggshells, the gaik, nicknamed latko, little summer. One thing is drowned and another is carried in. The village does not simply kill winter, it makes an exchange.

There is a hint, not more, of something older still. The Slovak form of her name, Mamuriena, is close enough to Mamurius Veturius, the old man beaten out of Rome with rods in March, that Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov proposed a shared inheritance running back through Mars in his agricultural rather than his military character. Suggestive, unproven, and typical of everything about her.

Her power is winter, and while it holds it is absolute: the ground shut, the stores going down, the sick not recovering. Nothing in the rite is aimed at persuading her. Nobody prays to her. She cannot be bargained with, only removed. And her weakness is stranger than any monster’s, because it is not a weapon or a word or a hero. It is the calendar. She can be killed on a fixed date by a procession of children with a straw doll and a pole, and she has no defence whatever against them, and the whole village knows in advance exactly when it will happen.

She also cannot be finished. The drowning is not a victory, it is a lease. Next winter she is rebuilt out of new straw, in the same clothes, and carried down the same lane, and the water takes her again.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Marzanna?

Marzanna is the Slavic goddess of winter, death and plague, known as Morana in Czech and Slovene, Morena in Slovak, and Marena in Russian. She is best known not from any myth but from the rite in which an effigy of her is drowned or burned each spring to end the winter. No surviving story tells of anything she actually does.

What is the drowning of Marzanna?

Topienie Marzanny is a folk rite, still practised in Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Lithuania, in which a straw effigy dressed in women’s clothes is carried out of a village and thrown into a river, pond or puddle, sometimes after being torn apart or set on fire. The procession often returns carrying a decorated spruce or pine branch called the gaik, welcoming spring in exchange for the winter it has just disposed of. Superstitions attach to the walk home: the effigy must not be touched once in the water, and nobody should look back or stumble.

Was Marzanna really an ancient goddess?

That is genuinely disputed. The Polish chronicler Jan Długosz named her as a goddess around 1455 and equated her with the Roman Ceres, but Aleksander Brückner argued around 1900 that Długosz built his Polish pantheon out of misunderstood song refrains and Latin parallels, making Marzanna a name for an effigy rather than an inherited deity. The rite itself is solidly documented from 1420 onward; the goddess behind it is not.

What does the name Marzanna mean?

It comes from the Proto-Slavic word morъ, meaning death or plague, from the Indo-European root that also produced Latin mors, Lithuanian maras and Russian mor. The Slovak variant Mamuriena has led Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov to suggest a connection with the Roman Mars in his older agricultural aspect. In effect her name is the word for dying, given a body of straw.

When is Marzanna drowned?

Traditionally the rite fell on the fourth Sunday of Lent, known as White Sunday or Death Sunday. In the twentieth century the date shifted to 21 March, the first day of astronomical spring, and the custom passed largely to schoolchildren and folklore groups.

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