Mavka

The snow above Zelenytsia in the Nadvirna hills held a line of footprints the size of a small child’s. The man who found them followed for three kilometres before they thinned to nothing in country where no child had any business walking, and when a folklorist wrote his account down in 1907 he was still arguing with himself about it. He would not have believed it either, he said, except that he saw it with his own eyes.

What made the prints, in the Hutsul telling, had a woman’s head and a child’s feet, and it had no back. The mountain collectors were blunt about this in a way later writers rarely are. Volodymyr Shukhevych took it down at the turn of the century almost as a formula: from the front she looks like one of us, and from behind you can see her insides. Antin Onyshchuk found the same thing in the villages a few valleys over, phrased as an apology to his listener, because the speaker knew how it sounded. Do not be surprised, the man said, but the back of her is open all the way, and you can see everything, the ribs and the heart and the guts, all of it, everything a person has inside.

Her name says what she is. It comes from *navь, the old Slavic word for a corpse, the same root that gives Czech nav for the land of the dead and Bulgarian navi for the spirits that smother women in childbed. Navka is probably the oldest Ukrainian form; mavka seems to have drifted from it, either by ordinary sound change or by folk etymology pulling the word toward mavkaty, to mew. The Hutsuls had their own explanation for the noise, and it is the bleakest gloss any philologist ever competed with. These are the souls of unbaptised children, they said, who wander the fields and the water margins before Whitsun and cry out, over and over, mav, mav.

That is the whole of her origin. She was stillborn, or she was smothered, or she died before a priest reached the house, or she was a girl who drowned or hanged herself or died on the eve of her wedding. Pavlo Chubynsky recorded another version in which the devil steals the children outright. The dead who die that way are not laid quietly with the grandfathers; they are the wrong dead, and they walk. There was one narrow door out. Onyshchuk’s informants told him a small soul had seven years to find someone who would perform the rite, and the remedy people were given was to throw a kerchief into the air during the Whitsun holidays, speak a name, and add the words I baptise you. If nobody ever did, the seven years closed over the child’s head and she became a mavka for good.

She is fair, and she is not warm. Pale to the point of whiteness, thin enough that a Zakarpattia proverb makes her the standard for it, dry as kindling, with big blue eyes and hair down her back, sometimes fair and very often green, with flowers worked into it in spring. Her clothes are thin transparent cloth that hangs loosely, spun and woven from flax she has stolen, and the Hutsuls insisted the grass did not bend under her feet when she ran across it. Her feet are the giveaway. They stayed the size they were when she died.

Mavky live in company rather than alone, up in the ash and fir and pine, on the branches or in mountain caves and sheds they hang with rugs of their own weaving. They keep house. They spin, they sew shifts out of bleached linen, they sweep, occasionally they do the washing, and one Hutsul account has a mavka pasturing a herd of deer. In spring, when the snow goes off the slopes, they run the valleys and the ridges planting them with flowers and grasses. At night they leave their marks on standing timber, and the woodcutters who found the marks in the morning said the mavky had been measuring the trees. That is why you never leave an axe or a blade lying by a fresh stump. She might cut those small feet on it, and then the man who left it is the one in trouble.

Their gathering places are called rozihry, and the people called the ground itself an ihrovyshche: round patches out on the mountain, grown over with moss. On Mount Skupova or some other high summit, in the week after Easter, at midday, they dance. They dance fast and in pairs, a boy and a girl, because the records are clear that some of them are male, and a devil pipes for them on a flute. What the dancing leaves behind is the one point the sources will not settle. Ivan Nechui-Levytsky was told the grass comes up thicker where mavky have danced. Onyshchuk was told the opposite, that grass never grows there again, which was a real grievance in a pastoral economy, and the Hutsuls looked for yellow bands lying in a broken circle as the sign.

At Pentecost the traffic reverses. The Ukrainian year has a day called Navskyi Velykden, the Dead Men’s Easter, also called Mavka’s Easter, when the souls come back into the world of the living, eat ordinary food and walk about the fields as people. Nobody worked that day, and nobody used the words corpse or deceased out loud, because the dead were home and listening.

The stories about her and men run one way with a single memorable exception. Onyshchuk collected the exception. A lad watched the nyavky bathing in a lake, took the kerchief belonging to the loveliest of them and would not give it back, and because he held it she could not leave. They married. Then one day when he was out she talked his mother into handing the kerchief over, and she was gone into the high mountains and that was the end of it. Every other account has her doing the taking. She meets a traveller, and she is beautiful, and she talks to him, and she gives him a joy far past what a man can hold, and then she tickles him until the excitement kills him. She can also throw blud on him instead, the wandering, so that he circles the same trees until the forest keeps him. She can lead him deep in and abandon him there. Chubynsky’s informants added that she can take a passer-by’s head off. Offend her, by pulling up the Whitsun branch stuck among the garden beds, and she may come in the night and suck at the offender or his wife or his child, who then thins and dries and dies. And she knows everything, which in a mountain village is its own kind of weapon.

Against that, a short list of limits. Winter blunts her, because the power of a growing thing sleeps when the mountain sleeps, and hunters used the season to track her by those child-sized prints in the snow. Hnatiuk was told that some mavky are merely skittish, more likely to lure boys into a dance than to kill them, and quick to bolt if anyone frightens them. Onyshchuk’s people said the mavky had already retreated from the pastures near the villages, up into the last unwalked ridges, because women had started coming to the high meadows. The old protective herbs against rusalky, garlic and lovage and wormwood, were carried against her too. And the deepest limit is the one written into what she is. Collectors never once recorded a mavka bearing a child, and the marriage stories always end with her going back to the trees. Something that died at the beginning cannot go on to the rest of it.

The Mavka most people can picture now is a different creature, and the difference is worth naming. She is green-haired, gentle, tragic and in love, a guardian of the forest rather than a hazard in it, and she comes from Lesia Ukrainka’s drama Lisova pisnia, written in 1911, from Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, where the drowned Marichka returns to the mountain as a nyavka, and lately from a 2023 animated film that put her on cinema posters across Europe. The literary Mavka is a real and deliberate creation and she has done more for Ukrainian folklore abroad than a century of ethnography managed. She is also a rewrite. The one the Hutsuls actually described was somebody’s dead baby, and she had no back.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a mavka in Ukrainian folklore?

A mavka is a female forest spirit of Ukrainian folk belief, most strongly attested in the Carpathians and also known in Podillia, Volyn, Polissia and the Poltava region. She is understood to be the soul of a child who died unbaptised, or of a girl who died an untimely or violent death. The name comes from the Old Slavic word nav, meaning a corpse or the dead.

What does a mavka look like?

From the front a mavka looks like a tall, unusually pale, very thin young woman with long loose hair, sometimes fair and often green, wearing a thin transparent shift woven from stolen flax. From behind, in the Hutsul accounts recorded by Volodymyr Shukhevych and Antin Onyshchuk, her body is open from the shoulders down and her ribs, heart and entrails are visible. Her feet stayed child-sized, which is how hunters recognised her tracks in the snow.

Are mavky the same as rusalky?

They are closely related but not identical, and the confusion is old enough that folklorists complain about it. Ukrainian collectors working in the Boyko and Hutsul regions found that rusalky were spoken of as drowned young women tied to water, while mavky were the souls of dead unbaptised children living in the forest and the mountains. Both were said to lure people and tickle them to death, and both walk during Whitsun week.

What is Mavka’s Easter?

Navskyi Velykden, the Dead Men’s Easter, also called Mavka’s Easter, is the folk feast of the dead observed around the Whitsun and Trinity period, when mavky and rusalky were believed to return to the world of the living and go about as ordinary people. Families cleaned the graves and left food, avoided work that day, and refused to call the dead by words like corpse, on the understanding that the dead were present and could hear.

Can a mavka be saved?

Ukrainian belief allowed a window of seven years after the child’s death. During the Whitsun holidays a person could throw a kerchief into the air, say a name and add the words I baptise you, and the soul would go to heaven instead. If nobody did it within seven years, the child became a mavka permanently and remained one.

Related Entries

Rusalka, Nav, Leshy, Lisovykha, Berehynia, Kupala, Vodyanoy, Topielec, Lady Midday, Samodiva, Vila, Myling, Changeling, Skogsrå, Dryad