Sântoaderi

The snow goes rotten in the first week of Lent, and the lanes in the Romanian hills turn to a mud that freezes at the top and stays soft underneath. What people listened for after dark in that week was not wind. It was a knocking under the surface of the night, hooves coming up the lane at the unhurried pace of men who know the house is not going anywhere, and a small dry rattle behind it that everyone knew was a chain.

They came in a band. Seven of them, or nine, or eight depending on whose grandmother was telling it, young and cloaked and moving together, and the disagreement about what they actually were has never been settled. Some tellings give them the bodies of young men with hooves instead of feet, the hooves crammed into opinci so that nothing shows until it is far too late to matter, and a tail folded up under the belt. Others give them nothing human at all: horses, lame, and invisible, which is a combination that ought to be a contradiction and is instead the detail that makes them frightening. A lame horse you cannot see is a sound with intent behind it.

Their week is fixed by the church calendar and named for a soldier saint. Sântoader is the Romanian worn form of Saint Theodore Tiron, whose feast falls on the first Saturday of the Great Fast, and the days belonging to the Sântoaderi run from the Tuesday before that Saturday through to the Thursday of the following week. Nothing about them is Christian except the borrowed name and the date. Underneath is a much older piece of household law about when a woman may work wool.

That is what sets them off. Spinning, above everything: the distaff, the spindle, the loom, and the șezătoare, the winter working-party where the young women of a village spun together through the evening and the young men came to sit with them. In their own week the șezătoare is forbidden, and it is precisely there that the Sântoaderi go. They arrive as guests. They sing along, they help the work, they are perfectly good company for as long as it takes, and then one of them takes a girl outside. In the gentler accounts she is the only one who does not come back. In the rest of them the whole room is killed.

Away from the spinning house they were simpler. Anyone found outdoors after dark in that week was trampled where they stood, and the phrase collected from villagers in the 1890s is flatly literal: they tread you underfoot until they leave you dead. Those who survived were left pociți, crooked, faces pulled out of shape or a limb that would not obey. Men were not exempt. In some regions the offence was not spinning but going about with a knife or an axe in hand during the week, and the punishment for that was the chain. Sântoader bound them with it, and the binding came out as pain in the hands, the feet, the joints, the seizing ache that a Romanian village had no other name for and that a doctor would now call rheumatism.

So households prepared. The distaffs went out of sight, and so did the needles, the forks and the toothed loom combs, because the Sântoaderi were held to pick up whatever sharp thing had been left lying and use it on the people who left it. Then, having spent the week terrified of the horses, the village went out on Saturday and made a fuss of its own. Manes were trimmed and plaited, tails were docked and combed, bridles were hung with red wool tassels, and the horses were raced up the village street in the încuratul cailor. Girls washed their hair in a decoction of herbs and asked Sântoader, out loud and into a mirror, to make their braids grow the way a horse’s mane grows. The being that trampled you on Wednesday was petitioned for hair on Saturday. Both things were true at once and nobody appears to have found that odd.

Where they came from depends on which twentieth-century scholar you follow, and the two main answers are not compatible. Romulus Vulcănescu put Sântoader’s night among the three nights of the year when living strigoi leave their bodies, alongside Saint George’s Eve and Saint Andrew’s Eve, and made the horses of Sântoader the shape those strigoi take. On that reading the riders are the neighbours. Ion Ghinoiu, building the Romanian peasant calendar into a pantheon, made them instead a divine troop of eight, human-faced and horse-natured, whose job is to scour the space clean at the opening of the fast, to shut winter and open summer, and who run behind the sun to hold it up in the sky. The older field material does not obviously support either tidy version, and it is worth saying plainly that the pantheon shape is Ghinoiu’s, worked out in the 1990s from a century of scattered village reports, not something a nineteenth-century peasant would have recognised as a system.

They also have neighbours across the borders. Antoaneta Olteanu groups them with the Greek kallikantzaroi and the Balkan karakoncolos as the region’s demonic centaurs, three troops of hooved night visitors doing the same disciplinary work in different weeks of the calendar. The Serbs and Bulgarians have the todorci and the same Saint Theodore’s Saturday, with invisible lame horses attacking anyone who worked. Milenko Filipović argued in 1950 that the whole complex descends from the Thracian Horseman, the rider god whose votive reliefs turn up all over the pre-Roman Balkans, which is a suggestive hypothesis and has never been more than that. Mircea Eliade, writing in 1975, noticed something closer to home: the Sântoaderi and the zîne both travel by night in a procession of dancers, and there is a belief that on the twenty-fourth day after Easter the two companies meet and hand each other flowers.

Their power is entirely a matter of timing. Outside their days they are nothing, which is why every remedy against them is a form of waiting: bar the door, damp the fire, put the wool away, sit still until Thursday. They cannot be fought. Nobody in the whole record even tries, and there is no hero anywhere in this story, only households that got through the week and households that did not. What they take is not blood or souls but the thing a subsistence village could least afford to lose, which is a healthy young body, and they take it in front of witnesses so that the lesson lands.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Sântoaderi in Romanian folklore?

The Sântoaderi are a band of hooved spirits, usually seven, eight or nine of them, who walk Romanian villages by night during the first week of the Great Fast. They punish anyone who spins, weaves or holds a night gathering in that week, and anyone they meet outdoors after dark. Their name comes from Sântoader, the Romanian form of Saint Theodore, whose feast falls at the end of their week.

What do the Sântoaderi look like?

The sources disagree. Some describe them as young men in cloaks with hooves instead of feet, hidden inside peasant sandals, with tails tucked into their belts, while others describe them as invisible lame horses. Because they are heard before they are seen, the sound of hooves and of a dragging chain is the more consistent description than any body.

Why are the Sântoaderi angry about spinning?

The first week of Lent carried a ban on spinning, weaving, sewing and on the șezătoare, the evening working-party where young people gathered. The Sântoaderi exist to enforce that ban. Accounts collected in the 1890s describe them slipping into a forbidden gathering as guests, joining the singing, then leading a girl outside, and in the harsher versions killing everyone present.

How do you protect yourself from the Sântoaderi?

You stay indoors, and you put away the distaff, needles, forks and loom combs, because the Sântoaderi were said to take up any sharp tool left lying and use it on the people who left it. There is no way to fight them and no charm that drives them off. Their week ends on its own, and that is the whole defence.

Are the Sântoaderi the same as the Serbian todorci?

They are closely related but not identical. The Serbs and Bulgarians observe Saint Theodore’s Saturday with their own belief in the todorci, invisible lame horses that attack anyone who worked during the week. Milenko Filipović suggested in 1950 that both traditions descend from the pre-Roman cult of the Thracian Horseman, though that remains a hypothesis rather than an established line of descent.

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