Skrzak

Also Known As: a Silesian, Wielkopolska and Pomeranian dialect form of Polish skrzat; also skrzot, skrzotek, skrzontek, skrzatek, skrzacik, skrzek, skrzof, skrzok; from Old High German scrat, scrato, “wood devil, kobold, poltergeist”
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Slavic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: It carries grain and money through the air to the house that feeds it, taking both from somebody else’s farm.
Role in Mythos: It is the household demon of the Polish countryside, the small resident presence that makes one farm prosper at its neighbours’ expense.
Relation to Humans: A family acquires one by taking in a half drowned chick and feeding it, after which the arrangement is difficult to end. The wealth it brings is real, but it is stolen goods, and the older belief is that the keeper settles the bill with his soul.

Rain on a Wielkopolska farmyard, and something small standing in the mud by the byre door. A chicken, apparently. Half drowned, feathers plastered to its body, too wretched to belong to any of the neighbours. The farmer’s wife picks it up because that is what anyone does with a wet chick, and carries it inside to the warmth of the stove. In the villages between Poznań and the Baltic coast, that is exactly how the money starts, and exactly how the trouble starts.

The creature she has just adopted goes by a word that changes shape every few parishes. Across Silesia, Wielkopolska and Pomerania the base form skrzat splinters into skrzof, skrzek, skrzotek, skrzontek, skrzacik, skrzok and skrzak, the same being wearing whatever vowel the local speech happened to hand it. None of these is a separate creature. They are one household demon heard through a dozen accents. The word itself is a borrowing and an old one, taken from Old High German scrat or scrato, which German glossaries render as a wood devil, a kobold, a poltergeist, and it entered Polish early enough that a Latin school gloss from around 1500 translates lares familiares as skrzatkowie and then adds, for the benefit of anyone still confused, that we call them the small people. The Indo-European root underneath it all means to shrink. The smallness was in the name before it was in the stories.

Country speakers had a tidier explanation and did not need any German for it. The skrzat, they said, is named for the noise. Jan Karłowicz’s dialect dictionary and Oskar Kolberg’s Poznań volumes both record the belief that the thing screeches, piercingly and without pause, like the largest flock of chicks anyone ever heard, and that the verb for that shrieking gave the demon its name. It is a folk etymology and it is wrong, but it tells you what the creature sounded like to people who thought they had one in the roof.

In Pomerania, Wielkopolska and Silesia, skrzat is also a name for the kłobuk, and here the picture sharpens. The kłobuk is the demon that turns up in the yard as that soaked chicken. Bring it in out of the rain, feed it scrambled eggs or groats boiled in milk, keep it fed every day without fail, and it starts bringing things. Grain first, usually. Then coin. Then whatever the household is short of and the neighbours are not. There was a saying around Poznań that put the whole transaction in a single breath: one ought to go to Poznań and buy oneself a skrzat, so there would be money in the purse.

What the neighbours saw was the delivery. At Gruczno, in the country between Chełmno and Świecie, people described the skrzok as a star with a tail that carries money, and one man remembered watching it fly with the coins spilling out behind it. He knew whose it was, too. A certain N. was a freemason, which explained everything. The same flight is recorded across Warmia and Mazury under other names, jachur and lataniec and kłobuk, and the descriptions agree: when it is carrying something it goes over low like a burning besom, or else only the tail seems to be alight, and it throws off more sparks the heavier the load it has slung behind it. On a cold night you could stand in a doorway and read a neighbour’s fortune by how brightly the sky was burning.

You could also rob it, and the method was undignified enough that it clearly worked at least once. Turn your back on the flying demon, show it your backside and shout at it to give up its master, and it will drop the load. What comes down on you along with the treasure is a shower of lice and vermin, unless you can get under a roof in time, and there is a good chance the hoard turns to chaff or tow before you have finished counting it. The stories about people who tried this are not admiring stories. They are cautionary ones with a punchline.

Where the creature came from depends on which layer of belief you dig into. The oldest Polish stratum is the ubożę, the poor little thing, a household spirit that fifteenth century sermons complain about by name: there are people, one preacher grumbles, who leave the dinner scraps unwashed in the bowls on Maundy Thursday to feed the souls and the other spirits they call uboże. Those were the ancestors, or were thought to be. Elsewhere the demon is the soul of a child who died unbaptised and was buried under the threshold, which is why it comes back as a light rather than a body and why it fetches food and money for the family it was born into. By the early nineteenth century the word ubożę had been pushed out of living speech altogether, replaced by latawiec, plonek, podziomek, skrzat and krasnoludek, and the ancestors underneath had largely been forgotten.

The church finished the job. Counter Reformation preaching folded the old helpful house spirits in with devils and their servants, and the skrzat came out of it with a double character, useful and damned at once. A Polish curse preserves the sour end of that: may the skrzats take you. In Przasnysz county the kłobuk was simply the household devil, no euphemism attempted. The logic was not hard to follow, because everybody in a village knows how much grain there is. The wealth is not made, only moved. If one barn is filling faster than the weather allows, another barn somewhere is emptying, and the peasant view was that the devil helps rich men and takes his fee in the usual currency.

There is a fourth description of the skrzak in circulation, and it is worth knowing that it is fiction. English language sources spent years describing a purplish black flying imp with fangs and claws and a maniacal laugh that drives listeners insane, haunting underground labyrinths. That creature was invented in 2016 for the bestiary appendix of a fantasy anthology, City of the Gods: Starybogów, Whispers in the Dark. It was copied onto Wikipedia the following year with no citation attached, sat there being quoted as folklore until August 2022, and matches nothing whatsoever in the Polish record. Even the brief description that replaced it, a hearth spirit that does the housework and claims its master’s soul when he dies, rests on a single line in a popular Polish demon lexicon. The dialect archives are richer and stranger than either.

Its powers are narrow and specific, which is what makes them convincing. It can fly, loaded, at night. It can pass as poultry. It can find and lift what is not nailed down within a few parishes and put it in your loft. It cannot make anything, and it cannot be dismissed by ordinary means once it is installed. Feeding it is the whole of the contract, and skipping a day is dangerous. Fire, iron and the flying, thieving nature that gives it away are the levers against it, along with the humiliating trick of shouting it into dropping its load, and the plain fact that a family known to keep one is a family the village stops trusting.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a skrzak?

A skrzak is a household demon of Polish folk belief that brings its keeper grain and money stolen from other farms. The name is a dialect form of skrzat, recorded chiefly in Silesia, Wielkopolska and Pomerania, where it is used interchangeably with kłobuk. The word is a very old borrowing from Old High German scrat, meaning a wood devil or kobold.

What does a skrzak look like?

Polish dialect records give the skrzak two forms rather than one. On the ground it appears as a small, soaked, bedraggled chicken standing in a farmyard, which is how a family unwittingly takes it in. In the air it is a low flying streak of fire with a blazing tail that sheds sparks, described in one Pomeranian account as a star with a tail that carries money.

How do you get a skrzak, and how do you get rid of one?

You acquire a skrzak by taking in the half drowned chick and feeding it, traditionally on scrambled eggs or groats boiled in milk, and the feeding must not stop. Getting rid of one is much harder than acquiring it, and the folklore offers no clean method. The nearest thing to a defence is the trick used against the flying form: turn your back, shout at it to give up its master, and it will drop what it is carrying, though the treasure often turns to chaff and the thief is showered with vermin.

Is the skrzak really a purple flying imp with maddening laughter?

No. That description was written in 2016 for the bestiary appendix of the fantasy anthology City of the Gods: Starybogów, Whispers in the Dark, then copied onto Wikipedia in 2017 without any source and repeated as folklore until August 2022. Nothing in the Polish dialect or ethnographic record describes the skrzak that way.

What is the difference between a skrzak and a krasnoludek?

They overlap, but they arrive from different directions. Skrzat, and therefore skrzak, is a medieval borrowing from German that displaced the older Slavic ubożę, and in the north and west it names the money bringing kłobuk. Krasnoludek is a much later name, popularised through literature in the nineteenth century, for the small red capped household and mine folk, and it carries far less of the thieving and the soul price.