Solomonari

The hail comes down on a Transylvanian barley field in August with the sound of gravel flung against shingles, and in twenty minutes a year of work is beaten flat into the mud. Standing at the edge of the ruin, wet wool steaming on his shoulders, a nineteenth-century farmer did not curse the sky. He looked up into it, past the bruise-coloured underside of the cloud, and understood that a man had been riding up there.

That is the strangest thing about the solomonar, and the thing that separates him from almost everything else in Romanian folklore. He was not born monstrous. He was a person, and a local one. Villages spoke of him as one of their own children taken away young and returned decades later as something the community could no longer read. The taking was the whole story: a boy chosen out of ordinary people, carried off to a school underground, kept seven years from any ray of sunlight, and taught the speech of beasts and the handling of storms out of a book the Devil was said to have written himself. The school had a name in Romanian, Șolomanță, which Saxon and Austrian writers phoneticised into the word Scholomance. In one widely repeated version, ten scholars were admitted at a time; nine were sent home with their learning, and the tenth was kept by the Devil as his fee, set on the back of a dragon and made the weather-maker.

He looked like nothing much, which was the point. The reports collected in Transylvania and Bukovina agree that a solomonar was tall and red-haired, wrapped in the long white robe of a peasant, sometimes in a coat patched together out of rags. What mattered was the bag. Inside it were an iron axe, used as a rod to call down lightning and to summon his mount, reins of birch bark or a bridle of gold, a small semantron of the kind monks beat to call the hours, which he struck to raise the whirlwind spirits, and the book, in which all his knowledge lived and from which all his power came. Some lists add a branch that has killed a snake. The winds themselves he was said to keep shut in a little wooden jar.

The great act begins at water. When a solomonar wanted to go up into the clouds, he took the golden bridle and walked to a lake without a bottom, or to some other deep water where he knew the balauri lay. Cold came off the surface before anything broke it. Then the dragon rose, and he bridled it as a man bridles a horse, and the two of them went up through the cloud floor, and the hail began.

The rest of the time he begged. A solomonar in the guise of a crippled or blindfolded beggar was indistinguishable from the genuine article, which is exactly how the belief worked: any stranger at the gate might be keeping accounts. In one account he takes the coins he has collected and throws them into a river as an offering to the water spirits. In another he simply remembers. The farmwife who gave nothing and shut the door found out in August which of her neighbours had been kinder. He was a man, and men can be bought, so a household with money could hire a contrasolomonar to work against him and steer the storm somewhere else.

The accounts disagree about what he actually was. Simion Florea Marian, who gathered this material directly from people in Transylvania and Bukovina and published it in 1879, recorded flatly that the solomonari were malicious and a kind of strigoi, which files them with the restless dead rather than with the living. Others keep him firmly human, a graduate rather than a revenant. The name is argued over in the same way. The obvious reading ties him to King Solomon, who commanded winds and demons in a great deal of medieval legend, and one Transylvanian account says outright that the art belonged first to “Kaiser Salomo” and passed to his inheritors. Moses Gaster, writing in 1884, proposed a blend of Solomon with Salamanca, the Spanish university that had its own reputation for teaching black arts. Another suggestion derives it from German Schulmänner, schoolmen. Nobody has settled it. The word itself is old enough to be traceable: Scholomonáriu appears glossed as Zauberer, sorcerer, in a German book on Dacia printed in 1781, and Șolomonariu turns up in a Buda lexicon of 1825, translated into Latin as imbriciter, rain-bringer, into Hungarian as garabantzás deák, and into German as Wettermacher, weather-maker.

There is a more romantic origin story, and it needs handling with care. Traian Herseni argued in the 1970s that the solomonari descend from the Kapnobatai, the ascetic Geto-Dacian holy men Strabo mentions, whose name literally means smoke-treaders and which Herseni read as cloud-travellers. Eugen Agrigoroaiei took it further and declared the matter settled. The ethnologist Andrei Oișteanu, who has written more carefully about the solomonar than anyone, calls the idea spectacular and tempting and then points at the hole in it: roughly nineteen centuries pass between Strabo and the first record of the belief, and the record is completely silent throughout. The Dacian solomonar is a modern reconstruction, not an inheritance.

The figure also escaped Romania by accident. Emily Gerard put the Scholomance into an English magazine article in 1885, complete with the school in the heart of the mountains, the tenth scholar, and a small immeasurably deep lake south of Hermannstadt where the thunder is brewed and the dragon sleeps beneath the water in fair weather. Bram Stoker read her, and the Draculas of the novel are made alumni.

What the solomonar can do follows from where he learned it. The weather is his because he can reach it, and he can reach it because he can bridle a creature that lives in the water and belongs to the storm. He speaks to animals because that was on the curriculum. He hides in plain sight because seven years underground taught him patience and because nobody looks twice at a beggar.

What he cannot do follows from the same source. None of it is his by nature. The power sits in the book, the bridle, the axe and the jar, which means it can be lost, stolen or left behind, and a solomonar without his bag is a tall red-haired man in a dirty robe. The learning was bought at a price he did not set, and in the versions where the Devil keeps him he is a servant rather than a master. In one Hermannstadt account, even the dragon has to be restrained: God keeps it from tiring, because an exhausted dragon would fall out of the sky and eat a great part of the earth. And the whole system has a countermeasure built into it. For every solomonar riding a storm toward a village, the village can find another one, pay him, and send the hail down the valley instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Solomonar?

A Solomonar is a wizard in Romanian folklore who rides a dragon and controls the weather, bringing rain, thunder and hail. Solomonari are described as ordinary people taken away as children and trained in magic, not as supernatural beings by birth. They are best known for sending hailstorms onto the fields of households that treated them badly.

Where did the Solomonari learn their magic?

They were said to be taught at an underground school called the Șolomanță, which Austrian and English writers rendered as the Scholomance. Students spent seven years below ground, avoiding sunlight, learning the speech of animals and the handling of storms from a book attributed to the Devil. In one common version, ten scholars were admitted and the Devil kept the tenth as payment, mounting him on a dragon to make the weather.

What dragon does a Solomonar ride?

Romanian accounts name both the balaur and the zmeu. The Solomonar takes a golden bridle or reins of birch bark to a bottomless lake where the balauri live, calls one up, and bridles it the way a rider bridles a horse before flying into the clouds.

What does a Solomonar carry?

A Solomonar’s bag holds an iron axe used to call lightning and summon his mount, birchbark reins or a golden bridle, a small semantron for raising the whirlwind spirits known as the Vântoase, and a book containing all his knowledge. Some accounts add a small wooden jar in which the winds are kept and a branch that has killed a snake. The book is the source of his power rather than any innate gift.

Can anyone stop a Solomonar?

Yes. A household that feared a Solomonar’s hail could hire a rival wizard called a contrasolomonar to cast spells that turned the dragon and its rider aside. Because a Solomonar’s power comes from learned skill and carried objects rather than from his own nature, he can be countered, outbid or separated from his tools.

Related Entries

Balaur, Zmeu, Vântoase, Strigoi, Moroi, Muma Pădurii, Iele, Pricolici, Vârcolac, Zburator, Căpcăun, Zalmoxis, Zduhać, Stuhać