Su Anasy

The plank footbridge over the village water is the most ordinary structure in the Tatar countryside. Women kneel on it to rinse linen, boys use it as a diving board, and on a hot afternoon its boards give off the smell of warm wet timber. It is also the place where you are most likely to meet her, because the bridge is where the water stops being scenery and starts being somebody’s floor.

She sits on the end of it with her legs over the edge and works a golden comb through tangled hair. That comb is the one detail no telling ever drops. Everything else about her moves from village to village, but the comb stays, catching the sun hard enough to be seen from the bank, and the sound of it is the small dry rasp of teeth through knots. If she is combing, she has not noticed you yet.

Su anasy is not a goddess and was never a single person. The Volga Tatars divided the world among owners, the iyase, one for the house, one for the barn, one for the bathhouse, one for the forest, one for every body of water, and su anasy is the female sort of water owner. She has a husband, su babasy, the water grandfather, and children, and the sons are sometimes called su iyase in their turn. At midnight she brings the children up onto the bridge to wash them. That is a domestic scene, and it is worth sitting with, because most of what is frightening about her comes from interrupting a household rather than from meeting a monster.

The Kazan tellings give her a big elongated head, enormous bulging eyes so dark they read as blue-black, a broad chest, and a body the red of copper. Around Tobolsk the Siberian Tatars describe someone else entirely under the same name, an old woman with long grey hair hanging loose, golden buckets or a golden comb in her hands, and they call her soo kortkoyak and make her the head of the soo-pärä, the spirits that take hold of a swimmer’s legs and pull him down by them. Nobody says where she came from. There is no birth story, no first water, no moment when she arrived. She is simply what the river already has in it.

What she can do follows from ownership. She can hold the rain back and leave a district in drought. She can send illness. She can drown a man, and she drags bathing children under and drinks their blood, which is the detail that kept Tatar mothers shouting from the bank. Because all of this is a matter of property rather than malice, it can be settled with a payment, and the payment was small: a bride newly arrived in her husband’s house, going to the water for the first time, threw a single coin in before she filled the bucket. One coin, once, and the account was open.

Her husband is the weak link. Tatar accounts describe su iyase as rather slow and ferociously jealous, and when his wife climbs out in the moonlight as a young woman and starts combing that long hair where men can see her, he loses his composure entirely, chasing the fish through the shallows and tearing out the water mills. Millers in the Volga villages had an explanation for a broken wheel, and it was not the current.

The story everyone in Tatarstan actually knows is Gabdulla Tuqay’s, and it belongs to a specific man on a specific date. Tuqay published the ballad “Su anasy” in 1908 and put a subtitle under the name: from the mouth of a village boy. He did not invent her, and he was not even first into print that year, since a poem on the same figure by K. Isänbayeva had appeared in the newspaper Әлислах that April. What Tuqay did was fix the image so hard that it has never come loose. In the poem a boy swims too long on a hot day, climbs out, and sees the grey-haired woman on the bridge with the golden comb blazing in the sun. He hides in the thick trees on the bank with his teeth clenched, not breathing. She plaits her hair, jumps in, and is gone. The comb is still lying on the boards.

He takes it and runs, and she comes out of the water and runs after him across an empty field, shouting at him to stop, calling him a thief, telling him the comb is hers. Every dog in the village turns out barking and drives her back to the river. That night he lies under the quilt while something taps at the glass, and it does not stop, and his mother gets up to ask who is outside at that hour. Water runs out of the visitor’s hair like a spring. The comb goes out the window, the window shuts, and the boy gets the scolding of his life. The last thing he says is that he never again touched anything that had an owner.

That is the whole of her power and the whole of its limit in four lines of verse. She cannot cross the threshold and she cannot simply take back what is hers. She has to stand outside in the dark and ask, and she can be turned by farm dogs. The same name travels south into the Caucasus, where the Kumyks knew a Suvanasy of enormous size who threw river stones about and had to be spoken to politely by anyone fetching water after dark, but the Tatar figure stays closer to home, at the edge of the village, on the boards, waiting for someone to remember that the water was never free.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Su Anasy in Tatar mythology?

Su Anasy is the “water mother”, the female kind of su iyase, the spirit owners of rivers, lakes and springs in Tatar belief. She lives underwater with a husband called su babasy and their children, and she is identified everywhere by the golden comb she uses on her long hair. She is a class of being rather than one individual deity.

What is Su Anasy’s golden comb?

The golden comb is Su Anasy’s unchanging attribute, the object she is combing her hair with whenever a human catches sight of her on a riverbank or a plank footbridge. In the Tatar folk tale, and in Gabdulla Tuqay’s 1908 ballad built on it, a boy steals the comb from the bridge and she follows him to the village to demand it back. Among the Siberian Tatars around Tobolsk she is described carrying golden buckets or a golden comb.

Is Su Anasy dangerous to people?

Yes. Su Anasy could send drought or illness, drown a grown person, and pull bathing children under the water to drink their blood. The danger was understood as a matter of ownership rather than pure malice, which is why a young Tatar wife drawing water for the first time at her husband’s house threw a coin into it as payment.

What happens in Gabdulla Tuqay’s poem “Su anasy”?

A village boy swims on a hot day, comes out, and sees Su Anasy on the plank bridge combing her hair with a golden comb. When she dives back in she leaves the comb behind, he steals it and runs, and she chases him until the village dogs drive her off. That night she taps at his window with water streaming from her hair, his mother throws the comb out to her, and the boy is scolded so thoroughly that he never touches anything with an owner again.

How is Su Anasy related to Su Iyase?

Su Anasy is the female form within the same family of spirits, and the two names are often used for one another. Su Iyase means “water owner” and covers the whole class, male and female, while Su Anasy means “water mother” and marks the woman of the household, alongside su babasy, the water grandfather. Tatar accounts describe su iyase as slow-witted and jealous of his wife, tearing up water mills when men see her combing her hair in the moonlight.

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