Topielec

The rafters on the Narew learned the words before they learned the river. Flis. Mlis. Klis. Nobody could say what the last two meant, only that the retman passed them down as his own retman had, and that a man who could speak them was safe. One young flis, jumping between timber sections in 1938, felt a small naked child come out of the water and take hold of him with a strength no child has. He got the charm out. The grip released. His friend, a stammerer, caught on the first syllable and went under the raft, and did not come up on the other side.

That was the arrangement Polish villagers lived under for centuries. Water killed people every summer, swimming was a rare skill, and the deaths needed an author. The topielec supplied one. He was not a god of rivers or a lord of lakes but something smaller and far more personal: the soul of a particular person the water had taken, still in the water, still hungry, sometimes still recognisable by name.

Where those souls came from varied by parish, though one answer dominated. When Leonard Pełka surveyed villages across the old Lublin and Rzeszów provinces, 79.4 percent of his informants said the water demons were the souls of people who had drowned themselves on purpose. The remainder scattered across a grim little census: children dead without baptism, illegitimate infants drowned in secret, the unborn child of a pregnant woman who drowned (a belief already old enough for the agricultural writer Jakub Kazimierz Haur to record it in 1693), children cursed by their own mothers, unbelievers, and the plainly wicked whom heaven declined to admit. Along the Raba in the south they said something stranger and grander, that the drowners were the haughty angels thrown out of heaven who happened to land in water rather than hell, and stayed.

The oldest Polish notice of such a creature is a strange one. Under the year 1278 a chronicle records that devilish obstructions were stopping fishermen working a certain lake, that priests and knights led the local people down to the shore with crosses and banners, and that the third cast of the nets brought up a monster with a goat’s head and ruby eyes. The crowd dropped the banners and ran. Several fell mortally ill from fright. Three centuries later Father Paweł Gilowski, listing the ranks of hell in his 1579 catechism, included the water drowners among them, which is roughly the moment the old demon and the Christian devil began sharing a body.

What that body looked like depended on where you asked. In the north, along the Baltic, the drowner wore a green beard and long green hair like sea grass. In Silesia he was green throughout, hair and clothing both. Central Poland gave him a huge tousled head on a consumptive frame, all long thin limbs. Elsewhere he shrank into a squat unpleasant dwarf in a red coat and a red cap, red being the colour demons wear and green the colour of the element. Some accounts fitted him with horse hooves or goose feet where his legs should end, and long claws on his fingers. Just as often he simply looked like the drowned: clothes soaked through, weed in the hair, water running off him. Near Magnuszew on the Orzyc they knew their local topielec by his wet ginger hair and called him Jacek, after a red haired lad who had drowned himself over a girl before 1864, and were still frightened of him in the 1930s. Near Lipsk on the Biebrza the resident drowner was a boy who had tied a lump of iron round his neck to avoid conscription for the war with Japan, and he came at people with the iron still on him.

He did not always come as himself. Along the upper Warta the favourite disguise was a saddled cavalry horse grazing alone on the bank, patient, apparently lost, an irresistible invitation to any farm boy. Whoever mounted it rode straight into the river. In other tellings he arrived as a dog, a ram, a pig, a deer, a duck, a fish, a floating rag or ribbon, or a small child crying on the shore. He could also be nothing at all. A man bathing near Goniądz on the Biebrza saw no one whatsoever and felt slick hands close on his legs and pull.

On calm moonlit nights he was less interested in killing. Drowners liked to climb onto a haystack or sit on the bank and dry themselves, or mend shoes, talking to the moon while they worked. Shine, moon, shine, one of them was heard to say, I need the light, I am sewing a shoe a woman needs for tomorrow’s churching. The moon pulled at them the way it pulls at tides, and in some stories they fed on its light.

Against all this the villagers had a thin but real defence, and it usually depended on catching the demon off balance. A woman washing linen at Serock was being hauled toward deep water when she shouted “Greetings from Małgorzata.” The drowner surfaced, baffled, and began asking which Małgorzata she meant. She reached the bank while he was still asking. A boy in the same stretch of the Narew tried “Look, the river is on fire,” and it worked just as well. Naming the demon by the name it had carried in life shamed it into letting go. A rosary thrown at him burned. A blessed stole left on his favourite haystack pinned him there. At Będzin the townspeople ambushed the drowner of the Brynica with a scapular, which left him powerless, and proposed to march him to church and baptise him; he begged off, swore never to drown anyone in the town again, and by all accounts kept his word.

His real weakness was simpler. In the water he could pull a grown man off a horse and kneel on his chest. Dragged onto the bank he was so feeble that a light shove sent him rolling back into the river.

The calendar did the rest of the work. No bathing until St John’s Day on 24 June, when John was held to have baptised every river and pond and made them safe; none on St Peter’s Day, none on the Assumption, none on St Rosalie’s Day in Mazovia, none on a Sunday morning while Mass was being sung, none before or after a storm, none while the rye was in flower. Break the rule and the drowner took you, and then you were one. The topielec could not rest until it found a replacement, which is the cruellest part of the whole arrangement: every victim was also a recruit. Near Wyszków they told of a boy who robbed a church and beat his mother, was cursed by her, died in three days, and was sentenced to the Bug until he had drowned seven people, at which point hell would finally take him in.

There were also payments. Zygmunt Gloger recorded in 1887 that at a lake in the Augustów region, where somebody died every year, the local peasants threw in a hen annually to settle the account. At Trzemeszno they killed three cockerels under a consecrated oak. A miller near the Warta put out a dish of food by the water each night and found it empty each morning, though his neighbours, who disliked him, were the ones telling the story. Small coins are still tossed into Polish rivers as payment so that he will not take us. And nobody was supposed to pull a drowning person out, because the rescue robbed the water of what it was owed and turned the demon’s attention on the rescuer.

Christianity eventually softened him. People began sorting drowners into good and bad, the good ones helping to bring hay in from the fields and calling warnings before hail, the bad ones still taking souls and favouring drunkards. In Silesia he stood as a godfather, lent money, and married during the autumn floods, throwing a noisy wedding for the neighbouring drowner families; his children were said to be remarkably beautiful, with nothing about them to give the game away. Near Pułtusk, where the ice broke under soldiers during the fighting of 1806, people were still describing topielcy in peculiar military uniforms in the 1920s, calling from the water in a language nobody on the bank could follow.

The belief did not so much die as get contaminated. By the mid twentieth century a folklorist working near Sulejów was told about a topielec shaped like an enormous fish and named repin, which turned out to be a half heard radio report about sharks. Somewhere near Pajęczno the drowners had become “viruses” living in the river and pulling swimmers down. Along the Pilica, someone gave a careful lecture on topielice that was really a garbled account of octopuses. The old demon was finally drowning in the twentieth century, and it went under exactly the way its victims had, quietly and in the middle of a sentence.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a topielec?

A topielec is a water demon of Polish and wider Slavic folklore, formed from the soul of a drowned person. It lives in the river, lake or pond where it died and tries to pull living people under. The name comes from the Polish verb topić, meaning to drown, and the creature is also called topnik, topiec, utopiec or, in Silesia, wasermon.

How does someone become a topielec?

Most accounts say a topielec is the soul of a suicide who chose to drown. In one large survey of Polish villages, 79.4 percent of informants gave that answer. Other origins recorded include unbaptised children, infants drowned in secret, children cursed by their mothers, and wicked people whom heaven refused to accept.

What does a topielec look like?

Descriptions vary by region, but a topielec is usually a naked figure with bluish or greenish skin, matted hair full of pondweed, bulging red or green eyes and spindly legs. Some regions gave it horse hooves or goose feet and long claws, others a red coat and red cap, and Silesian accounts made it green from head to foot. Very often it simply looked exactly as the drowned person had at the moment of death.

How can you escape a topielec?

The most reliable trick was distraction: shouting something baffling, asking a riddle, or calling the demon by the name it had carried when alive, then swimming for the bank while it was confused. Religious objects also worked, since a thrown rosary was said to burn it and a scapular left it powerless. Its greatest weakness was dry land, where a creature that could drag a man off a horse could be shoved back into the river with one hand.

Why did people avoid swimming before St John’s Day?

Polish villagers believed that St John blessed or baptised every river and pond on 24 June, and that the water was not safe from drowners until he had. Bathing bans also covered St Peter’s Day, the Assumption, St Rosalie’s Day in Mazovia, Sunday mornings during Mass, the days around storms, and the period when the rye was in flower. Anyone who ignored the ban and drowned was thought to become a topielec in turn.

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