Uriaș (plural: uriași)

Somewhere in the Carpathian fastness, in a chamber that has not seen daylight since before the kingdoms of the Dacians, a long arm shifts in the dark and a coin shifts with it. The hand belongs to a giant. The treasure belongs to a king who has been dust for two thousand years. The arrangement, in the older stories, still holds.

This is the keeping of the uriași, the primordial giants of Romanian folklore. They were the first race made on the earth, born so vast they could cross from one country to another in a few strides. Some had heads the size of mountains. They stepped across rivers, sat down on hilltops to rest, and when they wandered, the land itself bore the proof of them: depressions, mounds, caves cut into rock, valleys folded between the foothills. Romanian villages once measured distance by a unit called the jidovina, the length of a giant’s pace. Several meters, depending on who you asked.

Different regions named them differently. In Oltenia they were the jidovi, builders of barrows, and the older tellers warned that not all of them were friendly. In Muntenia they were the novaci, the powerful ones, beings who could uproot a tree as a man might pull a wildflower. In the Carpathians, where the forests thicken and the limestone caves run for miles, they were called blajini, the kind ones, and the story softened. There the uriași kept their own settlements among the trees, spoke at great volume across the valleys, and held humans in a bemused affection, treating them as the heirs of a world the giants were already giving up.

It was a common image in the old tales. A giant would come down to a tilled field at the edge of the trees, kneel until his knees broke the soil, and lift the ploughman as a child might lift a beetle. He would turn the small figure in his palm, sniff, smile, set him back beside his oxen, and rise. The man would shake himself off and go on with the furrow. Nothing further would happen. The hand had been warm and very heavy, and that was all.

Their making sits at the start of things. The uriași came before any other people, when the earth was newer and softer, and the gods set them down to keep watch. They were good in the old sense of the word, meaning calm, slow to anger, slow to act, which is what one wants in a guardian as tall as a thunderhead. They lived in caves and in groves of trees that had grown to shelter them. They drank from springs that have since dried. For a long time there was room enough for them and for the smaller beings who came afterward.

What unmade them depends on the version. In one strand of the cosmogony, a war broke out between the giants and the people who came after, both sides committing such cruelties that the creator drowned the world to end it, leaving only Noah’s ark to carry life forward. In another, the giants simply began to dwindle as the human world thickened around them, fewer of them in every generation, deeper into the woods, harder to find.

The most-told tale puts them under contract. Burebista, the king who united the Dacian tribes in the first century before Christ, met the jidovi in the mountains and offered them terms. They might keep their caves and their summits, their springs and their oak stands, on one condition: they would stand guard over the great Dacian gold, the hoard the Romans never found, hidden in the deepest galleries beneath the limestone. The giants agreed. The king died. The Dacian kingdom fell. The Romans came and went. According to the older Carpathian shepherds, the contract is still in force, and somewhere beneath the mountains a hand the size of a granary closes around a coin and does not let it go.

The image stayed vivid. Into the early twentieth century, country people in the hills still claimed their grandparents had heard the bargain told first-hand. There were specific places to point at. The Jidovi cave. The Jidovi table. The hill called the Tomb of the Giants. A flat slab the size of a barn that someone had set on edge against a slope, and no one with a yoke of oxen had moved since.

What they looked like is harder to fix. The texts agree on size and on little else. Mountain-headed in some accounts, merely several times the height of a man in others. Bearded, usually. Shaggy in the Carpathian variants, the kind ones often described as wrapped in furs and dressed in hides cured by their own hands. The voice carried. A uriaș calling across a valley could be heard at the next settlement over, and herders said you could feel it in your sternum before you could hear it in your ear.

What they could do followed from what they were. They moved across countries in a few strides. They reshaped landscapes by sitting on them. They lifted trees the way a person lifts a stem of grass. They could call across valleys without raising their voice. They had, depending on the teller, the slow patience of beings who had simply been there longer than anything else.

What they could not do was stay. The world they had been made for kept tightening. The valleys filled with villages. The forests retreated. Their numbers ran down. A Romanian peasant in 1900 could still recall an old man saying his grandfather had once seen one, and that was already the last of it. The flood, in the versions that have a flood, took most. The rest withdrew into the deep limestone, into chambers no one mapped. The contract with the king kept them quiet. Time did the rest.

They were here first. Then the world filled up.

The uriași do not end. They reduce. Carpathian folklore places them not in the past tense but in the further-back tense, gone underground, gone quiet, still there if you know which mountain. The treasure they were set to guard has never surfaced. Neither, in any verifiable way, have they.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Uriaș?

A Uriaș is a giant from Romanian folklore, plural uriași, generally portrayed as the first race of beings created on the earth. Uriași are described as immensely tall and immensely strong, ranging from creatures several times human height to figures with heads the size of mountains. They lived in the Carpathians and surrounding regions long before humans, and most tales remember them as patient and largely benevolent.

What is the legend of Burebista and the uriași?

According to one of the most widely told Romanian folk tales, the Dacian king Burebista made an agreement with the giants of the Carpathians, allowing them to remain in the mountains in exchange for guarding the great Dacian gold treasure. The pact assigned the uriași to the deepest caves of the range, where they were said to remain even after Burebista’s kingdom fell. Carpathian tradition holds that this guardianship still continues underground.

Where do uriași live?

In Romanian folklore the uriași live in the Carpathian Mountains, especially in deep caves, thick forests, and on high mountain summits. Different regions describe them differently, with Oltenia knowing them as jidovi, Muntenia as novaci, and the Carpathian heartland as blajini, the kind ones, but their habitat is consistently remote, wooded, and mountainous. Place names across Romania still mark spots associated with them, including the Jidovi cave, the Jidovi table, and the tombs of the giants.

Are uriași good or evil?

Most Romanian tales treat the uriași as benevolent, particularly in the Carpathian Blajini tradition, where they are remembered as kind, slow to anger, and protective of humans during floods and hard times. Some Oltenian Jidovi stories portray them more darkly, casting them as builders of barrows who could be cruel to the people who came after them. The dominant strand of the folklore favors the gentle reading.

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