Vodyanoy

Also Known As: Russian водяной, “he from the water”; also Vodyanik and Dedushka Vodyanoy, “Water-Grandfather”; Ukrainian vodyanyk; Czech and Slovak vodník, Germanized hastrman; Slovene vodeni mož; Polish topielec
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Slavic Mythology, Russian Mythology, Ukrainian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: He owns and commands every fish and every current in his own stretch of water, and can take almost any shape while he is in it.
Role in Mythos: He is the resident master of a single river bend, pond or mill race, drowning those who enter it carelessly and rewarding those who pay him properly.
Relation to Humans: Millers, fishermen and beekeepers dealt with him as a landlord who had to be paid, in butter, tobacco, a black sow or worse. Everyone else avoided his water after dark, on holy days, and without first making the sign of the cross.

On still nights the sound carries a long way across a mill pond: a flat wet slap, like an open palm brought down hard on the surface, then another, unhurried. Villagers knew what was making it and did not go down to look. The thing in the water cared for an audience about as much as it cared for the sign of the cross.

The vodyanoy is the master of whatever water he lives in, and Slavic folk belief put one into nearly every river bend, pond, lake and stagnant hole deep enough to hide a man. He favours the omut, the black slack place where the current doubles back on itself, and above all he favours the pool below a mill. Russians called him vodyanik, or, with the wary politeness people reserve for dangerous neighbours, dedushka vodyanoy, Water-Grandfather. Ukrainians said vodyanyk. Czechs and Slovaks said vodník, or hastrman in the Germanized mouth. Slovenes had a vodeni mož, a water-man; Poles a topielec, a drowner. Every one of those names says the same flat thing.

Which is worth pausing over, because vodyanoy is not a personal name at all. It is an ordinary adjective, watery, of the water, pressed into service as a noun, rather as though you called someone the one from the river and let that stand. There is no single vodyanoy with a biography. There are thousands of them, one to a pool, each territorial, none of them on speaking terms with the next one downstream.

The oldest and steadiest Russian picture of him is a naked old man, bald, with a fat paunch and a puffy swollen face, wearing a high cap woven from green club-rush and a belt of the same coarse grass, the whole of him slick with tina, the slime that grows on standing water. Other accounts give him a long green beard that whitens as the moon wanes and darkens again as it fills, so that he ages and renews himself monthly instead of yearly. Others make him a giant shagged over with moss; or scaled beneath the weed; or altogether black, with eyes like live coals and a nose as long as a fisherman’s boot; or human in the face but fitted with paws instead of hands, huge toes, horns and a tail. The disagreement is not a hole in the record. He is a shapeshifter and the sources say so plainly. He surfaces as a moss-furred fish, as a drifting log, even as a small-winged trunk skimming the surface, and when he walks up into a village he walks as an ordinary man.

He gives himself away by the same detail every time. One side of his coat is wet, and stays wet, and drips on the road.

Where he came from depends on who is telling it. One widespread Russian legend, lifted out of Christian apocrypha and fitted over much older spirits, has the rebel angels flung from heaven and landing wherever they happened to fall: into houses to become domovye, into forests to become leshie, into water to become vodyanye. The other answer needs no theology and is worse. The drowned are his, especially suicides and girls cursed by their own parents, and what goes into the water without a funeral does not come back out as itself.

In daylight he mostly does nothing. He lies in the deep part with the cold pressing on him, in courtyards of piled stone where he keeps herds of horses and cattle and pigs, and he drives them out to graze in the dark. When he wants to travel he rides a sheatfish, the great grey wels catfish with its slow whiskered mouth, and steers it through the weed like a man on a fat quiet horse.

His temper decides everything that happens in his water. Pleased, he herds fish into the nets until the mesh strains, and turns a boat away from the bad shoal in a storm. Crossed, he tears the spikes out of the mill wheel, pulls the water off its course, breaks the dam and floods the works. So the miller paid. A black well-fed sow went into the pond, or a horse smeared with honey in early spring when he woke hungry and thrashed the ice and howled for three days waiting; in Ukraine a horse’s head was buried in the dam to hold it. When a new mill was raised the foundation took a pig, or a cow, or a sheep, and the older accounts say plainly that it sometimes took a man. Fishermen poured melted butter into the river. Czech fishermen dropped in a pinch of tobacco and asked politely. Beekeepers bagged the first swarm of the season and drowned it, and at midnight on the feast days of Saints Zosimus and Sabbatius they dipped a honeycomb in the water by the mill and said the words over it.

The Bohemian and Moravian watermen kept something the Russian ones did not. In their crystal houses under the river they stored the souls of the drowned in earthenware pots, each pot lidded and full of water, and the souls could be heard fretting inside. In one telling a poor woman’s daughter goes to work as the hastrman’s housekeeper, sweeps dust that turns out to be gold, and one day lifts the lid off a jar that will not stop rattling. Her own brother comes out of it. She serves out years more before homesickness beats her, and when she finally runs she goes along the shelves first and opens every pot in the house.

He marries. He takes water-nymphs, or the drowned and cursed girls, and by one account fathers a hundred and eleven daughters who torment the dead. When a river bursts its banks he is holding a wedding, drunk, tearing down dikes and bridges and mills in his good mood. When his wife is confined he comes up into the village in human shape to fetch a midwife and godparents, and pays them afterwards in gold and silver. He likes markets, too. Watch what he pays for grain: high means a failed harvest coming, low means cheap bread.

Against all of that his limits are surprisingly firm. His terrible strength is a property of the water and does not travel; on dry land he is weak, and he knows it, which is why the luring matters so much. The Czech vodník cannot simply take whom he likes, only those already fated to drown, and he spends Friday sitting in the grass mending his nets instead of hunting. He sleeps the winter through. He can be read at a glance by a dripping coat-tail. A crossed river, a crossed body, a word said before wading, and the whole apparatus of him fails. He is not a god, and nobody ever built him a temple. He is a landlord with a bad temper and a very small estate, and the entire relationship rests on the fact that people needed the water and he was already in it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a vodyanoy?

A vodyanoy is a male water spirit of Slavic folklore who owns and rules one particular body of water, usually a river pool, lake or mill pond. The word is not a personal name but an adjective meaning “of the water”, and folk belief placed a separate vodyanoy in nearly every suitable pool. He is best known for drowning people and for extorting sacrifices from millers and fishermen.

What does the vodyanoy look like?

The most common Russian description is a bald, naked old man with a fat belly and a swollen face, coated in green pond slime and wearing a high cap and belt woven from club-rush. Other accounts give him a green beard that whitens with the waning moon, or make him a moss-covered giant, or a black figure with burning red eyes and a very long nose. He is a shapeshifter, which is how the sources explain the contradictions, and he can appear as a giant fish, a floating log, or an ordinary man whose coat drips on one side.

How do you protect yourself from a vodyanoy?

The standard protection is the sign of the cross, made before bathing, swimming or fording a river with livestock. Bathing after sunset, at midday or midnight, or on a holy day was considered especially dangerous. Millers and fishermen took the other route and bought him off with offerings: melted butter poured into the water, a black sow, a honey-smeared horse in spring, or a horse’s head buried in the dam.

Why is the vodyanoy connected with watermills?

The mill pond is his preferred dwelling, and the mill machinery is the thing he can most easily wreck, so miller and water spirit were locked together. An angry vodyanoy pulls the spikes from the wheel, diverts the water and breaks the dam. Building a new mill traditionally required a sacrifice buried in the foundations, and a working miller was expected to keep the spirit sweet for as long as the mill stood.

What is the difference between a vodyanoy and a vodník?

They are the same kind of being under regional names: vodyanoy or vodyanik in Russian, vodyanyk in Ukrainian, vodník or hastrman in Czech and Slovak, vodeni mož in Slovene, topielec in Polish. The Czech and Slovak versions have their own distinctive traits, particularly the coloured ribbons they use as bait and the earthenware pots in which they keep the souls of the drowned. The Czech vodník was carried to a wide audience by Karel Jaromír Erben’s ballad in Kytice (1853) and by Dvořák’s symphonic poem of 1896.