Zburător

A girl wakes before first light with bruises on her breast and no idea how they got there. Her mother finds her at the loom an hour later, grey in the face, hands unsteady on the thread, and knows the shape of the trouble at once, because every village in Wallachia and Moldavia knew the shape of it. Something had come down the chimney in the night.

They called him the zburător, the flyer, from *a zbura*, to fly. Dimitrie Cantemir set the word down in Latin as *volatilis* when he catalogued the beliefs of his countrymen in the *Descriptio Moldaviae*, written between 1714 and 1716, and his definition has never really been improved on: a phantom, a young and handsome man, who comes by night to grown girls and above all to women recently married, and spends the whole night doing improper things with them, though he cannot be seen by anyone else, not even by those lying in wait for him. Cantemir then adds a line that says a good deal about the men of his province. Some of the bolder husbands, he had heard, had caught such flyers, and having found that they were creatures with bodies like anyone else’s, punished them as they deserved.

The name was not the only one. Across much of the country he went by euphemism instead: *ceasul rău*, the evil hour, or *lipitura*, the clinging, which was also the name of the illness he left behind. Some regions simply called him a zmeu and left it there, though the two are not the same and the folklorists have spent a century saying so. The zmeu is a dragon with a household and a hoard. The zburător wants one thing, and it is not gold.

He arrives in whatever form the night allows. Simion Florea Marian’s informants had him coming in as a serpent with the look of a flame, dropping through the flue into the room below. Romulus Vulcănescu, filing him among the erotic half-divinities of the Romanian pantheon, recorded him as a handsome dark young man, a winged snake, a balaur, a star, or simply fire. Elsewhere he is a long roll of flame with a human head, seen from the yard as it comes in low over the thatch. Some accounts give him silver scales, others great white wings across the shoulders, and in others he is nothing to look at at all, a draught crossing a shut room. On clear summer nights people watched for him overhead as a bright streak between the roofs. Whatever the form, the one constant is that nobody who sat up waiting ever managed to see him arrive.

What he left was unmistakable, and to the people describing it, entirely physical. The woman woke without strength, wrung out, marked with small bruises. She felt a great weight over her whole body, and bitings and pinchings and ticklings under the skin. She stopped eating. She thinned. If she was carrying a child, the belief ran, the child came dead. Heliade Rădulescu’s Florica, in the 1844 ballad that turned the belief into literature, itemises her own symptoms before the poem has even named the thing responsible: the bruise on her breast, the fever and the shivering, the pallor, the prickling along her arms, the trembling, the sight going soft at the edges.

The myth outlived the belief. Eminescu carried it into *Călin* and *Luceafărul*, Alecsandri and Bolliac took their turns with it, and by 1941 George Călinescu was counting the flyer as one of the four foundational myths of Romanian folk poetry, standing alongside Miorița, Meșterul Manole, and Traian and Dochia.

Where he came from depends on who is telling it. The most widely held belief made him the issue of a great love that had run into unusual obstacles, which is a way of saying that the flyer was born out of precisely the longing he then preys on. Cantemir put him in older company, listing Zburătorul among the names his people still invoked at weddings and burials and which he traced back to the idols of the Dacians, alongside Drăgaica, Paparuda, Turca and Striga. Marian, working at the etymology, noticed that *a zbura* carries a second sense closer to drying out or draining away, preserved in the country saying that something has flown a man to the heart. Either reading fits. He flies, and he empties.

On a winter night in a one-room house the fire is banked and the smell of cold soot comes down the flue ahead of him. He fills the doorway of the girl’s dream wearing the face she has been thinking about all week. She does not wake, exactly. She simply stops being alone in the room.

The cure was a bath. Wise women gathered the herbs for it in May, out in the woods and the field margins, and the countercharm that G. Dem. Teodorescu recorded in 1885, still being performed near Bucharest in 1970 when Sanda Golopenția catalogued it, runs to nine ingredients: lovage and valerian, avrămeasă and cristineasă, drăgan, mandrake, the resin called blood of nine brothers, doe’s grass and mother of the forest. They went into a cauldron and boiled down, and the liquor went into the washing water, and the girl was bathed in it at the hour the market breaks up. The words spoken over her worked by sympathy. As the market breaks up, so let the binding break, and the clinging, and the flyer; as the pots break, so let the spells break; as the crossroads scatter, so let all of it scatter. Then the water went out at a crossroads in a new pot, three days running, with incense and smoke carried through the house for good measure.

One legend has a mother beat him by theft. Her daughter has been meeting someone on the bridge over the water in the evenings and wasting between meetings, so the mother goes to a charm-woman, who tells her the only remedy is a herb that the flyer alone knows, the small speedwell. The girl is tricked into fetching it, the potion is made, and the mother drenches her from head to foot in the middle of the bridge. The girl walks on to the meeting anyway, soaked and crying. He knows at once what has been done. He runs rather than let her see his real face, and on the way he tears the middle stem out of the plant that betrayed him, which is why the small speedwell has flowered on only its two side branches ever since. He leaves her one parting line, that he never loved her, and that once he had tired of her he would have drowned her in the water under the bridge.

His powers all run in one direction. He can take any shape that will get him through a window or a smoke-hole, he can go entirely unseen, he can arrive inside a dream and be more solid there than the room around it, and he can bind a person to the memory of him so completely that food and sleep and daylight stop counting for anything. He does not need to lay a hand on anyone to do the damage. He works on wanting, which is why the tradition sets him opposite Dragobete, the figure of clean and unhurried young love. The flyer is the same appetite with the brakes cut.

His limits are as specific as his methods. He cannot bear the light of the sun, and passes the day shut inside the hollow of a walnut or a hazel, which is why the plants that undo him were sought where they were. Smoke drives him. Words unmake him, provided they are the right words in the right order at the right hour of the day. He can be robbed of the single plant that identifies him, and he runs the moment he is recognised, which suggests the whole arrangement depended on his victim never getting a clear look at him. And Cantemir’s practical husbands found the plainest limit of all. Whatever came down the chimney had a body, and a body can be caught.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Zburator?

The Zburator is a demon of Romanian folklore that flies to a young woman’s house at night and torments her with obsessive love. Its name means “the flyer”, from the Romanian verb *a zbura*. It is also known by the euphemisms *ceasul rău*, the evil hour, and *lipitura*, the clinging.

What does the Zburator do to its victims?

The Zburator visits girls and recently married women in their sleep, usually in the guise of a handsome dark-haired young man, and drains them. Victims were said to wake exhausted and bruised, feeling a heavy weight over the body along with pinching and tickling under the skin, then to lose their appetite and waste away. The resulting sickness had its own name in Romanian, *lipitura*.

How do you get rid of a Zburator?

Romanian folk medicine treated the Zburator with a spoken charm and a herbal bath. Nine plants, among them lovage, valerian, mandrake and mother of the forest, were boiled down and added to the washing water, the charm was spoken at the hour the market broke up, and the water was then thrown out at a crossroads in a new pot for three days running. Incense and smoke were carried through the house alongside it.

Is the Zburator the same as a zmeu?

No, although some regions used the two words interchangeably. The zmeu is a dragon-like being with a household and a hoard of its own, while the Zburator is defined entirely by what it does to sleeping women. Folklorists have consistently kept the two apart.

Where does the Zburator myth come from?

The earliest written description is Dimitrie Cantemir’s, in the *Descriptio Moldaviae* of 1714 to 1716, where he lists the Zburator among survivals he traced back to pre-Christian Dacian belief. The myth entered Romanian literature through Ion Heliade Rădulescu’s ballad *Zburătorul* in 1844 and later through Mihai Eminescu, and George Călinescu counted it one of the four foundational myths of Romanian folk poetry.

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