Zduhać

The wind came off the mountains in the weeks before Christmas, when the snow was still thin and the air had teeth in it, and Pavel Rovinsky’s Montenegrin landlady stopped what she was doing to listen. Listen how they sing, she told him. The travellers. They have gone high, high. Happy journey to them. Somewhere below the ridge a man lay asleep so heavily that no shouting would lift him out of it, and everyone in the village understood that the body by the hearth was only the part of him still in the room.

They called such a man a zduhać, or a stuha, and in Montenegro they said his soul had gone into the winds. The name has been argued over for well over a century. Franz Miklosich traced stuhać back through Old Slavonic stuhia to the Greek stoicheion, the elements, the same root that gives modern Greek its territorial guardian spirits. Petar Skok and Norbert Jokl preferred the Albanian stuhí, storm. The zd- form probably arrived later, pulled into shape by the Serbian duh, spirit, which is the sort of accident that makes a word mean what people already believed it meant. The belief itself is recorded across Montenegro, eastern Herzegovina, parts of Bosnia and the Sandžak, and it is older and stranger than the tidy word suggests.

The power was inborn, and in most districts it announced itself at birth. The child came out wrapped in a caul, white or red depending on where you asked. The mother dried the membrane and stitched it into something the child would always wear, a small pouch tied under the armpit. Among the Kuči of eastern Montenegro she hid it from every eye and gave it to her son only when he was grown, because the caul protected him while he flew. Burn it or lose it and the power went with it. Herzegovina looked instead for a tuft of hair on the shoulder or the upper arm, or counted back to see whether the boy had been conceived on the eve of a great feast. On the Montenegrin Littoral the caul meant nothing at all; there, a zduhać was simply born on a certain Friday at a certain hour. In Semberija a father could hand the gift down to his son. And in one nineteenth-century account from eastern Herzegovina a man who had been born with nothing special could still buy his way in: forty days without prayer and without washing his face, then a circle drawn on level ground, then a wait in the middle of it until the Devil arrived to ask what shape he would like to be turned into.

You could pick him out of a crowd only if you knew the signs. Zduhaći slept like the drowned and woke slowly, and were often drowsy in daylight, thoughtful, solemn, given to long silences. Their faces puffed, their eyes sat in shadow. They were also shrewd, capable, lucky in a way that showed in full granaries and healthy stock. The Kuči said they were tremendous long jumpers. The Paštrovići of the coast said a zduhać could hear anything happening anywhere in the world, right down to somebody treading on his foot. In Semberija they read shoulder blades and talked to livestock. When one of them dropped off mid-sentence beside the fire, the household lowered their voices and stepped around him, and left the door as it was.

The fighting was territorial and organised. The zduhaći of eastern Bosnia went up together against those of Herzegovina and Montenegro; the men of the Sandžak fought the Albanian bands; along the Adriatic a combined force from Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and northern Albania met the transmarine zduhaći of Apulia, who came across the water. Each band had a commander. Mato Glušac of Korita in Herzegovina, who lived from 1774 to 1870 and was famous in his own lifetime as a seer, was reckoned the supreme leader of the Herzegovinian and Montenegrin fliers.

Their weapons were mostly weightless things, which is what you would expect of soldiers made of air: spindles, beech buds, splinters, leaves, stalks of straw, fluff, sand, long twigs, cornel stones, pine cones, eggshells. In Herzegovina they were said to tear up firs and oaks and swing those instead. The one weapon that could finish a man was a stick of luč, resinous pine kindling, charred at both ends, and because of that no careful household ever lit a splinter at both ends or left one half burnt in the ashes. Alongside his weapon each fighter carried a milk pail and a peck measure, sometimes a threshing shovel or broom. Those were the point of the whole exercise. Take an enemy’s peck measure and you took his district’s grain; take his pail and you took its milk. The gales that flattened trees and lifted the dust off the tracks were the battle itself passing overhead, and in Montenegro it was thought reckless to throw a stone into the wind, since it might put out a zduhać’s eye and he would come for you.

Rovinsky wrote down a story he was told in the Ceklin clan of southern Montenegro. A local zduhać had been beaten badly enough to die of it, and refused every remedy. He emptied the house of everyone but one brother, a noted fighter, and told him where to go: a stair-like cliff three or four hours off through dense forest, and take the knife with the silver sheath, whatever else you bring. The sky will be clear when you get there. Then a wisp of cloud will come from the direction of Mount Rumija and swell until it covers everything, and the wind will scream in a way you have not heard, and three bulls will fall out of it, a light-haired one, a pied one and a dark one. The light-haired bull is already wounded. Cut the other two and do not touch him. The brother went, sat under the cliff, lit his pipe, and jammed his cap down three times as his hair stood up. When the bulls dropped he stabbed the pied one in the neck and then the dark one, and kept stabbing until neither of them breathed. The cloud vanished. So did the light-haired bull. He walked home under the stars and found his brother sitting by the fire, feeding logs into it, perfectly well.

What a zduhać could do followed from the one thing he was: a soul that could get out. He steered winds and clouds, moved a storm off his own fields and onto someone else’s, and brought home a harvest that had been growing in another valley. What he could not do followed just as directly. The body left behind was the weak point. Turn a sleeping zduhać around so his head lies where his feet were, or carry him away from the spot where he dropped, and his soul cannot find the way back in; he simply does not wake. Wounds taken in the air arrived home with him, and there were men who lay sick for weeks and said plainly where they had got it. On the Littoral they held that even a mortal wound could be undone if the wounded man avenged himself before the eighth day ran out. It was a job, and it hurt.

There was a darker face to the same figure. In Montenegro the flier was often called a vjedogonja, and Njegoš put the word into The Mountain Wreath, where Vukota calls on God and the angels because Bishop Danilo has fallen into the wild-eyed state of a witch or a vjedogonja whose spirit has left him. The leaders among the vjedogonje were said to be hairy and to have tails. When one died, according to a nineteenth-century account, they drove hawthorn spines under his nails and cut the tendons behind his knees with a knife in a black sheath, so that he could not climb out of the grave. Petar I Petrović-Njegoš spent years preaching against all of it and wrote furiously in 1830 that nowhere had he found witches and vjedogonje except among his own people, who would sooner believe a lie than the Gospel.

Carlo Ginzburg set the zduhaći beside the benandanti of Friuli, the krsnik of Istria and Slovenia, the Hungarian táltos, the Ossetian burkudzäutä and the mazzeri of Corsica, all of them people who left their bodies at night to fight for their neighbours’ bread. The comparison holds, with one difference worth keeping. A Siberian shaman needed the drum, the dance, the chanting, sometimes the drug. A zduhać only had to fall asleep.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a zduhać?

A zduhać is a living man in Montenegrin, Serbian, Bosnian and Herzegovinian folk belief whose soul could leave his body while he slept and fly up to fight for the weather. Zduhaći were thought to defend their village or region from hail and storms by driving the bad clouds onto someone else’s land. The power was inborn, not learned, and the man himself was an ordinary farmer the rest of the time.

How could you tell that someone was a zduhać?

The commonest sign was being born with a caul, white or red depending on the district, which the mother dried and sewed into a pouch the child wore under his arm. Other regions looked for a tuft of hair on the shoulder, or counted the hour and day of birth. Zduhaći were also known by their behaviour: unusually deep sleep, daytime drowsiness, puffy faces, shadowed eyes, and households that did conspicuously well.

Who did zduhaći fight, and what with?

They fought the zduhaći of rival districts, in organised regional bands, for control of the storm and for the harvest itself. Their weapons were light objects such as spindles, splinters, straw, pine cones and eggshells, though Herzegovinian accounts have them uprooting firs and oaks. The deadliest weapon was a stick of resinous luč wood charred at both ends, which is why households avoided lighting a splinter at both ends or leaving one half burnt.

How could a zduhać be killed?

The vulnerable thing was the body he left behind. If a sleeping zduhać was turned around so that his head lay where his feet had been, or carried away from where he fell asleep, his soul could not return and he died. He could also be wounded in the air, and men who lay ill for weeks sometimes explained their sickness that way; on the Montenegrin coast a mortal wound could still be survived if the victim avenged himself within eight days.

Is a zduhać the same thing as a krsnik or a benandante?

They belong to the same family of belief without being identical. Carlo Ginzburg grouped the zduhaći with the Friulian benandanti, the Istrian and Slovenian krsnik, the Hungarian táltos and several other European figures who left their bodies at night to fight for the fertility of their community’s fields. The differences are local: the krsnik took animal form and fought werewolves, the benandanti fought witches, and the zduhaći fought each other.

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