Zmeu

The apples ripened once a year, and once a year they were gone before anyone saw them fall. The king had guards, and the guards had orders, and every autumn the branches came up bare and gold-flecked with nothing on them. His youngest son solved the sleeping problem with two sharpened stakes set either side of him, so that any drift of the head would wake him on a point. Near midnight he heard something moving in the leaves above and loosed an arrow into the dark. In the morning the apples hung heavy and ripe, and there was a long trail of blood leading away across the wet grass.

The thing at the end of that trail was a zmeu, and calling it a dragon only gets you halfway. A zmeu has arms and legs. It forges its own weapons and carries them, rides a horse like any boyar, speaks, argues, and wants above all else to marry a young woman it has no right to. That last appetite is the engine of most of its stories. Romanian storytellers put it alongside the giants and the ogres as often as alongside the serpents, and one folklorist writing in 1926 filed it among the country’s vampires, next to the vârcolac, which tells you how slippery the category is.

Nobody has ever agreed on what it looks like. Romulus Vulcănescu described the zmeu as anthropo-ophidian: a scale-covered body built roughly like a man’s, finished with a snake’s tail and wings like a bat’s. A fifteenth-century monumental stove tile, read by the collector Barbu Slătineanu, gives something stranger still, a human head sitting on a bird’s trunk with a serpent’s tail behind it. Lazăr Șăineanu, writing down what villagers actually said at the turn of the twentieth century, recorded a man-eating giant with a tail like rock, which somehow did not stop it getting into a saddle. Other collectors were told it was scarcely more than a big man with a human face, taller and thicker through the chest, capable of speech in a rough and graceless way. The sources contradict each other on every point except the menace.

Even the name pulls in two directions. Most linguists take zmeu straight from Slavic zmey, which runs back through Old Church Slavonic zmija to a word meaning snake, though Václav Machek found the derivation awkward enough that Sorin Paliga and Eugen Teodor proposed an early Slavic borrowing out of North Thracian instead. Alexandru Ciorănescu weighed a link to zmeură, the Romanian raspberry, and set it aside as unlikely. What the etymology never quite explains is why the Romanian creature grew hands.

Home is the celălalt tărâm, the other realm, and it is usually reached by going down. The zmeu comes back to its fortress there the way a landlord comes back to a property, and it knows the moment it crosses the threshold that something warm-blooded and unauthorised is inside. The nostrils work before the eyes do. In tale after tale the hero hears that sniffing from behind a door and understands that the negotiation has already started.

Prâslea followed the blood down a ravine on a rope his brothers held, and found three castles waiting, one of copper, one of silver, one of gold. A zmeu kept each, and a stolen princess with it, and the sisters had been holding their weddings off for years with demands their captors could not meet. He killed the first and the second. The third took longer. Locked in a wrestling match with the thief himself, running out of strength, he called up to a raven circling the roof and promised it three corpses if it would drop tallow on him; the bird obliged, and both fighters, parched and staggering, begged the watching princess for water. She gave it to Prâslea. That was the end of the zmeu, and the beginning of a longer story in which his own brothers dropped a stone on his head and left him under the world, and he climbed out on the back of an eagle whose chicks he had saved from a dragon.

The zmei of the Greuceanu ballad were more ambitious. They stole the sun and the moon out of the sky and left every living thing groping in the dark. Greuceanu and his brother went after them, and after the fighting was over the real problem arrived: the mother, a zmeoaică, coming across the country like a rolling cloud of smoke, faster than anything with legs. They ran for the workshop of Faur the smith and made an iron figure in the hero’s likeness, packed it with coals until it glowed, and set it out for her. She swallowed it whole and burst. The sun and moon went back up.

Not every zmeu arrives with a mace. In some districts the word covers something quieter and more intimate, a flame that comes in at the window of a girl or a young widow, stands up in the middle of the room as a handsome man, and leaves before light; elsewhere that visitor is called the zburător instead, and the two names blur. Popular usage blurs it further with the dracu and with the balaur, the many-headed serpent proper, and the flying mounts of the Solomonari are said to be zmei or balauri depending entirely on who you ask.

Its powers follow from what it is. Flight, fire from the mouth, shape-changing into bird or flame or man, strength enough to hold a hero at arm’s length for hours, and a mace that can be hurled and will come back to the hand that threw it. Its weaknesses follow just as directly. Everything the zmeu wants is outside itself, and wanting makes it slow. It negotiates with women who are stalling it. It leaves a blood trail a boy can follow. Its mother is killed by her own hunger, swallowing the first thing put in front of her. And for all the fire, it loses every single fight in the record, not to magic but to somebody stubborn who refuses to fall asleep.

That opening scene, the ruined orchard and the night watch and the wounded thief, turns up from Poitou to Baghdad, and folklorists file the whole family under a single tale type. The thief changes with the country: a lion in France, an eagle in Brittany, a marid in Iraq, a div in Azerbaijan. Only in Romania does he come with arms, a horse, a mother, and a marriage proposal.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Zmeu?

A zmeu is a monstrous being from Romanian folklore, usually described as a dragon-like ogre with human traits. Unlike a pure serpent-dragon, the zmeu has arms and legs, makes and carries weapons, rides a horse and speaks. It is the standard villain of Romanian folktales, most often as a thief or an abductor of young women.

Is a Zmeu the same thing as a Balaur?

No, although Romanian speakers have confused the two for centuries. The balaur is the many-headed serpent proper, while the zmeu is anthropomorphic, with a man’s shape, hands and the habits of a suitor. Authorities also disagree over which of the two the Solomonari ride through the sky.

What does a Zmeu do in Romanian folktales?

It steals. In “Prâslea the Brave and the Golden Apples” the zmeu robs a king’s tree of its golden fruit and holds three princesses in castles of copper, silver and gold beneath the world. In the ballad of Greuceanu, zmei steal the sun and the moon out of the sky and leave the earth in darkness.

How is a Zmeu defeated?

By persistence rather than magic. Făt-Frumos, the Romanian folktale hero, beats the zmeu through stubbornness, nerve and hand-to-hand fighting, often with small help from a grateful animal or a captive princess who chooses which fighter to hand the water to. The zmeu’s own appetites work against it, since its greed leaves trails and its bargaining buys the hero time.

What is a Zmeoaică?

A zmeoaică is a female zmeu, most often the mother or wife of one, and she is frequently the more dangerous opponent. In the Greuceanu story the mother pursues the hero across the country as a rolling cloud of smoke and is only stopped when she swallows a red-hot iron figure made in his likeness and bursts.

Related Entries

Balaur, Zburator, Solomonari, Muma Pădurii, Căpcăun, Uriaș, Zână, Iele, Vârcolac, Strigoi, Moroi, Pricolici, Zmey Gorynych, Tugarin Zmeyevich, Vishap