Zmey

Also Known As: Bulgarian змей; also Zmey Gorianin, “forest dragon”; cognate with Serbian and Macedonian zmej and zmaj, and with the Romanian zmeu; the word is also the ordinary Bulgarian noun for a dragon
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Bulgarian Mythology, Slavic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: The zmey throws lightning and fire from his mouth against the hail-bringing dragons of the sky, and can appear as a serpent, a bird, a ball of fire or a young man.
Role in Mythos: He is the guardian of a single village’s fields, standing on the divine side of the old storm-god’s quarrel with the water-hoarding dragon beneath the world.
Relation to Humans: Each settlement was held to have its own zmey defending its crops, which made him one of the few Balkan dragons a farmer was glad to have overhead. He is also a nocturnal lover who visits human girls and young brides and slowly drains the strength out of them, and the only recorded cure is a bath in mixed herbs.

The hail comes in from the wrong side of the mountain and the whole village goes out to watch it, because what is happening up there is a fight and the fight is about them. Somewhere in that boiling grey a thing made of lightning is working, and if it wins the wheat stands. If it loses, the ice comes down and strips the fields to stubble in four minutes, and there will be a hungry winter. Bulgarian farmers did not watch storms the way a meteorologist watches them. They watched the way you watch a bout you have money on.

The zmey is the one they were rooting for. Balkan dragon belief splits along a line that surprises people who arrive expecting the western arrangement of knight and worm: the male dragon is the protector and the female is the disaster. The lamya and the ala bring the hail and eat the harvest. The zmey drives them off. Where the sky tears open and the thunder goes on too long, that is the sound of him working, and the storms that ruin one district while sparing the next were read as the outcome, not the cause.

He is not one shape. The record assembles him out of borrowed parts: a serpent’s body under fish scales, four legs like a lizard’s, the wings of a bird, and in some tellings a single eye set in the middle of the forehead or a neck that divides into several heads. Elsewhere he has no anatomy at all. He is the lightning itself, or a ball of fire crossing the ridge, or simply a cloud, and villagers pointing him out to each other were pointing at weather. The one detail that holds across the variants is heat. Whatever else he is, he is burning.

His origin is a slow one and the sources disagree on the arithmetic. A snake, or a carp, lies in a cave or a puddle or a crack in the rock and is not seen by any human eye. If it manages that for long enough it stops being a snake. The Bulgarian tellings gathered in the twentieth century put the term at forty years; the comparative work on the wider South Slavic and Romanian material puts it at seven or nine, and adds that the creature is owed a milk offering before it can finish. Then the wings come, and it goes up. The Romanian version of the same idea says it plainly: the thing gets out of the black world into the white one and flies to the sun.

So the caves matter. Legends still attach to the Rabishka cave and to the cave near the village of Pirin in the Sandanski region, and the map of Bulgaria carries the residue in place-names, a Dragon’s House here, a Dragon’s Well there. He keeps to forests and high ground, which earned him the by-name Zmey Gorianin, the forest dragon, though wells and lakes and rivers hold him too.

He also has a human shape, and this is where the stories turn uncomfortable. In it he is a young man, handsome, unusually strong, with wings folded under his arms. He eats and drinks and marries and fathers children like anyone. He has dragon women of his own and it makes no difference. He comes at night to human girls and young brides, and the songs about this were sung at Easter and on St George’s Day, which is to say in public, at the two points of the year when the village was most assembled. Sometimes he descends out of the sky and takes the girl outright. Sometimes he arrives in proper form with a whole wedding party of dragons on horseback.

What happens to her afterwards is the part the songs dwell on. She stops seeking anyone out. She stops attending to how she looks. The strength goes out of her by degrees, because he is taking it, and the neighbours can see the transfer happening in a face they have known since it was a child’s. Against this there was one remedy: a mixture of herbs steeped for a bath, and the girl put into it.

The children of such a union came out looking human. They had wings under their arms and strength that did not belong to the century they were born into, and Bulgarians said as much about their own rebels, that this one or that one had wings beneath his shirt and could not be killed by an enemy.

Beyond the children there were men who were something else again. In Bulgaria and eastern Serbia the ethnographers found a recognised kind of person, called by the dragon’s own name, held to be the son of a fiery dragon or eagle and counted among the mythical ancestors of the clans. When the storm came such a man fell down insensible and his soul went out of him, carried off by an eagle or a snake, and fought in the air in the shape of a snake or a lizard or a cock. Those souls shot lightning, threw stones, and pulled up trees to use as clubs, and they fought for the same thing the dragons fought for, which was fair weather over their own fields and nobody else’s. Dimitar Marinov wrote this down from living informants in 1914. It was not an old story by then. It was what people did.

Behind all of it stands an older quarrel. The thunder god Perun, whose signs are the thunderbolt, the oak and the horse, against the dragon below that hoards the water and will not let it fall as rain. Christianity did not dissolve that arrangement so much as recast it: in Bulgarian legend it is St Elijah and his helpers who beat down the hail-dragons of the next village over, and it is St George who kills the lamya, never the zmey. The zmey was never the thing that needed killing.

His limits follow from what he is. He is parochial to the bone. He defends one valley, one set of fields, one congregation of people who have the sense to be his, and the monster he drives back across the ridge is very often the neighbouring village’s protector doing exactly the same job in the opposite direction. There is no rule in the sky, only a boundary. And the power that lets him hold that boundary is the same power that ruins a girl in her own house, drawn out of her a night at a time, until somebody thinks to fetch the herbs.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a zmey in Bulgarian folklore?

A zmey is a Bulgarian dragon, and unlike most European dragons he is usually on the human side. He is credited with guarding a particular village’s crops by fighting the hail-bringing female dragons in the sky, and the thunderstorm is understood as that fight in progress. He can appear as a scaled serpent with lizard legs and bird wings, as a ball of fire, or as a young man with wings under his arms.

How does something become a zmey?

By not being seen. A snake or a carp that lives hidden in a cave, a rock crack or a puddle without ever being observed by a human eye eventually stops being an ordinary animal, grows wings and flies up. Bulgarian sources gathered in the twentieth century give the term as forty years, while comparative work on the broader South Slavic and Romanian material gives seven or nine years and adds that a milk offering is owed before the transformation completes.

Is the zmey good or evil?

He is both, depending on which end of him you meet. As a weather-dragon he is protective, defending his own village’s harvest against the lamya and the ala, which is why St George in Bulgarian legend kills the female dragon and not the zmey. As a lover he is destructive, visiting human girls and young brides at night and steadily draining their strength until they withdraw from everyone around them.

What is the difference between a zmey and a lamya?

The split is by sex and by function. The zmey is male and guards crops; the lamya is female, arrives as storm and hail, and destroys them. Bulgarian tellings describe the lamya as a huge scaled lizard with a dog’s head and three, seven or nine heads, while the zmey is a fiery composite of snake, fish, bird and man.

How do you get rid of a zmey who has taken a lover?

With herbs. The remedy recorded in Bulgarian folk practice is a mixture of herbs prepared as a bath, in which the afflicted girl is washed. It is the only cure the tellings name, and it is aimed at the woman rather than at the dragon, who is not confronted, fought or driven off.