In Bulgarian folklore, an ordinary woman can become a witch if she carries a black hen’s egg in her armpit until a black chick hatches. If she slits its little throat and smears the blood on her joints, that ordinary woman will gain a witch’s power – including the ability to turn herself into a black hen.
Peasant farmers in southern Bulgaria believe that freakish creatures called mamnici can steal their crops. Mamnici have no feathers, but they have two heads, and as they hatch from witches’ eggs, they are witches’ offspring. The souls of un christened children turn into small, chicken-like, evil, demonic beings that are called navi. Croats and Serbs believe the souls of unchristened children have birds’ bodies and human heads. In Ukraine and Poland, such a creature is called potrečuk or latawiec.
In Bulgarian folklore, chickens are ‘unclean’, ‘dark’ animals, related to demons. A chicken is a bird that cannot fly. It pecks the ground with its beak, hence it connects people with chthonic powers. Thus the chicken encompasses contradictions: as a kind of livestock, it belongs to people, but equally it belongs to the heavens (being a bird), and at the same time to the underworld (being unable to fly). Notions of Baba (Yaga) sitting on eggs in a nest made in a treetop, of her hut on hen’s legs, of her ability to give birth to forty-one daughters (a quantity that could only have hatched from eggs!):[50] these all build up a picture of a black-feathered demon that is linked with all three spheres of the world.
Birds have always fascinated the human imagination, because they are connected with people’s deepest dreams of flight. Mere mortals are chained to the earth, whereas wings were the endowment of demons, angels, fairies and other mythical creatures. Birds are the gods’ transport of choice (Garuda carried the Indian god Vishnu, and Brahma flew on a goose).
In one of the most beautiful Russian fairytales, The Feather of Finist the Grey Falcon, a maiden begs her father to buy her a feather from Finist, a falcon. After three attempts, her father finally gets a feather and gives it to his daughter in a box. When she opens the box, the feather flies out, lands on the ground and turns into a handsome prince before the girl’s very eyes. The maiden and the prince love each other every night, until the maiden’s sisters find out about the unusual sweetheart from the box and wound him badly. The falcon flies away, and the girl, if she is to find him again, must pass through thirty lands in thirty realms, wearing out three pairs of iron shoes and wearing down three iron staffs. On the way, three good Baba Yagas give her useful gifts: a silver distaff and golden spindle, a silver dish with a golden egg and a golden embroidery frame and needle. In the end, the maiden finds her sweetheart, her feather, and marries him.
The most feathery and aerodynamic Russian fairytale is the tale of Elena the Wise.[51] Everyone flies in this tale: the ‘dark forces’, the ordinary soldier (turned into a robin redbreast), the three sisters (turned into doves) and Elena the Wise herself.
The age-old human fantasy of flight has persisted down to our own aero-age, into mass culture and its genres (sci-fi, cartoon strips, films), and has bred two of the mythical mega-icons of our time: Superman and Batman. Interestingly, among the mass media myth-icons of our time, there aren’t any strong female counterparts. Wonder Woman stays in the margins. Even in the lowlier zones of human imagination, the pilots’ seats are reserved for men.
Only in ancient mythical zones is women’s power of flight unlimited. There they fly on equal terms with men. In the oldest times of all, aerial traffic was unusually dense: the heroes flew on huge birds and magic carpets; along with anthropomorphised winds, flashes of lightning and thunderbolts, dragons and witches, flying daggers, brooms, mortars, dark forces, demons and demonic creatures, gods, deities and brave heroes went in search of their sweethearts – pea-hens, doves, swans and graceful ducks – falcons, eagles and hawks. In these zones, Baba Yaga herself could fly freely. She flew in her mortar, in her mortar-womb, to be sure, but the thing is, she flew.
Your author’s narrative has a striking ornithological framework: the story in the first part, for example, is set in a three-year temporal framework which limits the invasion of the starlings to one of Zagreb’s neighbourhoods, and their departure likewise. In the second part, right on the first day we learn from the newspaper that Arnoš Kozeny is reading that the H5 strain of bird ’flu has been discovered, while on the last day, we learn – again from Arnoš Kozeny’s newspaper – that thousands of hens were slaughtered on Czech farms because of suspicions that they were infected with the H5N1 virus. All in all, there are feathery motifs to spare. I shan’t offer a more detailed analysis here, rather I shall leave you to brood a while on the symbolical eggs in your author’s text.
OLD AGE
In one of the old Bulgarian legends, the Archangel Michael meets a woman and asks where she comes from and who she is. ‘I’m a witch, and I slither into the house like a snake,’ the woman replies. The archangel ties her up and starts to hit her with an iron rod. ‘I shall beat you until you tell me all your names,’ he says. The witch reels off her names, until she reaches the nineteenth. The legend is hard to translate because the multiple oral traditions have produced a ‘Chinese whispers’ effect, creating a delightful alloy of Hebrew, classical Greek, Bulgarian and who knows what else, so that many words can hardly be deciphered with any certainty. This is how it happens that – in the text that has come down to us – the witch did not reveal all her names or all her faces.
Likewise with Baba Yaga. The story about her circulated for hundreds of years by word of mouth, from ear to ear. Although the storytellers (and later the interpreters) set about her with their interpretive rods, they still could not bring all her ‘names’ to the surface. Only partly misogynistic herself, Baba Yaga was (and remains) the object of frightful misogyny: they beat her, dunked her, threw her in the fire, shoed her like a horse, banged nails into her, cut off her head, pierced her with swords, forged her tongue on an anvil, roasted her in the oven, monstrously insulted her in fairytales, children’s jokes and epic poems.[52]
Let us say it once again: Baba Yaga is a witch, but she does not belong to the coven of witches; she can be both good and evil; she is a mother, but she is her own daughter’s killer; she is a woman, but she has no man, nor ever had one; she is a helper, but she also plots and schemes; she has been excommunicated from the human community, but she does communicate with humans; she is a warrior, but a housewife too; she is ‘dead’, but also a living being; she roasts a little child in the oven, but the outcome has her being roasted herself; she flies, but at the same time she is riveted to the ground; she only has a ‘supporting role’, but she is the hero’s mainstay as he (or she) makes his (or her) way to fame and fortune.
Baba Yaga’s character emerged from oral traditions, innumer able nameless storytellers, male and female, who built it up and added to it over many decades. She is a collective work, and a collective mirror. Her biography begins in better times, when she was the Golden Baba, the Great Goddess, Earth Mother, Mokosh. With the transition to patriarchy, she lost her power and became an outlawed horror who still manages to prevail through sheer cunning. Today Baba Yaga ekes a life in her hut like a foetus in the womb or a corpse in a tomb.
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I assume that your author’s title,
Linguistic analysis could lead to a comically grotesque inversion of the phenomenon of female creativity. For every child in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia knows the nursery rhyme:
Mokosh, as we know, is the pagan Slavic goddess of fertility (
In American showbiz jargon, the expression
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I have adapted and abbreviated this tale for you. The portions in italics belong to the original.
Once upon a time, a young soldier guarded a demon which, taking pity on it, he released. The demon put the soldier on its wings and carried him off to its castle, where the soldier’s only task was to guard the three beautiful daughters. It was not a difficult service, the young man could have carried on forever, but he noticed that the maidens disappeared somewhere every night. One night he crept into their room and saw the girls stamp their feet on the floor, turn into doves and fly out of the window. The soldier followed suit, turned into a robin redbreast and flew after them, until the doves flew down and alighted in a grove of green trees.
The youth fell in love with Elena the Wise, mistress of the doves, and he decided to follow her by stealth to her castle. By hiding in a tree, he could keep her chamber in view as he warbled so sweetly and sadly that the queen did not sleep a wink all night. In the morning the queen caught the robin and set him in a golden cage, which she carried into her room. As soon as the queen fell asleep, the robin turned into a fly, flew out of the cage, landed on the floor and turned back into the fine young man. He approached the bed and could not help himself kissing the queen on her honey lips. Then he turned straight back into a fly, went back into the cage and became the robin again. Elena the Wise awoke, looked around, saw no one. She was awoken several times again that night, and in the morning she used her magic book to see everything as plainly as if it was written on her hand.
At this, the soldier wept and wailed so mournfully that the queen took pity on him: ‘I shall give you ten hours to hide yourself so well that if I cannot find you, you shall have my hand in marriage, but if you don’t succeed, I shall have your head!’
The soldier ran out of the castle and into a thick forest, sat under a bush and despaired. At that moment, the demon appeared before him, stamped on the ground and turned into a grey eagle. The soldier climbed onto the eagle’s back and was borne up to the highest heaven. But Elena the Wise saw all this in her magic book: ‘You fly in vain, eagle, for I see you, and you know full well that you cannot hide from me. Come back to earth!’ What could the eagle do but return to earth? So that is what he does, then he rounds on the young man, strikes him on the face and turns him into a needle, and then himself into a mouse. He picks up the needle in his teeth, slips into the queen’s castle, finds the magic book and thrusts the needle into the book. Elena the Wise searched for the soldier in her book, and she saw him, yes she saw him indeed, but she could not find him. When ten hours had passed, the queen threw the book into the fire in a rage. The needle flew out of the book, hit the floor and turned into the good young man. And that is how they got married.
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‘And this is what Ilja says: / “Eh, you, Dobrynja Mitkevich / there’s no honour or fame / if two heroes fight the old woman / you should beat the woman in the proper manner / on her tits and arse.” / And he remembered the old ways, / he starts to beat her on the tits and arse, / and he kills the whore Baba Yaga.’ (As cited by Andreas Johns)