Croatia - Folklore and regional stories | Advertisement feature
Towards sunset, having 'done' a few more sights, I sat with a pivo in the Stradun, the Old Town's only wide street - of polished stone, lined with tall, gravely imposing buildings. And there Dubrovnik's free evening entertainment mesmerised me: thousands of swifts giving a dizzying display of aerobatics, circling high in the sky , then swooping and darting low between the buildings, their speed and flock coordination something to marvel at, their shrill frenetic twitterings so loud I had to raise my voice when ordering another pivo. Looking up and down the Stradone, I mentally congratulated the successors to the Major Council: no plastic disfiguring of shop façades is allowed and only café table sunshades - Coca-Cola and Marlboro - marred the Adriatic's most famous thoroughfare.
The above extract is taken from Through the Embers of Chaos: Balkan Journeys by Dervla Murphy (John Murray, 2002).
Folklore
Croatian mythology should be told on a cold winter's night. It's the sort of stuff that needs flickering light from a dying fire and a howling wind whistling outside, occasional draughts sending extra shivers down your spine. Sitting in a semi-circle before a wise old woman, or a huge bearded man, you don't get Croatian folk stories from a book, just from memory and invention.
Croatian myth is part of the Slavic tradition that sweeps across Baltic, central and Eastern Europe, terrifying children and giving nightmares a ghoulish flavour. There is almost nothing that can be called specifically Croatian, hardly surprising given that there has hardly been an area that would answer to the name of Croatia for very long.
The Slavic tradition itself is nothing like as hard and fast as Greek mythology. There are no ancient written authorities and all that survive are the characters, but without any actual stories.
There are Gods like Perun, God of Thunder, King of the Gods, who are recognisable from all mythologies. Most of the Slavic Gods, like Veles, God of the Underworld, would feel at home round a Greek or a Norse Gods' banqueting table. But it is the lesser deities, who inhabit the world around us every day, who give Slavic myth its own peculiar dimensions.
Harry Potter fans might recognise the Vila, fairies who appear in the shape of beautiful women. There are also the domaci, good house spirits who live in cupboards and under the stairs. And who could forget those most famous of mythological demons, the vampires and werewolves!
Some fables are specific to Croatia, like that of Malik Tintilinic, a very naughty little boy dressed in red from head to toe. Known to the story-tellers of coastal Croatia, Malik loves to joke and dance and brings good fortune to his master. Typical to all Croatian stories, though, there is a darker subtext: folk say that Malik is the spirit of an unbaptised dead child.
These, and many other Croatian stories - like the tale of the frozen city of Legen - have been adopted and put into stories by one great Croatian writer. In her Croatian Tales of Long Ago (1916), long overdue for a new English edition, Ivana Brlic Mazuranic, used the rudiments of Slavic mythology to create a real mythology just for her country Croatia.
Called by contemporaries "The Croatian Andersen", and more recently "The Slavic Tolkien", Ivana was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her characters include Mokos, wife or helper of the chief God Perun, who is the Earth Goddess. We also meet gods of beauty, morning, bright skies, and a sphinx-like creature who asks travellers awkward questions.
In Brlic's work, as in all Slavic tales, everything is black and white: there are creative and destructive forces and each good character has a nemesis, an opposing force in a dualistic universe.
These are folk tales with simple messages and characters in search of narrators; luckily, although Croatian mythology lacks a Homer or an Ovid, it has its Tolkien.
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