“A sleeping man whose soul leaves his body to wrestle the storm-demons hurling hail at his village.”
In the karst villages of eastern Herzegovina and the Dinaric highlands, certain men were watched with quiet awe. They slept too deeply, woke too tired, and carried a solemn, faraway look. Folk tradition named them stuhe, or zduhaći: men born with an inborn gift, whose souls slipped out of their sleeping bodies to meet the weather itself — riding into the winds to turn hail and black cloud away from their people's fields.
The stuha mattered because the harvest mattered. In a landscape of thin soil and sudden mountain storms, a single hailstorm could ruin a year, and the belief gave that ruin a champion and an enemy. Zduhaci fought in regional bands — Herzegovinian and Montenegrin flyers against rivals from Bosnia, Albania, even from across the Adriatic in Apulia — and the defeated side's land bore the bad weather and the failed crops. Ethnographers class the tradition among Europe's sleeping shaman-figures, kin to the Istrian krsnik and the benandanti of Friuli.
The Legend
Tradition holds that a zduhać is made in the womb. He is born with a caul — white or red, by regional telling — which his mother dries and sews into his clothing so the gift is never lost; among the Kuči of eastern Montenegro she keeps it and presents it to her son when he comes of age. Other signs marked the calling: tufts of hair on the shoulder, birth on certain Fridays at certain hours. Such men grew up drowsy, pensive, and shrewd, deep sleepers whom nothing could easily wake.
When storm season came, the sleeper's soul 'went into the winds.' It could steer cloud and gale, and it fought — with spindles, beech buds, splinters, and straw stalks, or in heroic tellings with whole uprooted firs and oaks. The deadliest weapon was a stick of resinous fatwood charred at both ends; a touch of it meant certain death, and prudent households avoided burning a stick at both ends for exactly that reason. A sleeping zduhać must never be moved or turned: if head and feet were exchanged, the soul could not find its way back, and the man died.
The Record
The tradition is unusually well documented. The Russian ethnographer Pavel Rovinsky collected zduhać accounts in Montenegro, including a Ceklin clan story in which a mortally wounded zduhać is healed after his brother strikes down two dark bulls that fall from a storm cloud. The philologist Franz Miklosich traced stuhać to Old Slavonic stuhia, 'the elements,' from Greek stoicheion, while later linguists heard Albanian stuhí, 'storm,' in it; the form zduhać itself grew by folk etymology from duh, 'spirit.'
Named men carried the reputation. Mato Glušac (1774–1870) of Korita in Herzegovina was held to be supreme commander of the Herzegovinian and Montenegrin zduhaći, and Petar I Petrović-Njegoš, Montenegro's prince-bishop, was popularly counted one himself. Even an enemy could be a flyer: Mahmud Bushatli, the Ottoman pasha of Skadar killed in 1796, was reputed a mighty zduhać, and after his death the region's crop yields were said to have diminished.
The Lore
The belief shades into a whole family of Balkan weather-guardians: the vetrovnjak of western Serbia, the vilovit men of Dragačevo who vanished when hail clouds appeared and returned bloodied, and the vjedogonja of the Bay of Kotor, whose dead were pinned with hawthorn spines beneath the fingernails so they would not walk. Animals could carry the gift too — a dog, ox, or rooster that cried out in its sleep was cherished as a guardian of the herds and never sold or slaughtered.
Scholars from Carlo Ginzburg onward read the zduhać alongside the benandanti of Friuli, the Hungarian táltos, and the shamans of Siberia: ecstatics whose trance was a private, sleeping battle for the community's prosperity. The figure keeps a literary afterlife as well — Njegoš's The Mountain Wreath invokes the gloomy autumn flights of the vjedogonje, and Simo Matavulj built a short story around a young Herzegovinian escort who drops into trance whenever thunderheads cross the mountains.
Field Notes
- ✦ Believed able to defend an estate or whole region from destructive storms.
- ✦ The soul is said to leave the body during deep sleep to do battle.
- ✦ Strongly associated with Herzegovina, Montenegro, and the Sandžak.
- ✦ Born with a caul, dried and sewn into his clothes so the gift would not be lost.
- ✦ Moving or turning a sleeping zduhać was thought to kill him — the soul could not return.
Case File
- Classification
- Weather-guardian
- Category
- Other
- Territory
- Eastern Herzegovina and the Dinaric highlands
- First Sighted
- Dinaric folk tradition
- Habitat
- Mountain villages; storm clouds in spirit form
- Reported Size
- Human-sized
- Also Known As
- Zduhać · Stuhać