“Cyprus's own Christmas goblins, scrambling up from underground for twelve days to pester the household before the waters are blessed.”
For most of the year the kalikantzari are busy underground, sawing at the trunk of the great tree that holds up the world. Then Christmas comes, the daylight turns, and the work is abandoned: for the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany the goblins of Cyprus swarm up to the surface to plague the living — slipping down chimneys, souring the larder, fouling anything left uncovered, and riding the darkness of the year's longest nights.
Cyprus gives the pan-Greek Christmas goblin its own island shape. Known locally as kalikáttaroi — and in some tellings as planetaroi — they are described as part human and part animal, horned, tailed and goat-bearded. Cypriot households met them with a mixture of defence and hospitality peculiar to the island: fires kept burning through the Twelve Days, and sausages and fried pastries thrown onto the rooftops to feed the unwanted visitors and speed them on their way.
The Legend
The legend's engine is the world tree. All year the kalikantzari saw at the pillar that carries the earth, and each year they are nearly through when Christmas interrupts them. Freed by the turning of the season, they abandon the saw and scramble to the surface for twelve days of licensed chaos. When Epiphany drives them back down, they find the tree healed whole again — and they pick up their saws and begin the work anew, forever.
Above ground their malice is domestic rather than deadly. They enter houses by the chimney, urinate on the fire and the food, befoul stores and provisions, and torment anyone caught outdoors after dark. Tradition made the Twelve Days a season of caution: fires banked high all night, doors marked against entry, and children born during the dangerous nights watched carefully, for in some tellings such infants risked growing into kalikantzari themselves.
The Record
The name has kept scholars busy. Derivations proposed for kallikantzaros run from the Greek kalos joined to a form of kentauros, the centaur, to kantharos, the scarab beetle, to the Turkish kara-kondjolos — 'black bloodsucker' — a word whose relatives surface across the Balkans in the Serbian karakondžula, the Bulgarian karakondžul and the Albanian karkanxholl, all demons of the same unbaptised midwinter days.
Ethnographers have traced the goblins' pedigree to pre-Christian winter revels, proposing that the kalikantzari preserve the memory of Dionysian masquerades — costumed, belled figures going door to door in the dead of the year, grotesque by design. The Cypriot material, with its distinct local names and its rooftop offerings of food, is documented as one of the tradition's regional branches alongside the mainland Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian and Albanian forms.
The Lore
The defences were precise. A hearth kept burning denied them the chimney; a foul-smelling old shoe on the coals repelled them outright; a colander on the doorstep trapped them in counting, since a kalikantzaros can never pronounce 'three'. In Cyprus the housewife also fed them out the door, tossing meat, sausages and xerotigana pastries onto the roof with a rhyme — 'titsi, titsi, loukaniko' — inviting the goblins to eat their fill and be gone.
Epiphany ends the siege. At the Theophaneia on 6 January the priest blesses the waters and goes house to house with the agiasmos, sprinkling holy water into every corner, and the kalikantzari flee underground before the blessing reaches them. In the coastal towns the cross is thrown into the sea for young divers to retrieve — the one who brings it up is blessed for the year — and with the waters sanctified the island is quit of its goblins until the next midwinter.
Field Notes
- ✦ Kindred goblins appear across Greek, Cypriot, Serbian, Bulgarian and Albanian midwinter folklore.
- ✦ Kept off by a burning hearth and banished by the blessing of the waters at Epiphany.
- ✦ Blamed for spoiled food and household disorder throughout the festive season.
- ✦ Cypriot households threw sausages and xerotigana pastries onto the roof, with a rhyme inviting them to eat and go.
- ✦ Underground they saw at the world-tree all year; it heals whole again each Epiphany before the cut is finished.
Case File
- Classification
- Subterranean goblin
- Category
- Little People/Fae
- Territory
- Villages across Cyprus
- First Sighted
- Traditional Cypriot folklore
- Habitat
- Underground, surfacing over the Twelve Days of Christmas
- Reported Size
- Small and dark
- Also Known As
- Skalikantzari · Kalikáttaroi · Planetaroi · Cypriot Christmas goblins