“Black little goblins that crawl up from underground for the Twelve Days of Christmas to foul food and tangle the household.”
For most of the year the kallikantzaroi are somebody else's problem: they live underground, gnawing and sawing at the trunk of the world tree that holds up the earth. Then comes Christmas. From December 25 to Epiphany on January 6 — the Twelve Days, when Greek folk belief held the waters unblessed and the dark at its strongest — they swarm up into the villages to make human life briefly and comprehensively miserable.
They are not grand devils but vermin of the supernatural: small, black, hairy, red-eyed, variously lame, squint-eyed or backwards-footed, foul-smelling and lisping. They slide down chimneys to douse the fire, foul the food and wine, spoil the milk, break the furniture and eat the Christmas pork. Their tragedy is built into the calendar — every year, just as they near cutting through the world tree, the Twelve Days arrive, and by the time they return the tree has healed.
The Legend
The world-tree story gives the creature its shape: the kallikantzaroi labour all year in the underworld to fell the pillar of the earth, abandon the work each Christmas for twelve days of surface mischief, and return at Epiphany to find the trunk grown whole again — an eternity of sabotage undone by their own appetite for nuisance. Above ground they are chaos in miniature: riders of household backs, befoulers of hearths, and on Chios, posers of riddles with painful penalties for wrong answers.
Entire categories of people were entangled in the legend. On Zakynthos it was said that a child born on Christmas Eve risked growing into a kallikantzaros, conceived as it was on Mary's own feast day; anxious parents bound such infants in garlic or straw, and on Chios some singed the babies' feet against the change. When the priests bless the waters at Epiphany, the game ends: the goblins bolt back underground, and the village is safe for another year.
The Record
The paper trail is respectable. Leo Allatios described the goblin-lore of his native Chios in the mid-seventeenth century; Bernhard Schmidt's Das Volksleben der Neugriechen (1871) gave the creatures systematic treatment; and John Cuthbert Lawson's Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (1910) argued they were centaurs gone to seed — folk memory of composite monsters surviving in Christian dress.
The name itself is contested ground. Adamantios Koraïs derived kantzaros from kantharos, the scarab beetle; Lawson favoured kentauros, the centaur; others, following Schmidt, point to the Turkish kara-koncolos, the 'black bloodsucker' that stalks the same midwinter nights. The creature's cousins — the Serbian karakondžula, the Bulgarian karakondjul, the Albanian karkanxholl — mark out a shared southeast-European season of fear that scholars are still mapping.
The Lore
The counter-measures are the most beloved part of the tradition. A sieve or colander left on the doorstep condemns the goblin to count its holes all night — it can count only to two, since three is a holy number it dare not utter — until the dawn rooster saves the household. The hearth fire is kept burning through all twelve nights, a Yule log smoulders against intruders from the chimney, and stubborn cases call for burnt salt, an old shoe smoking on the coals, or a pig's jawbone hung behind the door.
Folklorists have long noted how much the kallikantzaroi resemble the masked, bell-hung revellers of ancient winter festivals, and one theory roots them in Dionysian masquerade dressed down through the centuries. They remain entirely alive in Greek Christmas: children's books, seasonal joking and village custom keep the goblins current, and the January blessing of the waters still carries, alongside its theology, the satisfying sense of an infestation coming to an end.
Field Notes
- ✦ Warded off by burning salt and old shoes, a black cross on the door, or a hearth fire kept alight for twelve nights.
- ✦ A sieve left out distracts them into counting its holes until dawn — they cannot utter the holy number three.
- ✦ They vanish underground at Epiphany, when the waters are blessed, to find the world tree healed.
- ✦ Children born during the Twelve Days were feared destined to become kallikantzaroi; garlic and straw bindings were the remedy.
- ✦ Cousins across the Balkans include the Serbian karakondžula and the Turkish kara-koncolos.
Case File
- Classification
- Subterranean goblin
- Category
- Little People/Fae
- Territory
- Throughout Greece
- First Sighted
- Traditional Greek folklore
- Habitat
- Underground all year, surfacing during the Twelve Days of Christmas
- Reported Size
- Small, dark and hairy
- Also Known As
- Kallikantzaroi · Christmas goblins