BACK SHOP

The person who has once seen a dragon will never be able to forget it. Scared or amazed, it does not matter, he is not able to quiet his heart and calm down his breath to let the dragon show himself clearly, in all its power and beauty. That is the reason for those inarticulate testimonies, which describe more the preface, signs and surroundings than the appearance of the dragon himself. All agree, however, that there is some strange calm, then a powerful wind and some sort of thunder, and then fire, with a howl and a bang and shaking of the earth. Since everything happened just like that, sudden and full of fear, our witness should not be blamed for the confusion of memory that will stay with him forever, even after death, because the story about the dragon witness will continue to mark his family, children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, same as the place where he saw the dragon. So, Zmajevac (zmaj = dragon) is now a river near Kraljevo and  a mountain top in Dragačevo and a spring near Zvornik, and Zmajevo a village near Novi Sad and Zmajeva Voda a spring in Kuršumlija.

Unfortunately, today we know a lot more about dragons than the people who used to encounter them. We say unfortunately, because the more we know about dragons the less they appear, and, since the time when we will know everything is approaching, another beauty will disappear from the world – dragons will not appear any more. 

HOW DRAGONS APPEAR

Dragons originate from animals. The majority of the sources we were able to find mention snake, carp or ram. If they originate from a snake, or a carp, then they are those mysterious specimens of these animals that have spent their lives of nine, thirty three, forty, fifty, or even a hundred years without a single human eye having seen them, in inaccessible areas, in the dark of age-old forests, in the depths of big lakes and muddy, lazy rivers. If they originate from rams, then they are those capricious and hard-headed rams giving equal trouble to wolves and shepherds, so no one, beside their own herds, likes them.

One Danube fisherman, who swore that in those days he had not, contrary to his custom, tasted a single drop of wine, described his encounter with a transformed carp. It was dusk and he was, rocked by the boat, falling into a peaceful nap, and then everything quieted down, not a single bird was heard, the rustling of poplar and willow trees stopped on the bank, and the boat was strangely still, as if floating on the surface of a mirror. Then concentric waves appeared, and the bow started slowly moving into the direction opposite from a clock hand. Then, our fisherman said, he felt someone was watching him from below, from the water. He was turning around, the boat was turning, and he already thought he would lose his conscience from all the turning, when he saw two huge eyes right underneath the water surface, and a carp cop above the eyes, two round whiskers below the eyes, and a somewhat sad, resigned mouth underneath the whiskers. He also managed to notice a powerful back covered with scales and legs, almost human legs. The last thing he remembers was a thunderous bang, and then the carp-dragon broke out from the water, covering him for a moment with his left wing. The fisherman woke up on the bank, covered in dragon scales, with a gold coin in each hand. Those gold coins were the crown proof of the truthfulness of his story, especially concerning wine, because no one has every treated a drunken fisherman with such a catch.

WHERE AND HOW DRAGONS SPEND THEIR LONG LIVES

Stubborn and eccentric like the animals from which they originated, dragons choose as their habitats inaccessible areas, usually springs or caves in thick forests, on unreachable mountain summits. As long ago as the 14^th century, Mount Jastrebac above Kruševac was documented as a dragon habitat. Dragon rams especially like to settle in clouds, in those big and light clouds that do not bring hale nor rain, but, lazy and satisfied, they simply and peaceful sail above the world. It is still possible during particularly bright days, to see in such a cloud a huge ram head with curved horns, sleeping on a bent wing. Feathery ends of the clouds wrap up the soft fleece of the sleeping dragon, tickle him and draw him into a deep sleep. When a dragon lets out a sigh from those sleepy depths, the cloud spreads and envelops it, hiding the sleeper from the curious human eye, for, even in their deepest sleep, dragons can feel when they are discovered.

Dragons leave their inaccessible habitats when they have to help people save their fields, vineyards and orchards from floods, hale and storm, or from a long drought. Then they turn into indomitable heavenly warriors against their fateful enemies – serpents or thunder serpents. It is hard to imagine such a battle in the sky, and we are really lucky to have found a few testimonies that can help us in this respect. For a start, in order to better understand this clash, we will mention a rather accurate fact the inhabitants of Pečenjevac found out. Dragon’s rival, the serpent, is of such dimensions, that, according to their calculations, it can carry 10 tons of grapes in a single ear. Granny Smiljana, the oldest inhabitant of Pečenjevac, who could not see with her left eye since birth, and consequently was able to see with the other, right and healthy eye everything an average human eye never could, thus described a battle between a dragon and a serpent and its army of malcontents that took place above the territory of her village in the summer of 1820.

Black and heavy clouds have descended over the village, Granny Smiljana, says, so low that they swallowed the top of the Lombardy poplars, and somehow crept lower and lower, as if they wanted to consume the village houses. There was no rain, nor hail, but some sort of heavy and smelly wind blew, carrying hens and rooster around the village as if they were newborn chicken, even the largest turkey that everyone called, because of his size, the Sultan. Thin whirlwinds were descending from the clouds down to earth uprooting vine, turning and beating it, until the last grape cluster was plucked and drawn into the clouds. Those were, Granny Smiljana says, serpent tails. And then, when she already thought that everything would disappear in the whirlwind, vineyards, and chicken, turkeys and roosters, even roofs, that night will reign over the Earth, a dragon appeared. It was a dragon-snake, all in fire and flaming sparks. The light he emanated through the dark clouds enabled Granny Smiljana for the first time to see the Unquenchable, as she called the serpent. During the battle with the dragon, she was a giant snake with horse’s head, and then she turned into a body of a huge woman with tail and wings, and a dog’s head, with sharp teeth and jaws ajar, whose yawn was more than fifty feet wide. The dragon was at times a pure white thunder, and at times it would bend and become a fiery ball, and, running away from him, the serpent screeched and squeaked so loudly that the clay pots in houses were breaking, and many inhabitants of Pečenjevac remained deaf on one or both ears. When the serpent finally escaped, the clouds became thinner, and then disappeared, and the sun shone over the village. Granny Smiljana’s seventh grandchild, the little Živana whose right eye was blind, managed to see with her left eye what her grandmother had missed. According to Živana, the clouds following the serpent were woven out of the grey souls of the drowned people and suicide victims, and out of all of those who were unsatisfied until the end of their lives, and all the screaming, yelling and squealing was not coming from the serpent, but from their uncomforted desires that scattered after the dragon’s blow.

When he is not taking care of the fields, the dragon likes to turn into a man and to appear among people, to help them with mowing, or some other activity, and he does it very successfully, for even in that shape the dragon keeps the greater part of his strength. This kind of dragon can be recognised by big, impressive eyes that hide some kind of ungraspable depth, but since many handsome men have those eyes, especially for girls, they are not a sure and reliable sign. A lot clearer dragon trait are little wings in his armpits, but the trouble with them is that the dragon would never, even under the threat of death, let anyone see them. Still, there are moments when a dragon is discovered, and there are (female) witnesses, who have seen those wings.

DRAGON IN LOVE

We said about the serpent that she is the dragon’s fateful enemy, fateful – but not the greatest. Dragon’s greatest enemy is the same as man’s: their nature, or, to be more accurate, the fact that he falls in love easily. Dragon’s weakness is pretty girls. When a dragon falls in love, he appears to his chosen one as a handsome young man, not hiding anything, not even the wings in his armpits. He flies over at night, in a fiery light, and then enters the house, usually through the chimney, turning into an irresistible young male. For all the others, except for his darling, he is invisible, and jealous souls with a tendency for spying can sometimes hear a girl’s words addressed to the dragon-man. Girls in these kind of relationships become pale, quiet and fearful, as is usually the case with people who possess an unusual secret, because people are tortured and bothered by secrets, even the most beautiful ones.

People thus think they would feel better if they reveal it, that they would lighten their souls if they tell the secret, and for centuries everyone, from the medicine man and preacher to the doctor, has been trying to convince them it is so, and then, when it is already too late, the revealed secret seems to them as the most valuable thing they had, the thing that made them what they are, specific and extraordinary. That is what secrets are like, just like the sorcerer’s stone.

Dragons err, nevertheless, in always believing that they will succeed in finding the one who would know how to keep a secret, and they often have to pay for this delusion with their head. Thus in the vicinity of Svrljig a dragon called Viden perished, and the inhabitants of two Svrljig villages, Gulijan and Lozan have been fighting for the sad glory of dragon-slayers and head-cutters, ignoring the fact that their villages are now bypassed by fertile rains and increasingly beaten by lethal hails. In order to do justice to the girls, it should be mentioned, nevertheless, that dragon’s love is not easy, it isolates them from the human community and makes them unbelievably lonely, so sometimes they see the only way out in revealing their relationship with the dragon. For those who would like to free themselves from the dragon-lover, and to save their heads at the same time, there are proven recipes. They have to cook basil (Ocimum basilicum)  and then to bathe in that water, or to mix the herb valerian (Valeriana officialis) with a little of their own hair, to burn that mixture and fumigate themselves with its smoke.

Dragon’s tendency to fall easily in love works against him even when he finds a girl completely ready to commit herself. He then, crazy from love, neglects his duties, and then serpents, hail-bearing clouds, or unbearable droughts start reigning over his territory, thoroughly destroying everything on their way. Peasants are then forced to organise Mugajalas, or expulsion and banishment of the dragon. This expulsion was documented more than once, up to a very recent past. One took place in 1908 in Veliki Izvor, and Mr. Svetislav Prvanović also documented two of those cases, one in 1935 and the other in 1946. Men gather, elect a leader, who has to be a saturdayer, a man born on a Saturday, they arm themselves with bells, rattlers and whistles, sticks and rods, and then set out completely nude from one end of the village to the other, making unbearable noise, knocking over whatever can be knocked over on their way, and beating with those rods around themselves. Not one participant of this posse is allowed to say a single word. The other peasants, especially women, retire to their houses, leaving the village to this at the same time mute and noisy procession.

When the dragon feels that the posse is close, he leaves the house of his chosen one, but, hoping that the loud procession will bypass him, or that the peasants would give up, he keeps the human form. So he starts retreating, house by house, clawing every fence, relinquishing the site of his love to the pursuers with the greatest unease. Near the last shacks at the village exit, he finally realises he has lost the battle and that, even if the villagers under incredible circumstances would stop making noise, they would clearly hear the insane fluttering of his little wings in his armpits, which are saying good bye to the loved one in the rhythm of the dragon’s heart. Then his body gets covered in hard scales, the arms turn into powerful wings, and the dragon takes off high above the village. When the peasants see him, they start yelling and crying out of joy, and suddenly their nudity becomes somehow funny to them.

From the book by Milenko Bodirogić, Fairies and Dragons, Orphelin Publishing, 2010.

The drought has lasted for too long in the villages under Meglin, so long that children have grown, started walking and talking, and had still not seen rain or snow in their little lifetimes.  They were skinny and bony children, with long and fragile legs, like spider’s, and big heads that swayed on their thin necks, as if constantly looking for a balance point in which they could calm down and fall asleep, finally having closed the extinguished and always sleepy eyes. And it looked as if they had ceased growing, those children, and only their little bellies, while the famine lasted, grew bigger and bigger.

In that village and during that famine, watching all those sad children, grew Hrst, the son of the Meglin fairy. They also called him the Elf, because he was the son of a fairy, and they called him Animal-Talker, because he spoke with birds and beasts more often than with humans. Everyone knew about that skill of Hrst’s, but he was not mocked for it, nor was he exiled from the village. On the contrary, it seemed that the locals loved him in these difficult times. This was Hrst’s merit, for, just as he knew how to talk to animals, he was able to adjust his speech to every human being. It seemed that Hrst had a special kind of language, the language of gentleness, understanding and joy, made for every person, and that the words his interlocutor is listening to are somehow new and comprehensible only to him, his sensibility and experience. While talking to Hrst, everyone became important and unique to himself, and he could see that very image in the boy’s eyes.

No one, however, could see the end to the drought. After the perishing of the cattle, the villagers knew that the hungry children would start dying as well, and every child of theirs was hungry. So they decided to move, to abandon the village and leave it to the unquenchable thirst and the deadly sun, and start searching for happiness on the other side of the mountain. Hrst knew that the rains would soon come, he found that out from conversations with migratory birds, who were arriving from afar bringing the good news, just as he knew that, if this move were carried out, these people, with whom he was sharing the last bites of food, would leave their bones in the mountain. Famished and weak, they would never find, he suspected, the river they were longing for, and the fertile slopes on the other side of Meglin. But no one believed him. Mad from thirst and hunger, they were already gathering the little they had left, ready to set out on their last journey.

Seeing them exhausted and starved, wading through the village in the attempt to set the details of the migration, Hrst decided on the move of a desperate man. He will look for the Lame Wolf!

For three days and three nights he roamed the mountain, for the wolves have withdrawn because of the drought, and then, on the third night, when his strength was already deceiving him, he saw a wolf on a glen. He was sitting on his hind legs, lighted by the moon, with his head upright. His scent had long announced the boy.

Hrst approached him fearlessly, with the courage of a desperate man who does not have anything to lose anymore. It was the Lame Wolf for sure, the one and only was he, thought Hrst, and he looked just as the birds have described him – very, very old, with shabby and somehow greenish fur, with milky webs on the eyes that made him almost blind. He sat there still, calm. 

In his long life, while he could still see, the Lame Wolf had seen many men, many battles, blood and death, and there was always fear above all. The fear was killing people, and not the fangs of his herd, and this boy had been searching for him for days, he knew, and now, when he decided to show himself, to wait for him on the glen, he was sniffing the air in vain. The fear that gave a particular, unforgettable scent to humans was not there. So he let the boy approach him completely, while the shadows of his wolves, who were ready to dismember the intruder at his sign, were quickly moving in the tree shades around the glen.

The boy introduced himself as Hrst the Animal Talker, and he mentioned his fairy mother and the bird language he first learned, and then he moved to the fatal drought and the dying village. And it was only then that the Lame Wolf realised that he perfectly understands this human being, that he is talking to him in a clear and beautiful language of a young wolf. And there was something else in this language, something he had never heard, thought the Lame Wolf, now already lying on all four, completely charmed, something that made him feel that this child and he were the only creatures in the world under the open sky, and that there was nothing on the glen save the moonlight and the two of them. And the boy was talking about the fairy herds of wild goats, about which he had heard from his mother, and he was asking him that his wolves be shepherds and to bring those herds to the village, because otherwise everyone in that village of his would die.

And the Lame Wolf felt how somewhere at the bottom of his stomach a strange coil was moving and beginning to jolt, conquering him completely, flooding him with the feeling that could have only one name – joy! After the long decades, he was happy again as a young wolf hunting for the first time. This strange boy and his pure wolf tongue, his crazy suggestions that wolves be herdsmen and save the village, all of that represented for the Lame Wolf a crystal beam of joy falling on him like moonlight. And in order not to inappropriately start laughing joyfully, the Lame Wolf started howling. The shadows of the herd between the trees stopped, and everything calmed down.

 “What do I get in return?” he asked the boy.

“Nothing!” answered Hrst, and it seemed to the Lame Wolf that he could not stand it any longer, that the laughter kept for a hundred years would break out of him. Is there, thought he, another lunacy he would hear tonight, which would not turn into a pure truth.

“Apart from my friendship, which would not change anything,” added Hrst. You all will have your wolves’ fate, and we will have our human fate. Still, sometimes they can meet without the blood and killing. Then we can be happy, like you are tonight.

“Good! And what do you humans promise?” asked the Lame Wolf.

“We will not kill a single goat. We will only use their milk.”

“Otherwise we will kill the entire village!” growled the Lame Wolf, and suddenly it seemed to him that he was the same as he used to be.

“Otherwise kill the entire village!” agreed Hrst.

And thus set out the famous, strange herds and their even stranger shepherds, about whom they still talk underneath Meglin. Every night, the wolves from the Lame Wolf’s pack would separate half of the fairy herd, around a hundred goats, and take it to the village. The next evening they would bring the other half of the herd, and take the one from the previous night back to the pasture.

At first, the milking was unsuccessful. Scared by the grinning fangs of their shepherds and by the rough hands of the villagers, the goats had almost no milk. And it seemed that the village would start hating Hrst for the first time.

Was the drought not enough? thought they. Now he had brought them the blood-thirsty wolves, and because of them they could not even think about moving anymore, and these milk-less wild goats, which they could not even kill. At night, hungry, scared and angry, they would retire to their houses, letting the wolves roam and howl around the village and the horrified goats bleat. It seemed to them that the end has approached, and that the fairies, and the son of one of them, and the wolves, and the forest goats, and who knows who else, were revenging themselves for something they did not commit, and no one could remember what that could be.

Hrst, night in and night out, gathered the goats. He stroked their sharp, black fur. He placed his head on the hard, goat foreheads and bleated in a kid’s tongue, stroking them around their necks, across the spine, and then their belly all the way to the udder. And on the seventh night, he collected all the pots around the house and milked almost a hundred liters of milk. It was a thick and sweet milk, with the scent of fairy herbs.

From the next day on, the villagers were milking the goats themselves and thus lived from the milk and cheese, and if to any of them it would occur what a nice bite one of these fairy animals would represent, the very sight of the black ring of wolves circling around the village would be enough to thwart every carnivorous thought.

For years after the Great Drought the story circled around how at night, in the deep forests of Meglin, a boy and the Lame Wolf could be seen together. And although no one dared to enter the Meglin forests in the deaf period of the night and check this story, everyone was convinced that it was true. And also, a fearful storyteller would add, the Lame Wolf could be heard laughing.

From the book by Milenko Bodirogić, Fairies and Dragons, Orphelin Publishing, 2010.

While he was, hidden in the bushes, watching Meglinka bathing in a lake, Stojan did not have any intentions, good or bad. At that time he did not know her name was Meglinka, he almost did not even know what his name was, but he knew, or better said, he felt he had to do something in order to keep that creature from the lake next to him. For Stojan felt that everything he had seen and experienced up to this moment, and everything he will see and experience later in his life, will not be worth anything in comparison with this beauty from the green waters of Lake Meglin. So he, as if in a dream, ran out of his hiding, snatched the fairy’s wing veil and started running, still unaware of his deeds and their meaning. He ran breathless, ready even for his heart to explode in that run, but now completely sure that there is some kind of unbreakable tie between these wings that were light as a feather and Meglinka.

In the evening, when everything in the village had settled down, the sheep, and hens, and nightingales in the rose bushes, Meglinka appeared in front of Stojan’s house. She was completely nude, but her body was hidden by her blond hair that almost reached the ground. Meglinka did not say a word, she simply passed by the dumbstruck Stojan, and entered the house. Thus began their life together.

Stojan found for her clothes woven from the most refined wool and the best-processed flax, knowing that for her skin this is still too rough, and Meglinka wove her hair into braids and wrapped them around her head. She was the most beautiful bride the village has ever seen. And the saddest, the peasants would add.

But as the time passed, they grumbled more and more. It was true that with Meglinka’s arrival Stojan’s herds became bigger, the sheep and the cows produced more milk, and hens more eggs, and his roosters were bigger than the neighbours’ ganders, and the wheat grew faster and more dense, and his pastures were most exuberant. And it seemed to the villagers that this was not Stojan’s merit, but the merit of this beautiful witch he brought into the house, after whom the wheat would bend as if showing her respect, and everything that she touched would become fertile and filled with fruits. The women from the village were jealous because of Stojan’s attention and love. They watched as he combed her every evening in the yard and made her braids, as if he were not touching female hair but some relic, they watched how he, at twilight, carried her around glens, prancing and dancing out of joy as a colt.

Stojan was blind and deaf to the village. It was important for him that Meglinka is next to him, and that she, forgetting about her fairy sorrow, would fall in love with him at least a bit. He hoped when a child is born to them, she would finally step over to his side, and that she would finally smile.

What surprised and confused Meglinka the most was that she loved and hated the same thing about Stojan – his human imperfection, incompleteness, that vulnerability of his fate, which was hanging on such a thin thread that it seemed a deeper breath would cut it short. And then nothing would be left of that life and that unbelievable tenderness. The only thing that would surely remain is his wondrous, vast love, which would certainly remain after him, for she thought that he was woven and made out of it, just like the dust and ashes remain after people, because they were made out of dust and ashes.

When their son was born, Stojan gave him the name Hrst. It was an old and pretty name, but he was motivated by other reasons. For Stojan it was more of a deep and mysteriously sincere murmur than a name, and one could not call it out loud. And the three of them, Meglinka, Hrst and he, thought he, have to be always together, as the real love deserves, and there could be no loud calling. In a constant fear from Meglinka’s flight into the forest, he tried, by thus naming the son, to anticipate every possibility of departure.

Still, with Hrst’s birth nothing had changed. Meglinka was still sad and at night, when she would think Stojan had fallen asleep, she would slip away and roam the groves, untying her hair and letting out almost animal-like sighs of pain. Stojan would follow her and come back before her, at dawn, all damp and broken with the awareness that he is the cause of her sorrow. He would free her, he thought, and enable her again to be the way she was when he saw her hidden in the bushes on the shore of Lake Meglin. He took the fairy wing veil and put it on a thrashing floor where Meglinka passed in her night walks.

We do not know if Meglinka would have left Hrst and Stojan if she had found the wing veil. We do not know and we will never find out, because the wing veil was found before Meglinka by the angry villagers, and they burned it, as witch’s veil, as snake’s skin. Meglinka found a pile of ashes and she knelt for a long time above it, clasping her knees, rocking from heels to toes, from toes to heels. And then she disappeared and never came back to the village. Not belonging to the human world and having lost the last hope she would return to the fairies, she turned into a bird. Into a passerine. This bird, with its broken, fast flight, now to the left, now to the right, testifies to this date about Meglinka’s longing for the fairy world and her suffering for the abandoned home.

Stojan found the burned wing veil and then searched for Meglinka for days. And then. when he noticed a strange bird flying above the house and landing on Hrst’s shoulder, he took the son to his brother’s wife in the neighbouring village. Then he set out to the deepest forest and disappeared.

They say that Stojan turned into an owl and then he suddenly found out that his son’s name, Hrst, is ideal for calling out in the bird’s tongue, and that love can thus live on. Hrst was called during the day by his mother, and at night the father rocked him to sleep. So both of them loved him and taught him the love language of animals and birds.

From the book by Milenko Bodirogić, Fairies and Dragons, Orphelin Publishing, 2010.