The Strzyga
Poland (Małopolska, Podhale highlands, Silesia) · Folk tradition, recorded nineteenth century
The child had been marked at the birth. The village midwives of the Podhale and the Małopolska foothills had a list of the marks, and the list, in the ethnographic record collected through the second half of the nineteenth century by Oskar Kolberg, did not vary. A second row of teeth set behind the first, small and unerupted at the gum. The brows joined above the nose in a single dark line. The hair at the crown grew in two distinct whorls instead of one. The skin under the arms remained smooth past the age at which the village expected it to coarsen. The cry, in some accounts, was hoarse rather than thin. When the village midwife found two of these marks on a single child she said nothing to the mother. She crossed herself and spoke privately, before the week was out, to the priest and to the father.
The child was a strzyga.
The folk diagnosis held that such a child had been born with two souls and two hearts. One soul was the soul of the parish, given at the baptism, attached to the body and to the village in the proper manner. The other soul was older and was not given by anyone. It was the older soul that would not consent to die when the body did, and that would, after the funeral, rise.
The village had a procedure.
On the small years
The child was raised.
The Kolberg field volumes are particular on this point. The marked child was not exposed, was not given away, was not denounced from the pulpit. The marked child was baptised twice, on the same day, by two priests where two priests could be found, on the theory that one baptism would take the first soul and the second would catch the other. The marked child was given the long form of the name and never the short. The marked child was watched, by the mother and the godmother and the eldest woman of the household, with a closeness not extended to the unmarked siblings.
The marked child, the accounts agree, rarely lived to seven.
The death, when it came, was not violent. The marked child weakened over a season. The cough started in autumn. The eating fell away by the first snow. The marked child died, generally, in the small hours of a winter morning, in the bed in which it had been born, with the mother and the godmother present and the priest, if the priest could be reached in the snow, at the door. The first burial was conducted in the proper manner. The grave was opened, the coffin lowered, the earth replaced. The mother, in the accounts, did not always weep. The mother, in the accounts, often went home and slept a long sleep.
On the rite the village kept ready
Within the year the second soul rose.
The signs the village waited for were specific. The cattle of the household began to give thin milk. The smaller children of the parish began to wake in the night complaining that someone small had been sitting on their chests. A neighbour’s infant was found, in the morning, with a faint bruise the size of a thumb at the corner of the mouth. The dogs of the village, in the older accounts, would not pass the corner of the cemetery in which the marked grave lay.
The village dug.
The reburial rite is described, with small regional variations, across the Małopolska and Podhale and Silesian field records. The body was lifted from the grave. The body was found, in the cases recorded, in the state the village had predicted: the cheek full, the nails grown forward, the small mouth holding a thin red trace at the inner lip. The head was severed from the body with a sickle that had been kept hung in the rafters of the parish barn for this work and for no other. The head was placed between the feet of the corpse in the coffin. A length of aspen, sharpened at the foot of the hearth the night before, was driven through the chest where the second heart had been. The body was turned face-downward in the coffin so that, were it to wake again, it would dig itself further into the ground rather than out of it. The mouth was packed, in the highland accounts, with a small handful of poppy seed: the dead, the village said, would have to count each seed before it could rise, and the dead could not count past three.
The grave was closed.
On what the parish did not record
The parish registers of the Podhale do not record the reburials.
The priests of the foothill parishes were aware of the rite, attended at least in some cases, did not condemn it from the pulpit, and did not enter it in the books. The village understood the silence. The village had been performing the rite, in the accounts of the eldest informants Kolberg’s collectors interviewed in the eighteen-seventies, for as long as anyone living could remember. The procedure was not theological. The procedure was hygiene.
The archive holds no position on whether the marked child of the Podhale household carried a second soul beneath the ribcage of the body recorded at the first burial. The archive observes only that the village kept a sickle in the parish barn for this work and for no other, that the aspen was sharpened the night before, that the head was placed between the feet, that the mouth was packed with poppy seed, and that the village, in the morning after the second closing, slept a long sleep.
- Kolberg, Oskar. *Lud: Jego zwyczaje, sposób życia, mowa, podania, przysłowia, obrzędy, gusła, zabawy, pieśni, muzyka i tańce*. Kraków and Warsaw, 1865-1890. The thirty-three-volume ethnographic survey of the Polish lands compiled in the field across four decades; the *strzyga* and *strzygoń* entries appear in the Małopolska and Podhale volumes.
- Moszyński, Kazimierz. *Kultura ludowa Słowian*. Volume II/1: *Kultura duchowa*. Kraków: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 1934. The standard comparative treatment of Slavic spiritual culture, with the *strzyga* placed in the broader pan-Slavic double-soul revenant tradition.
- Pełka, Leonard. *Polska demonologia ludowa*. Warsaw: Iskry, 1987. A synthesising study of Polish folk demonology drawing on Kolberg, Moszyński, and the post-war ethnographic record.