In Montenegro, Herzegovina, and Bocca Cattaro the people believe that the soul of a sleeping man is wafted by the winds to the summit of a mountain, and, when a number of such has assembled, they become fierce giants who uproot trees to use as clubs and hurl rocks and stones at one another. Their hissing and groans are heard especially during the nights in spring and autumn. Those struggling crowds are not composed merely of human souls, but include the spirits of many animals, such as oxen, dogs, and even cocks, but oxen especially join in the struggles.
Witches
Female evil spirits are generally called veshtitze (singular, veshtitza, derived obviously from the ancient Bohemian word ved, which means ‘to know’), and are supposed to be old women possessed by an evil spirit, irreconcilably hostile to men, to other women, and most of all to children. They correspond more or less to the English conception of ‘witches.’ When an old woman goes to sleep, her soul leaves her body and wanders about till it enters the body of a hen or, more frequently, that of a black moth. Flying about, it enters those houses where there are a number of children, for its favourite food is the heart of an infant. From time to time veshtitze meet to take their supper together in the branches of some tree. An old woman having the attributes of a witch may join such meetings after having complied with the rules prescribed by the experienced veshtitze, and this is usually done by pronouncing certain stereotyped phrases. The peasants endeavour to discover such creatures, and, if they succeed in finding out a witch, a jury is hastily formed and is given full power to sentence her to death. One of the most certain methods used to discover whether the object of suspicion is really a witch or not, is to throw the victim into the water, for if she floats she is surely a witch. In this case she is usually burnt to death. This test was not unknown in England.
Vampires
The belief in the existence of vampires is universal throughout the Balkans, and indeed it is not uncommon in certain parts of western Europe. Some assert that this superstition must be connected with the belief generally held in the Orthodox Church that the bodies of those who have died while under excommunication by the Church are incorruptible, and such bodies, being taken possession of by evil spirits, appear before men in lonely places and murder them. In Montenegro vampires are called lampirs or tenatz, and it is thought that they suck the blood of sleeping men, and also of cattle and other animals, returning to their graves after their nocturnal excursions changed into mice. In order to discover the grave where the vampire is, the Montenegrins take out a black horse, without blemish, and lead it to the cemetery. The suspected corpse is dug up, pierced with stakes and burnt. The authorities, of course, are opposed to such superstitious practices, but some communities have threatened to abandon their dwellings, and thus leave whole villages deserted, unless allowed to ensure their safety in their own way. The code of the Emperor Doushan the Powerful provides that a village in which bodies of dead persons have been exhumed and burnt shall be punished as severely as if a murder had been committed; and that a resnik, that is, the priest who officiates at a ceremony of that kind, shall be anathematized. Militchevitch, a famous Serbian ethnographist, relates an incident where a resnik, as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, read prayers out of the apocrypha of Peroon when an exorcism was required. The revolting custom has been completely suppressed in Serbia. In Montenegro the Archbishop Peter II. endeavoured to uproot it, but without entire success. In Bosnia, Istria and Bulgaria it is also sometimes heard of. The belief in vampires is a superstition widely spread throughout Roumania, Albania and Greece.[6]
Nature Worship
Even in our own day there are traces of sun and moon worship, and many Serbian and Bulgarian poems celebrate the marriage of the sun and the moon, and sing Danitza (the morning star) and Sedmoro Bratye (‘The Seven Brothers’—evidently The Pleiades).[7] Every man has his own star, which appears in the firmament at the moment of his birth and is extinguished when he dies. Fire and lightning are also worshipped. It is common belief that the earth rests on water, that the water reposes on a fire and that that fire again is upon another fire, which is called Zmayevska Vatra (‘Fire of the Dragons’).