BALAURI & ZMEI -

ROMANIAN DRAGONS

-an article by Alastair McBeath & Andrei Dorian Gheorghe,

first published in The Dragon Chronicle,

Number 13, July 1998-

As part of our continuing examination of dragons in Romanian mythology,

we look at some of the tales featuring the two chief dragon-types found there.

In doing so, we have chosen to give mainly details from the myths, legends, tales

and ballads themselves, with little attempt at commentary or comparison

with other myths from elsewhere.

That many of the tales do appear to have counterparts from other places

is undoubted. Much of the material we give has been translated into English

for the first time by us for use with this article.

The Romanian dragon is “balaur”, a term which means something like

“golden serpent” (Mitrut, 1998).

It is perceived as evil. It is a composite creature with a reptile’s body, bat-like wings

and seven (sometimes nine, twelve or just one) reptilian or serpentine heads.

It can pour forth fire from its mouths, and it lives in the air among the clouds,

creating thunder, lightning, hailstones and rain.

Sometimes, it is seen as the personification of the lightning.

Its enemy is Fat Frumos (“Beautiful Boy”), the good hero in Romanian mythology,

who is the only one able to finally triumph over the balaur.

We met Fat Frumos in an earlier TDC article (McBeath & Gheorghe 1998),

and we shall find out more of him in future.

Ion Ottescu (1907; Chapter 1) gives a tale from Neamt county, in eastern Romania:

“When the great rains and storms are unleashed, the Balaur revives

and gambols among the clouds.

When the clouds are thin, the Balaur can fall to the Earth.

In olden times, a Balaur fell on a place called Balaur Hill, and he lay there

for a long time, slowly rotting away.

His length and thickness were very great, his skeleton was gigantic, and one of

his ribs was two royal palms [approximately 56 cm] in breadth.”

In some myths, the balaur was originally a snake which lay concealed from sight

for nine years, and became transformed into this creature (Kernbach, 1983).

In other legends, the balaur is named a “zmeu”.

The zmeu is a very strong, male, bipedal creature, able to fly on the wings

of the wind, although he has no wings himself.

He is sometimes nicknamed “Zburatorul” (The Flying Being) as a result.

He is humanoid in shape, but has the scaly hide of a snake, and a long tail.

He lives in taramul celalalt, “the Other Space”, another dimension.

He can breathe fire, and possesses a mace which can be hurled at his opponents.

This magical weapon has the ability to return to its thrower in some myths.

When he wants to, the zmeu can remove his scaly hide, to appear as a normal man,

especially when he is alone with his wife, who is generally a young, human woman.

The zmeu is hoaxed by a wag in many tales, rather like the Devil in

British landscape folklore, but he is famous for his inconceivable strength,

which makes him invincible and dreadful.

As with the balaur, only Fat Frumos is able to fight with, and even defeat, a zmeu,

but the combat is always very difficult, and Fat Frumos frequently has to rely on

magical assistance to win.

The terms balaur (plural balauri) and zmeu (plural zmei) are interchangeable in

Romanian myth and legend, but zmeu tales are by far the more numerous.

Similarly, Fat Frumos is not so much the name of a specific heroic figure,

more a generic title for an almost archetypal heroic inspiration that may reside

in almost any human suddenly thrust into a potentially deadly situation.

The zmeu’s nickname, “Zburatorul, The Flying Being” is also the title of

the Romanian myth of sexuality.

It was first poetically prepared and published by Ion Heliade Radulescu (1872).

This is a paraphrased version of it: In a Wallachian village, on a night when

“...the stars began to shine one after another,/.../Followed by the late Moon,/

And, sometimes, a star fell like a bad omen...”,

a young maiden called Florica had

erotic dreams, which tormented her even after she awoke.

She thought this might be because a handsome flying magician came at night

to eat her dreams, vanishing before morning.

However, “In the height of the night, from the sky’s midst,/The black attire sown

by stars/Covers a world which dreams/Unknown incidents...”, the old women from

the village asked themselves: “What light was that like a lightning strike/Sending

out sparks in the mid-night?/Is it a star that falls? Is it an emperor who dies?/Or a

damned Zmeu?/Probably, it was a Zmeu/ Who came down to Florica/

Through her house’s stove-pipe,/.../A Balaur of light with a fiery tail...”.

Such a creature usually enters a girl’s dreams disguised as a handsome,

slender young man with golden hair, provoking her great sexual agonies.

The old women’s closing comment is naturally “God forbid!”

We have elsewhere (Gheorghe & McBeath, in press) discussed the Romanian

beliefs in “shooting stars” (meteors) as omens of death, and other aspects of

Romanian dragon-related meteor mythology.

We do not repeat most of that again here, except to note that Ottescu (1907;

Chapter 3) makes the following comments. “Thinking of fireballs

[very bright meteors], the peasants add that there are other falling stars,

which are round or long, and which can enter into men’s houses,

or fall to the Earth, or even land on men.

These are the flying balauri (the Romanian dragons) or zmei

(balauri in human form), which walk in the night to disfigure or kill lone men.

This is because the zmei are evil beings.

Thus, these stars are also known as lost or travelling stars.

When the zmei come into men’s houses, they search for boys and girls to torture”.

Dragon-women, the zmeoaice, also exist, as we commented in

(McBeath & Gheorghe, 1998).

Continuing the astronomical theme, the following discussion of eclipses is

largely based on extracts from (Ottescu, 1907; Chapter 6).

The Romanian peasants thought that eclipses of the Moon existed because

the Moon was eaten by unearthly monsters called varcolaci

(Latin “worm-like creatures”, from vermicolacius, varkolak in Slavonic).

The varcolaci are explained in various ways as being either:

a kind of animal smaller than a dog, or simply small dogs; balauri or zmei;

animals with many mouths like octopus suckers; or ghosts called Pricolici.

They are also assigned various origins, including appearing

from children who died unbaptised;

from children born to unwed parents; if someone chewed maize

while poking the fire; if someone brushed dust towards the Sun

while sweeping their house; or if a woman spun without a candle in the night.

The association of the varcolaci with the balauri seems to have had

a very early origin.

However, the etymology of the word varcolac indicates it derives from “wolf”,

thus the little dogs should actually be little wolves.

Ottescu suggests this belief about the wolf-varcolaci must be very old too.

In a separate Romanian myth, we find that the wolf was originally created

from clay by the Devil, but that God resculpted it better, and gave it life.

In the process, a fragment of clay fell off and became the snake.

We saw in an earlier article (Gheorghe & McBeath, 1998) the

intimate wolf-serpent link in creating the wolf’s head and

serpent-bodied “windsock” dragon battle standard used by the Dacians and others.

This finding merely reinforces that earlier point further.

There are many ballads, going back a very long way in time, extolling the

brave Romanian soldiers who fought against invaders from outside the country.

The Romanian soldiery are thus considered as “proud cubs of the zmei”

(because the zmei are very strong), which may contain echoes of

their Dacian ancestry too.

Two further myths from (Niculita-Voronca, 1903) concern astronomical subjects,

showing that the zmei and balauri are connected with the existence of

the Sun and Moon.

A Moldavian myth holds that the Sun was a girl, God’s daughter,

who was abducted by some zmei who wanted to rape her,

but she managed to escape them, and ran far away into the sky.

In a second tale, also from Moldavia, we find that God created the Sun

as a golden man with wings of fire.

The Sun lived alone and sad for seven years, so God, aided by the Devil,

decided to create the Moon as a silver girl, with wings made of precious stones,

in order to light the night.

God built for her a silver way, so she could walk after the Sun, but never catch up

with him. Now, when the Sun walks the sky, the Moon reposes in the solar house.

The Moon is a woman who periodically becomes a child, then a young, mature

and finally an old, woman, before undergoing her monthly rebirth.

She is raised by seven imps (servants of the Devil).

Sometimes her wings are eaten by balauri, because they are the creators of

the precious stones which make up her wings.

If in Britain we say “to hoist a kite”, the Romanians say “to hoist a zmeu”.

Indeed, kite-flying events in Romania are still sometimes called

“Festival of the Zmee”.

Lore concerning wind and weather accounts for a sizeable proportion of

other balaur and zmeu tales.

According to one of these myths (Niculita-Voronca, 1903), the wind was a

child born to an emperor’s daughter, impregnated by a dream.

When her child was born, God christened him Ion the Wind. God then chose a

very large tree in which lived a zmeu.

He drove away the zmeu and fastened Ion the Wind to the tree with iron bands,

leaving only a narrow space so Ion could just breathe.

Finally God threw Ion the Wind and the tree into the sea,

and now Ion is carried by the waves, but still lives.

This was because God knew if he left the wind free, as Ion was very strong,

he would have destroyed the world, overturning the Earth.

Another myth, in which a zmeu features rather less peripherally,

concerns the “vantoasele”.

These are supernatural flying maidens, a variant on the Iele

(whom we met in (McBeath & Gheorghe, 1997); see especially the box

entitled ‘“Hora” the Ring Dance’ on p.13).

Here, they are represented as the daughters of the Wind (vant = wind).

They do not appear to be the daughters of Ion the Wind, however, as they are

sister-princesses, who become very upset when a zmeu abducts the most beautiful

of them, the last-born child.

While hunting for their lost sibling, a whirlwind appeared, called vantoase or volbura.

It is not clear who caused this, the zmeu or the vantoasele, but such a phenomenon

is a typical draconic attribute found in many other places.

Ultimately, the vantoasele try to save their sister by attacking the iron gates of the

zmeu’s stronghold, but as with many Romanian tales,

the myth ends before they actually rescue their captive sister.

Their adventure has thus remained incomplete for all time (German, 1928.).

Hailstones are said to be made by the Solomonari who walk among the clouds,

or they ride balauri which carry the hailstones for them.

The Solomonari throw hailstones wherever they want to.

It may be that the small, mobile clouds that sometimes appear ahead

of more stormy clouds, especially those before hail-storms,

gave the idea of the balauri-riders who choose where the hail will fall.

Such outriders of the storm are often referred to poetically

in many other tales and legends across the world.

The name Solomonari seems to derive from the Biblical Solomon, perceived

in Romanian peasant tradition as someone quite extraordinary, if mysterious.

In this, the hail-throwing is a punishment for everyone who does not match up to

the Solomanari’s high ideals - representing the wisdom of Solomon, in effect.

Solomon was also thought of as someone who knew how to dominate evil spirits.

Some of these spirits were trapped by him in bottles, whose corks he sealed,

and then the bottles were thrown into the sea.

The evil spirits saw Solomon’s seal on their bottles, and did not dare to emerge.

He cast other spirits into the Earth’s depths in a similar way,

leaving only a few spirits free to cause much trouble on Earth and in the sky

(Ottescu, 1907; Chapter 8b).

Lastly, the rainbow is represented as a balaur with two heads.

“After the Flood sent by God, God created the rainbow as a sign that

He would never again flood the world with rains so heavy; now when it rains and

the Sun is shining brightly in the sky too, the rainbow appears as a reminder of this.

The rainbow-balaur has two heads, one so it can drink water from an earthly river

or lake, the other to send rain from the clouds.”

Anyone who can travel on their knees from the place where the rainbow was seen

to the place where the rainbow-balaur drinks water, will change sex (Crintea, 1994).

REFERENCES:

Crintea, A. 1994. In: Legends of the Cosmos. Grai si Suflet Publishing House.

Bucharest, Romania. (In Romanian)

German, Traian. 1928. Popular Meteorology. Greek Catholic Seminary Printing

Works. Blaj, Romania. (In Romanian)

Gheorghe, Andrei Dorian & McBeath, Alastair. 1998. The Dacian

Dragon Standard, King Decebal, Emperor Trajan and King Arthur.

The Dragon Chronicle No.12: pp.13-19.

Gheorghe, Andrei Dorian & McBeath, Alastair. In press. Romanian Meteor

Mythology, in: Knöfel, André & McBeath, Alastair (eds.). Proceedings of

the International Meteor Conference, Petnica, Yugoslavia, 1997

September 25-28. International Meteor Organization. Postdam, Germany.

Kernbach, Victor. 1983. Dictionary of Mythology. Albatross Publishing House.

Bucharest, Romania. (In Romanian)

McBeath, Alastair & Gheorghe, Andrei Dorian. 1997. The Great Romanian

Sky Dragon. The Dragon Chronicle No.11: pp.11-14.

McBeath, Alastair & Gheorghe, Andrei Dorian. 1998. Romanian Sky Dragons

& Celestial Serpents. The Dragon Chronicle No.12: pp.31-33.

Mitrut, Dan. 1998. The Origin of the Name “Decebal”, in:

(Gheorghe & McBeath, 1998). The Dragon Chronicle No.12: p.18.

Niculita-Voronca, Elena. 1903. Traditions and Beliefs of the Romanian People,

Collected and Prepared Mythologically. Isidor Wiegler Printing Works.

Cernauti, Romania. (In Romanian)

Ottescu, Ion. 1907. Romanian Peasants’ Beliefs in Stars and Sky. Romanian

Academy Annals. Bucharest, Romania. (In Romanian; English translation

in preparation by Gheorghe, Andrei Dorian & McBeath, Alastair)

Radulescu, Ion Heliade. 1872. Seraphs and Odes of the Romanians. Bucharest,

Romania. (In Romanian)