The Zduhać: The Serbian Sleepers Who Fight Hailstorms in Their Dreams
In the mountain villages of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, into the twentieth century, certain men were watched with a particular respect when the weather turned. As the hail-clouds massed over the ridges—the summer storms that could strip a year's grain and grapes in a quarter of an hour—these men grew heavy, yawned, and fell asleep : suddenly, irresistibly, wherever they were, in the field, at the table, at the fair. And the village knew what the sleep was, and enforced its one iron rule: do not wake him. Do not move him. Above all, do not turn his body. For the sleeping man was a zduhać (or stuha , or vetrovnjak , the wind-man, by district): one of the born champions of the community, whose spirit had left the body and gone up into the storm —to meet, above the ridgeline, the zduhaći of the hostile weather, or of the rival region whose clouds these were, and to fight them : spirit against spirit, in the thunderheads, with the year's harvest as the stakes. If ...