Slunjčica Fairy Stories

Anita’s Stories or her grandmother Roza (maiden name Špelić) Obajdin’s Oral Histories

Photo: Vedran Božićević

In Slunj and the surrounding area, stories of fairies and mystical creatures connected with nature have been passed on for generations.

Fairies from this area are powerful and fickle beings. Although they are described as beautiful girls, one can never be too careful with them. Fairies often have supernatural features such as goat cleft hooves or horse hooves. According to folklore, they mostly inhabit deep forests, caves or live around the source of the river Slunjčica and along the riverbanks. But sometimes, they will come into the backyards.

Photo: Vedran Božićević

One of the most famous stories comes from Rastoke. According to folklore, during the night, fairies would take horses that the millers left under gazebos. At dawn, they would return the horses tired and sweaty, with braided manes. In the morning, they would wash clothes in the river, dance in a circle and beckon to the millers to join them. It is believed that to this day, fairies still gather near the Vilina kosa waterfall.

Anita Janković (maiden name Obajdin) with her children

To this story, we will add the narration of Anita Janković, maiden name Obajdin. She was born in Slunj. She spent the first ten years of her life in Podmelnica in Slunj. Due to the war and aggression, in 1991 she moved with her parents to Karlovac, where she still lives. However, every chance she gets, she returns with her children to Slunj, to her hometown, to her parents who returned after the liberation and to her roots. With pride, she says that she belongs both to Karlovac and Slunj.

Anita’s grandmother and grandfather – Roze and Mile Obajdin Ban

Anita has saved all her grandmother Roza’s stories, which were usually told when the power was out, with a lit candle. Sometimes her grandfather Mile (Ban) added his stories as well. To this very day, the stories live on. With melancholy, Anita remembers how her grandmother would, before telling a story, give an introduction about how there are moments in the day when a person has to stop and respect the silence and those moments are the hours when night falls or when dawn rises. That is also the time of the fairies, the time when they dance in a circle in the backyards and when it is wise for a person not to be in their way.

Photo: Vedran Božičević

Here are some stories from audio recording, with minimal editing for the text form.

Photo: Vedran Božičević

Be Careful with Your Words or the Fairies Might Take You Away!

One story is from the times when my grandmother was a little girl. She is from Lumbardenik, a village close to the town of Slunj.

In that old time, as was customary, the adults would send their children to get water from the Slunjčica. And so, one year, there were two sisters in one family. The younger one would always follow the older one. The older sister was opposed to that and she would tell her to get lost, “Go away, move! I am going alone; you are in my way! You are always following me!”

But the younger girl never succumbed. In her anger, the older sister told her,

“I hope fairies take you away!”

After a while, she realized that the younger sister was no longer there. She was simply gone. Disappeared. People searched for days and were unable to find her.

After several days, they found her in a cave near the Slunjčica hanging on ‘sekulaze’, meaning roots of the ivy growing in the caves. Her mouth was dirty and so was her face. Incidentally, fairies were feeding her roots and plants growing in the cave so that she would survive.

Although no one really believed the story of the girl who was kidnapped by fairies and all because of her older sister’s words, “I hope fairies take you away!”, people eventually started believing that, even though she had been saved, that girl was never the same afterwards. She became more recluse, as if she did not belong to this world anymore.

Unfortunately, when she got a little older, she drowned.

Photo: Vedran Božičević

Fairies Must Never Know That Someone Has Seen Them

When women went to wash clothes in the Slunjčica, they would often see fairies. That always happened right before nightfall or early in the morning. However, fairies never should have known that someone had seen them. They would become nasty and wicked and they would do all kinds of mischief.

So it happened that one man was going home from prelo one morning and he saw a fairy. He thought it was a woman washing clothes and he said out loud, “What the devil, who is washing clothes at this hour?”

The fairy approached him and slapped him behind the ear. After that, he was deaf for six months.

Photo: Vedran Božičević

Fairies Braid Horses’ Manes

When people took their wheat to Rastoke to be milled, they would leave horses over night because, naturally, not everything could be milled during the day.

The next day, they would come to pick up their flour and horses. Wherever the horses stayed the night in Rastoke, waiting for the wheat to be milled, they were found in the morning with their manes braided.

My grandmother would say that horses were often found in the morning stunned, out of breath and wet – as if someone had been riding them the whole night. Essentially, it must have been fairies, they rode them all night.

Photo: Vedran Božičević

Instead of a Pretty Girl, a Fairy with Goat Legs

Anita remembers one story about fairies having goat legs.

My grandmother used to tell stories about her brother driving a cart in the evening before dark. There was a pretty girl standing by the road and he gave her a lift on his cart.

One thing led to another, a pretty girl, laughing, talking and at some point, he put a hand on her leg. But it was not a pretty girl’s leg, it was a goat’s leg.

Photo: Vedran Božičević

The Spirit of a Mother Feeding her Child

Here is a story that is not about fairies per se, it is more about apparitions and spectres, about which my grandmother also often spoke.

I remember she told me how a woman died at childbirth in Lumbardenik and the baby was very small.

At that time, there were no food supplements like today. Everybody was scared whether that baby would survive. No one was able to feed it and the baby refused all the food they tried to give it. However, at some point in the night, after crying for a while, the baby would always suddenly stop and after that people heard satisfied cooing, “Yum, yum, yum.” As if the baby had just eaten. There were stories that one man saw a dead woman, the spirit of the baby’s mother, coming every night to feed her child.

Photo: Vedran Božićević

That kind of stories taught us that the world is more than meets the eye. “We realize that later,” Anita says and adds, “In the still of the night, with the murmur of the river, fairies may really dance. And all that people can really do is to respect them and never find themselves in their way.”

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We thank the volunteers who helped turn Anita’s narration into written words.

• Rastoke enthusiast, radio journalist and editor, publicist and author of documentaries Vesna Jurić-Rukavina
• Retired teacher Mira Vukošić
• Photographer Vedran Božičević

Vesna Jurić-Rukavina – radio journalist and editor, publicist and author of documentaries who, with her knowledge and love for Rastoke, helped turn Anita’s narration into written words.