Łukasz Kozak: The Collectivization of Agriculture Killed the Ghouls [INTERVIEW]

Łukasz Kozak: The Collectivization of Agriculture Killed the Upiórs [INTERVIEW]

kozak_lukasz_2.jpg, default, Łukasz Kozak, photo: courtesy of author, Łukasz Kozak: The Collectivization of Agriculture Killed the Upiórs [INTERVIEW]

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Why should we take vampires away from the Romanians? Can upiórs be friendly, and who believed Mickiewicz was rising from the grave? Łukasz Kozak, medievalist and author of ‘The Upiór: A Natural History’ and ‘With Stake and Spade: Vampiric Diversity in Poland’, talks about the living dead in ancient Poland and the medieval sense of humour.

Piotr Policht: Belief in upiórs was still common in Poland at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, while today even the meaning of the word upiór (editor’s note: a demonic being from Slavic and Turkic folklore, an early prototype of the vampire) has become somewhat blurred.

Łukasz Kozak: ‘Mythology’ is actually the wrong word. When I began working on the book Upiór: Historia Naturalna (The Upiór: A Natural History), I myself thought in terms of mythology, or even – worse still – Slavic demonology and pagan beliefs… It turned out that it wasn’t mythology at all but anti-mythology. In reality, these are records of absolutely true events. This doesn’t mean that I believe in corpses crawling out of graves (though I would have nothing against it), but it does mean that people were once completely convinced of the existence of upiórs (dead people who could leave their graves) or living upiórs (people with two souls, one of which would remain in the body after death and bear the hallmarks of being bound to return from beyond the grave even while they were still alive). They took the most genuine, realistic measures possible to protect themselves. We find echoes of these in court records and the press. These are testimonies of real events; exhumations of bodies believed to have returned from the grave were still common into the 20th century.

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Painting by Aleksandra Waliszewska from ‘The Upiór: A Natural History’, photo: Aleksandra Waliszewska

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We have interesting accounts among researchers of Kashubian folklore, not only in Poland but also among settlers in Canada, research by Jan L. Perkowski conducted in the late 1960s and by Jan Perszon, a native Kashubian and professor of theology who studied Kashubians in Pomerania in the late 1990s. There, several decades ago, people still believed in wieszcze – as the Kashubians call upiórs – and spoke of them not as a fairytale or a legend. Kashubians point to specific names, say that so-and-so died in a given year and later emerged from the grave or sent an illness upon his family. In micro-communities, these beliefs – I use the catch-all word ‘beliefs’ for lack of a better one – persisted for a very long time.

And why did these beliefs die out in central Poland? There are several possible explanations. The first, of course, is education and the efforts of post-war authorities to eradicate such beliefs as superstitions. Interestingly, the Polish People’s Republic, in a sense, successfully continued the policies dreamed of by the Enlightenment in the late 18th century, mostly by bishops who fought against popular religiosity in favour of, let us say, pure Catholicism. Another issue is the increasingly monoethnic nature of the country, meaning resettlements, the expulsion of the Ruthenian population, the fusion of ethnic groups and the creation of a strange, synthetic Poland that is unprecedented, as it has always been a multiethnic and multi-religious country.

But the most interesting clue, the one that seems to illuminate the heart of the matter, is the collectivization of agriculture and livestock, which did not necessarily go hand in hand with access to education. Belief in upiórs was closely linked to belief in witchcraft and witches. Essentially, a living upiór is a sorcerer or witch, though not the stereotypical one we imagine today based on popular literature, as a woman burned at the stake for an alleged pact with the devil. It’s a preserved animism. I’d venture to say it’s a form of Slavic shamanism, which is evident in historical sources. The primary activity of people practicing harmful witchcraft was harming animals, primarily taking away their milk. If we look at studies of the Hutzul population from the Soviet era, it turns out that they still believed in witches, but the witches stole milk from individual farmers rather than approaching the cows on kolkhozes. Such an economic and political solution seems to effectively extinguish this belief. The extinction of the belief in witches goes hand in hand with the disappearance of the belief in upiórs.

Over half a century ago, Bohdan Baranowski, a researcher known for his popular studies on Polish folk beliefs, wrote a very interesting and little-known book, Zanik Tradycyjnego Chowu Krów oraz Wierzeń i Zabobonów z Nim Związanych na Terenie Obecnego Województwa Łódzkiego [The Disappearance of Traditional Cattle Breeding and the Beliefs and Superstitions Associated with It in Present-Day Łódź Voivodeship]. Baranowski examined how post-war attitudes toward cattle breeding were changing and how, hand in hand with it, folk beliefs and magical-religious practices were disappearing rapidly. These beliefs are simply ancient, as they are still linked to the belief complex of nomadic peoples for whom cattle were the basis of existence. Primitive upiórs primarily harmed cattle, not humans. And a vampire or upiór very likely drank milk at some archaic stage, not blood. Here I am reaching conclusions that are both revolutionary and controversial. But I have strong arguments to do so, both linguistic and historical.

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Illustration by Julia Mirna from ‘With Stake and Spade: Vampiric Diversity in Poland’ by Łukasz Kozak, 2020, photo: Adam Mickiewicz Institute

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PP: Today, the vampire is primarily associated with the image created in the 19th century by Bram Stoker, among others. Is the fact that his Dracula is a count from Transylvania related to similar Romanian beliefs? How far beyond the borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did the belief in upiórs reach?

ŁK: Regarding Dracula, this is terribly unfair to the communities of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, primarily Poles and Ukrainians. I believe we should form an alliance to take back from the Romanians what they gained thanks to Stoker. Stoker contaminated the rather scant Western knowledge of vampirism with the legend of Vlad Ţepeş, a late medieval ruler who, while admittedly committing various atrocities, is a very interesting figure from a political perspective. Due to the political balance of power, the Germans began writing pamphlets about him at the end of the 15th century. They created an image of a tyrant who impaled thousands of people and enjoyed breakfast while watching these tortures. Stoker decided it would be a good figure to turn into a vampire. There are absolutely no previous sources that would in any way connect Țepeș with vampirism.

The Transylvanian region, or what is usually called Transylvania, is not a particularly vampiric region. Vampirism came to the West from Serbia when the Habsburg state took over Banat from the Ottoman Empire in the second decade of the 18th century. The Habsburgs, of course, had meticulous Austrian officials who had to keep records of everything. They soon began sending in reports that these Serbs had a strange affliction: they emerged from their graves, drank blood and infected others with vampirism. This is the only source that mentions the contagion of vampirism, which was completely absent in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Two such reports appeared in the West, introducing the word ‘vampire’ for the first time, a word not at all common, even in the Balkans, yet it achieved incredible popularity thanks to these official documents.

This phenomenon found fertile ground in the German Enlightenment, works on vampires began to be written and connections were made with older cases, including those from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Thus, the ‘scholarly’ vampire was born, a subject of debate and even political regulation, as Maria Theresa, under the influence of Gerard van Swieten, her personal physician, issued an edict prohibiting the exhumation of bodies and the use of anti-vampire treatments. In Poland, meanwhile, the bishop of Poznań, Teodor Kazimierz Czartoryski, issued a similar pastoral letter much earlier, prohibiting the beheading of upiórs – we have always been the first in this field. Even before the word ‘vampire’ appeared in European literature, Parisian scholars were discussing upiórs from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late 17th century in the magazine Mercure Galant, so the term upiór appeared in Western Europe much earlier.

Finally, there’s John William Polidori, who portrayed his vampire at the famous horror-story tournament during the ‘Year Without a Summer’ (1816) at a villa on Lake Geneva, where he, Byron, Shelley, the future Mary Shelley, then Godwin and other English golden youth met. Because Byron rejected and wronged him – and they were most likely having an affair – Polidori decided to be mischievous and portray the titular vampire from his story as a dark caricature of Byron. This is where the stereotype of the aristocratic vampire came from, even though aristocratic, noble upiórs were essentially non-existent; most were simply peasants.

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Painting by Aleksandra Waliszewska from ‘The Upiór: A Natural History’, photo: Aleksandra Waliszewska

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PP: Although in your book you also mention a certain noble story, about Franciszek Pobłocki.

ŁK: Yes, although this was certainly a peasantised nobleman. This is an example of a true story that was supposed to remain a family secret but that infiltrated the collections of vampire narratives. In Pomerania, in 1870, Franciszek Pobłocki died of consumption. Since the entire family also began to suffer, it was assumed he was a wieszczy [a type of upiór – a revenant from Slavic folklore]. When one of his sons died, the other decided that something had to be done. They used the standard procedure against upiórs: beheading the corpse. They also drew blood from the deceased which the victims had to drink. Today, we think vampires drank human blood, but in reality, it was the humans who drank the the blood of upiórs. So they had to bribe the grave diggers to let them bury their son’s body near his father, then dig up the grave and behead him, too. Things didn’t quite work out because a priest found out about the matter and reported it to the authorities. Initially, Pobłocki’s son and his assistants were convicted, but later an appeal overturned the sentence, and so on, until the case reached the highest tribunal in Berlin. A typical Kashubian family story that was to be resolved discreetly became known worldwide.

PP: The Kashubian term wieszczy or wieszcz is today associated more with Mickiewicz and other Romantic poets, who not necessarily rose from the grave.

ŁK: In Mickiewicz’s case, it was believed that he was indeed emerging from the grave. After his second funeral at Wawel Castle, it rained constantly, and wet summers followed. Galician peasants began to consider Mickiewicz a płanetnik, a kind of weather-working spirit believed to control storms and rain, now unfairly reduced to a weather demon: these were simply people who could control atmospheric phenomena, even after death. It was assumed that Mickiewicz was causing this constant bad weather and that he needed to be removed from Wawel Castle, that the French had actually ordered him removed from Montmorency because he brought rain and crop failures. Seweryn Udziela recorded interesting statements by Galician peasants who claimed that Mickiewicz was emerging from the grave. He was portrayed as both a płanetnik and a strzygoń. Some said he should be dragged out and his coffin thrown into the Vistula, while others believed that had already happened. Franciszek Wójcik, a politician belonging to the Polish People’s Party [Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe – PSL] and a government minister shortly after Poland regained its independence, confirmed this. He wrote to peasant newspapers that such things were being said about Mickiewicz and that educational efforts should be undertaken among the peasants of the Kraków area.

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Illustration by Julia Mirna from ‘With Stake and Spade: Vampiric Diversity in Poland’ by Łukasz Kozak, 2020, photo: Adam Mickiewicz Institute

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The words wieszcz, wieszczy, or wieszczyca have always had magical connotations. A wieszcz is a prophet. The related wieszczy is the only term for a revenant figure of purely Slavic origin. Wieszczyca was the term for a witch who could also emerge from the grave; it was later replaced by wiedźma, which came from Ruthenia. These Western and Eastern Slavic terms share the same roots, and we can trace their common etymology. It referred to someone who was knowing, a sorcerer, a shaman, someone born with special abilities. Among the Kashubians, this was symbolized by being born with a caul – that is, with the remnant of the fetal membrane on their heads, which seems to signify special abilities in all cultures. To this day, we say in Polish ‘w czepku urodzony’ [born with a caul] to convey the sense of a special destiny, luck and success.

PP: Other regional terms for upiórs have completely different origins, such as strzyga, which has ancient roots. Where does this diversity within a single country come from?

ŁK: Strzyga and strzygoń can indeed be derived from Latin or Greek, although we don’t know whether the Greek or the Latin strix came first. Even in antiquity, this word was ambiguous and enigmatic. Pliny the Elder wrote that he knows the strix was cursed by the ancients – and for us, he himself is an ancient – but he doesn’t know what kind of bird it is. For a strix could be either a demonic bird or a demonic woman capable of separating her soul… We also have a number of early medieval sources that speak of strigae, later strigones, etc. In our lands, this word is present primarily in Silesia, Lesser Poland and central Poland. On the one hand, it may have penetrated as part of the so-called Vlach colonization, while the South Slavic population may have adopted it directly from Italy. On the other hand, it could have simply come from Latin – Kraków’s university culture radiated through Lesser Poland, and someone could have preached against striges or strigones, meaning witches or sorcerers – and any word for a living corpse in Poland was originally synonymous with a sorcerer.

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Painting by Aleksandra Waliszewska from ‘The Upiór: A Natural History’, photo: Aleksandra Waliszewska

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Finally, upiór, an etymological mystery for centuries. In the early 18th century, the Jesuit Jerzy Gengell claimed that it derives from feathers [pierze] because upiórs are so fast they could be feathered or some kind of magic was performed using feathers from casket pillows. This is a thoroughly folk etymology, and although it was accepted by the eminent philologist Aleksander Brückner, we absolutely must reject it. Gengell, however, notes one important point, that the word upiór comes from the Ruthenian language. We know, therefore, that this word originated from Ukraine; it is one of the most magnificent Ruthenian expressions in Polish.

There was also a concept that emerged in the 19th century that wampir [vampire] and upiór originated from the Turkic. This was rejected until the recent publications of Kamil Stachowski, a linguist from Kraków, who very accurately and coherently demonstrated that the word upiór may indeed originate from the Turkic. Moreover, in Tatar folklore, the form ubyr appears – ubyr and opyr are also found among the Hutzuls, and they are essentially identical to upiór. Ukrainian and Polish beliefs are almost identical to Tatar beliefs, as well as to those of the Chuvash and Mari people. Therefore, this is, one might say, a nomadic, Turkic-Slavic-Finno-Ugric belief community. Here we return to the keyword, shamanism, the original animistic beliefs associated with sorcerers who could, for example, harm cattle yet retain their power after death. Even among the Buryats in the 19th century, burials of shamanesses were recorded that were exactly like those of upiór somewhere near Kielce or Lublin, including being pierced with an aspen stake or having a coffin made of aspen.

PP: Where does this attachment to this particular species of wood come from?

ŁK: This is interesting and somewhat inconclusive because the folkloric sources that attempt to explain it are already heavily influenced by Christianity. Judas hanged himself from an aspen tree, and the tree has been trembling ever since, or Jesus hid in an aspen tree when he was a hunted man, and the tree began to tremble and betrayed him to his executioners… These are folk apocryphal accounts of aspen. At the same time, aspen was used for magical practices, primarily associated with witches. By burning aspen wood or planting it root-up, you could summon a witch who was harming your cattle – and thus discover which of your neighbours was the witch. At the same time, aspen logs sizzling in the fire, which even appears in part IV of Forefathers’ Eve [Dziady], were considered the abode of a penitent soul. So this was also associated with a wandering soul, which is at the heart of beliefs in upiórs. But that’s still not enough.

If we misuse a certain comparison (though it’s not a misuse at all in my opinion) and look at Siberian beliefs, we’ll see that aspen is considered an impure wood there. This means it desacralizes a shaman’s power. If we crush or pierce the body of a deceased shaman with aspen, we deprive him of his power. I’m convinced that this is the original meaning of this particular choice of wood. It wasn’t the only species used to neutralize upiórs, although it was definitely the most common in the areas of central Poland and Ukraine. In Silesia and Lesser Poland, however, nails were used rather than stakes.

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Strzygoń i jak sobie z nim radzić

PP: You mentioned the original belief in depriving cattle of milk, later followed by deadly plagues, and today the upiór has unequivocal connotations with horror. But in your book, you also describe the more friendly face of upiórs, who returned to their families after death and even helped with farming and fathered children. When did they acquire these positive character traits?

ŁK: This is a feature found primarily in Lesser Poland, but interestingly, very similar narratives are also found in Greece, in stories about vrykolakes. In Lesser Poland, a strzygoń who was a farmer notoriously returned home, helped, chopped wood, fed the livestock and slept with his wife. It’s hard to say where this came from; some researchers believed it was simply a specific Western Galician part of culture, where everyone was so friendly that even the living dead were more likable than, for example, the Ukrainian dead, which were truly the most terrifying. Although there were also cases there of upiórs returning to their wives or simply harassing girls – one account from Ukraine has it that an upiór’s amorous advances resemble the advances of a drunken farmhand.

Galician wives were generally pleased that their deceased husbands helped them with their work, and peasants would single out specific women as wives of strzygońs, saying that their children were certainly fathered by their deceased husbands as they were certainly of unquestionable moral conduct. Therefore, a housewife with such a deceased husband could lead a relatively independent life in the Polish countryside. In the Boyko, Lemko and Hutzul regions, on the other hand, such a husband was not particularly welcome; he was driven away in various ways, for example, using tricks suggested by a witch. She would say, for example, ‘Dress up as if you’re going to a wedding. When your dead husband arrives, tell him you’re going to a wedding where a brother is marrying his sister. He’ll say that such an incestuous relationship is unthinkable, to which you’ll reply that a relationship between a living wife and a dead husband is also unthinkable’. There’s another interesting account, according to which a dead husband came to his wife and started to make moves on her, and she told him to kiss his ass. And he left – often it was a sharp retort that worked with upiórs.

In Lesser Poland, when women start to get fed up with their returning husbands, they go to a priest and confess. The priest says they should tie a thread to his posthumous shirt and then follow it to his grave – peasant graves were usually unmarked, and even if they were marked, peasants couldn’t read, so they didn’t really know where their deceased lay. So, they would locate the grave, the priest would come with the sexton, cut off the head with a spade, or use lesser methods, such as turning the body over.

In the press, we also find accounts of returning dead wives. In the late 1860s, near Bodzentyn, a man named Jan Szafraniec complained about his wife, who kept coming to him after her death. At first, he bribed the grave digger and turned her face down in her coffin, but that didn’t help, so he finally beheaded her. Of course, the newspapers wrote about this as a terrible manifestation of ignorance, unbecoming of the second half of the 19th century. Meanwhile, many years later, near Warsaw, Edmund Miller faced a similar problem – he dug up and reburied his wife in a different location because she was returning from her grave. The newspapers again wrote about it as a terrible case of ignorance near Warsaw itself – unbecoming this time of the 1930s, in the 20th century no less.

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‘Fighting a Snail’, Metz, ca. 1295, photo: Metz, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 1588, fol. 139

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PP: Besides your upcoming books about upiórs, you also recently prepared a visual essay on medieval pop culture and humour in the margins of manuscripts for the exhibition ‘Żarty Żartami’ [Joking Aside] at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Often, the humour was explicit, scatological or sexual; the illuminators of the time probably wouldn’t have been moved by today’s controversial works. Were there any taboo subjects in medieval humour?

ŁK: I noticed absolutely no taboo for medieval illuminators when it came to marginal decorations. They could laugh at absolutely anything sacred. One example is an initial depicting a scene from the Apocalypse: Christ sitting on a rainbow next to angels blowing trumpets, a very serious scene – but above this initial, the illuminator painted a cat cleaning its rear in a characteristic feline pose. Moreover, this cat is looking directly at the viewer of the manuscript. This apocalyptic kitten is a beautiful example of how these people were able not to be too serious about even the most serious topics. At the same time, there were no bigoted restrictions – the depiction of clergy, bishops and popes being cast into hell or boiling in pots of tar was common.

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Harpist, antiphonary, Cambrai or Tournai, ca. 1260–70, photo: LA Getty Museum, Museum Collection Ms. 44 / Ludwig VI 5, p. 115

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We view the Middle Ages stereotypically; in fact, I’d say we view all of history stereotypically, adapting school patterns to our perception of the era. Meanwhile, the Middle Ages were, in fact, an era that was incredibly anticlerical and intellectually distant from various manifestations of what we would today call hierarchical pathologies. These medieval anticlericals were often clergy or monks themselves. Take the Franciscan movement, for example: if St Francis hadn’t submitted to the pope, he would have inevitably burned at the stake as a heretic because what he preached resembled the ascetic ideas of the Cathars or other heretical movements. Looking at the margins, we find no embarrassment, and some scenes, apocryphal and in themselves controversial, were depicted with incredible care. For example, the legend of the Virgin Mary rescuing Theophilus of Adana, who had sold his soul to the devil, was depicted as the Virgin Mary going to hell to intervene and unceremoniously beating the devils with a stick or simply punching them in the face with a straight right fist to retrieve the contract. Such scenes, which today might somehow outrage people and be considered an insult to religious feelings, were perfectly normal in the Middle Ages and accepted by everyone.

On the one hand, this humour was indeed blunt and scatological because it is timeless – jokes about poop will always be funny. But the Middle Ages had a sensitivity to sexual humour that is often lacking today – it usually wasn’t crude humour alluding to sexual violence. Besides, we view these jokes about sex and poop as primitive jokes, but they often had a deeper meaning behind them, one that was intellectual or alluded to social satire. The stories of Eulenspiegel and Marolf are, yes, collections of faecal humour, but on the other hand, they are an incredible social reflection, from which Rabelais, for example, later grew. There are also a whole series of jokes that we don’t understand because we don’t have the key to them, but we know that they were based on popular lore or references to stories circulating at the time.

PP: What scenes are these?

ŁK: For example, in the margins of the 14th-century manuscript Roman de la Rose, the most popular allegorical poem about love, kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a whole story depicting the sexual relationship between a nun and a monk is painted on several pages. The elaborateness of the scenes and their arrangement indicate that this must have been a familiar narrative. It includes two well-known miniatures depicting nuns collecting penises into a basket, which grow like fruit from a tree. Perhaps this was a story from some fabliau, which often criticized sexual misconduct by clerics, but we simply don’t know the source. Until the text is somehow discovered, we won’t be able to fully understand this narrative, but we can always have a laugh.

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Early Music

PP: Just as we point out the differences between French and English Gothic, for example, did humour from medieval margins also vary geographically?

ŁK: It was intended to be universal, but if we were to conduct statistical research on surviving examples, we would find that the Netherlands, for example, excelled in inventing humorous scenes depicting the world upside down, for example, with animals behaving like humans. The specific culture of what is now Belgium also produced all sorts of 16th-century artists representing so-called plebeian culture and humour that was associated not with the refined taste of the upper classes but with genuine wit, sometimes crude, sometimes reflective.

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Reproduction of page from manuscript of ‘Florian Psalter’, circa 1395–1405, photo: Polona National Library (CBN)

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Reprodukcja strony rękopisu "Psałterz floriański", data powstania dokumentu; (ca 1395-ca 14050), fot. Biblioteka Narodowa Polona (CBN)

On the other hand, we have the French production, which was also capable of inventing incredible things: there are 14th-century manuscripts of the Mosan school depicting magnificent rabbits fighting each other, rabbits fighting dogs, rabbits killing people, skinning them alive… Rabbits that we could consider the progenitors of the rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, only much more cruel. This upside-down world, this carnival aesthetic, can also be found in manuscripts from England, where a distinct school developed under French influence. Here, too, we see animalistic and explicit humour in the margins, such as the depiction of Marolf sticking his butt out to the reader of the manuscript – an interesting reference to the text of Marolf itself, in which the titular character sticks his butt out to King Solomon. So, in reality this is a ‘flattering’ gesture to the reader, who is equated with King Solomon.

If we look at a production closer to home, the Florian Psalter [Psałterz Floriański] obviously contains many humorous decorations, and a specific humour blossomed in Czechia alongside Hussitism and was distinctly anticlerical – these include monks spending time in the baths with each other or with female companions, or popes burning in hell. This humour pertains not only to the margins of manuscripts but also, for example, to architectural decorations. If we examine the decorations of churches, we find very similar erotic, scatological scenes in places where it’s difficult to notice anything at first, such as on consoles or less prominent capitals. This is a sense of humour that characterizes all of ‘Latin’ Europe.

PP: Where, beyond these margins and architectural details, was there room for humour in medieval culture?

ŁK: Certainly in literature, which was largely oral and only written down or used later. Therefore, we can reconstruct many things based on later relics. Pieter Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs is a collection of amusing traditional sayings that certainly predate the 16th century. Two figures of plebeian merrymakers appear in literature, mocking lords and priests: the aforementioned Marolf and Eulenspiegel. One could say they are proto-revolutionaries who desire an eternal carnival. Eulenspiegel’s humour is at times particularly distasteful – for example, in the story of a Polish king who organized a jester’s tournament, where the visiting Eulenspiegel faced the king’s own Polish jester. In a contest to see who could do something funnier or worse, the Polish jester simply pooped in front of the king. In response, Eulenspiegel did something much worse: he ate the poop. This is the extreme dimension of medieval humour.

But we also have bourgeois fabliaux, which flourished in France, especially in the 14th century. They mainly poked fun at adulterers, unfaithful wives and especially priests – priests, who are usually the cause of this marital infidelity. Today, many religious sensibilities would be offended by the story of a priest who had an affair with the wife of a craftsman specializing in carving crucifixes. Someone reported the affair to the betrayed husband, and he caught both his wife and the priest in flagrante. As he was knocking on the door, his wife told the priest to hide in the studio. There wasn’t much room, but there was a cross lying there, to which a sculpture of Christ was to be nailed. So the priest simply lay on top of it, naked, pretending to be crucified. The sculptor entered, pretended to his wife that nothing had happened, went into the studio, looked at the priest, picked up a chisel, and said he needed to make one more correction to the sculpture. Then he cut off the priest’s genitals with the chisel. This was an example of a moralizing and highly amusing 14th-century French fable. I can only imagine the reactions to such a story today, whereas the Middle Ages loved to combine religious motifs with humorous and often unrefined ones.

Published in Polish, 15 December 2020, last updated 19 September 2024

Translated by Michał Pelczar

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