Keeping the Kallikantzaroi Out: A Village House in the Twelve Days

In a Greek village of the nineteenth or early twentieth century, the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany were not only a season of feasting. They were a season of siege. From Christmas until the blessing of the waters on 6 January, the kallikantzaroi were abroad: shaggy, ill-made goblins who came up from beneath the earth, ran through the lanes after dark and tried to get into houses, usually by way of the chimney. Folklorists who collected these beliefs found them across mainland Greece and the islands, under many local names and in many shapes. What they also found, almost everywhere, was a practical tradition of defence. This room is laid out like a village house, and each exhibit is one of its guarded points.

Who comes down the chimney

Descriptions vary from valley to valley. Some kallikantzaroi were tiny, some taller than a house; many were black and hairy, with the legs of goats or donkeys, red eyes, long tongues or a limp. They were not quite demons and not quite ghosts. In some districts they were thought to be human beings transformed, above all children unlucky enough to be born during the Twelve Days themselves. Leo Allatius, the scholar from Chios who spent much of his working life at the Vatican Library, described beliefs of this kind from his native island in a treatise printed in 1645, one of the earliest written records we have.

A widely told explanation says that for most of the year they live underground, sawing at the great tree that holds up the world. By Christmas they have almost cut through it, but the season draws them to the surface, and while they roam among humans the tree heals. When they go back at Epiphany they find it whole again and start sawing once more. Whatever its age, the story captures the logic of the season. The danger was real, but it had a fixed beginning and a fixed end.

The hearth and the threshold

The first line of defence was fire. In many regions the hearth was kept burning day and night for the whole Twelve Days, often with a large log set aside for the purpose, so that nothing could climb down the flue without being singed. Householders threw salt on the embers, whose crackling was thought to frighten the visitors, or burned old shoes and other foul-smelling things to drive them off. In some places the jawbone of the pig slaughtered for Christmas was hung inside the chimney or behind the door.

The doorway had its own guard. A sieve or a colander left on the threshold was one of the best-known tricks. The kallikantzaroi, the story goes, cannot resist counting the holes, but they can count only to two, because “three” is the number of the Holy Trinity and the word would undo them. So they sit there muttering “one, two, one, two” until the cocks crow at dawn and they must flee. Night is their time; first light ends their power.

Food was a third front. They were said to foul the water jars, scatter the flour, spoil whatever was left uncovered and put out the fire by urinating on it, so careful households covered everything at night. In some villages the first fritters or sweet pastries of the season were thrown onto the roof, a portion meant to satisfy the visitors and keep them out of the kitchen.

The cradle and the road

Because children born in the Twelve Days were at risk of becoming kallikantzaroi, or of being harmed by them, newborns received particular protection. Garlic, the all-purpose charm of Greek folk practice, might be tied near the cradle, and a lamp kept burning beside it. Allatius already reported a harsher remedy on Chios: singeing the baby’s feet at the fire, so that the child could never take that shape. Adults out late on the road were thought to be at risk as well. The goblins might jump on their backs and ride them, force them to dance, or lead them astray until dawn. Prudent people came home before dark.

None of this was secret or shameful. These were household routines, part of the ordinary rhythm of the season, like baking the Christmas bread or the children going from door to door with their carols, the kalanda.

Epiphany: the waters are blessed

Every defence so far only held the line. The decisive act belonged to the Church. During the Twelve Days the waters were spoken of in many places as still “unbaptised”, and the creatures were tied to that unhallowed state. At Epiphany, called Ta Fota, “the Lights”, the priest blessed the waters. In seaside towns he threw a cross into the harbour and young men dived to bring it back; inland the blessing was made at a river, a spring or the church font. Then the priest went from house to house with a sprig of basil dipped in holy water, sprinkling each room, the stable and the well. The kallikantzaroi, villagers said, fled before him, grumbling a rhyme recorded in many versions.

Run, let us run, here comes the crazy priest with his holy water and his dripping sprinkler!

Greek folk rhyme, Epiphany tradition (our rendering)

With that, the house was clear for another year. The pattern is old even if the creatures are not ancient in any simple sense. Athenians of the classical age kept the Anthesteria, a spring festival during which the spirits of the dead were believed to wander the city. Later Greek lexicographers report that on its most dangerous day people chewed buckthorn leaves and smeared their doors with pitch, and they preserve a proverb for sending the visitors away when it was over, though scholars still argue about who exactly was being dismissed. A perilous window of days, homely precautions at the threshold and a formal goodbye: the shape is strikingly similar.

If the sieve and the pig’s jaw remind you of older guardians, look at the Gorgon’s face in our room on Medusa, the ancient world’s favourite protective stare. And for the dark beneath the earth, with its own seasonal comings and goings, visit Persephone, whose yearly return from below gave the Greeks their oldest story about a door between worlds that opens and closes on schedule.