This is a draft article. It is a work in progress open to editing by anyone. Please ensure core content policies are met before publishing it as a live Wikipedia article. Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL Easy tools: Citation bot (help) | Advanced: Fix bare URLs · Article logs · Draft logs. Last edited by Joy (talk | contribs) 4 days ago. (Update) Finished drafting? Submit for review

Vlach magic (Template:Lang-sr; Vlach vrăžî, "sorcery"; the spoken charms themselves are called đeskînćiśe, sg. đeskînćik) is the system of ritual healing, divination, protective and coercive practices maintained by the Vlachs of north-eastern Serbia. It consists of spoken incantations recited over prescribed ritual materials water, honey, basil, frankincense, embers, thread, coins, river pebbles by female practitioners known as vrîžîtuorj (sg. vrîžîtuarja), who are understood in local belief not as autonomous sources of power but as ritual intermediaries acting on behalf of supernatural authorities.^[1]

The tradition operates inside a strongly fatalistic worldview. Human destiny is held to be fixed at the moment of birth by twelve supernatural female beings called the Šojmanke, and cannot be altered. Magic therefore does not formally attempt to change fate, but to restore a life to its ordained course after it has been disturbed by illness, the evil eye, demons, or the deliberate magical action of other people.^[1][2]

The Vlach religious-magical complex has been repeatedly described in Serbian ethnological literature as unusually elaborate and archaic. The ethnologist Paun Es Durlić, who has classified the underlying belief system as fatalistic-animatistic, has argued that it may be one of the most archaic surviving religious systems on the soil of modern Europe.^[2]

The charms are recited in the vernacular of the Vlachs of eastern Serbia, a Romanian variety composed of the Banat and Oltenian dialects. In the standard scholarly transcription developed at the Majdanpek department of the Museum of Mining and Metallurgy, the material is written in the Serbian Latin alphabet supplemented by five additional graphemes ă, î, ś, ź, ḑ the last three of which are absent from standard literary Romanian orthography.^[1]

Central vocabulary includes:

• đeskînćik (pl. đeskînćiśe) incantation, charm
• vrîžîtuarja the female practitioner; healer, "wise woman"
• skrisă "that which is written"; destiny. Synonyms recorded in the field include ursa, daćina, soarta, narok and fata (< Latin fatum), the last surviving chiefly in curses
• întorsură a "returning", the class of charms that sends malign magic back to its sender
• ljak the cure or remedy

Practitioners are also called đeskîntatuorj; although male practitioners exist, women are overwhelmingly predominant, the role being regarded locally as a woman's occupation.^[3]

According to belief recorded in the Poreč region, twelve šojmanke one for each month of the year attend every birth and determine the entire course of the newborn's life, hour by hour, until death. This determination is entered in a book, from which destiny takes the name skrisă, "the written".^[1]

Three of the beings are known by name Jana, Sîmdzîjana and Stojana but naming them aloud is prohibited. They are instead referred to obliquely as jalje ("They") or, more commonly, dzînjilji milostînśilji ("the Gracious Fairies", Milostinke), so as not to provoke their anger. They are described as fearing nothing, not even God, and as obeying only the Holy Mother Mary. When offended they inflict illness, and only they possess its cure.^[1]

Offence is typically incurred unintentionally: by treading on ground where the Šojmanke have danced, by urinating on the woodpile in the farmyard held to be their dwelling and ritual table or by being caught in a whirlwind. The resulting condition, described as being "taken", "struck" or "touched" by the Šojmanke, presents as disorientation, exhaustion, incoherent speech, disturbed sleep, nightmares and, in severe cases, seizures; in infants, refusal of food and prolonged crying.^[1]

Belief in the Šojmanke is not universal among the Vlachs of Serbia. Durlić's field mapping locates it among the Eastern Vlachs (Ključ, Krajina, and eastward across the Timok toward Vidin) and the Central Vlachs (Poreč and Crna Reka). Among the Western Vlachs, between the Porečka river and the Morava the Ungurjani of Homolje and Zvižd the equivalent beings are the vetrinje, wind spirits, and healers are said to "fall into trance through the wind" rather than through the Šojmanke. The vetrinje are held responsible for epilepsy.^[1]

Almost all healing charms invoke the Holy Mother Mary as the ultimate source of the cure. Durlić interprets this figure as the Christianised name of an older Great Mother goddess who, in Vlach belief, gave birth to the Earth and to the whole world, and who therefore knows the destiny of everything in heaven and on earth.^[1]

Practitioners are said to be chosen by the Šojmanke from among girls of nine. Knowledge of illnesses and of the charms that cure them is acquired in altered states trance and dreams since only in such states can the beings be seen and heard. The apprenticeship is described as lasting until the age of sixteen, after which the young woman may practise publicly. The most gifted are taught to enter trance at will, in which state they can converse with the Šojmanke; such trances were traditionally undertaken on the eve of the new moon, when the beings were believed to descend into the human world.^[1]

Durlić notes a historical shift in how this apprenticeship is described. Formerly no practitioner could admit to having learned from a living predecessor, insisting instead on direct instruction by the Šojmanke through dreams or trance; more recent practitioners, whose biographies are open to verification, admit learning from a named older woman who in turn had learned directly from the Šojmanke.^[4]

Traditional rules constrain the practitioner strictly. She may not refuse anyone who comes to her, shorten a charm, omit any of the prescribed materials, or ask for payment; violation is said to bring a beating from the Šojmanke. She may accept only what the patient offers willingly, and only as a token. Older practitioners were reported not to take money into the hand at all, requiring instead that it be laid on the ground and touched with the foot, with the words "Let the remedy be paid for!"^[1]

Diagnosis is made by casting grains of maize (buobe đi kukurudz), which the practitioner mixes by hand and reads as they fall, the pattern being attributed to the will of the Šojmanke. In more serious cases the client consults a practitioner who enters trance; such women are credited with foreseeing future events and with calling the dead back from the "other world" to speak with living kin.^[1]

The charms are recited verse texts, most often repeated three times, and follow a small number of recurrent narrative and formulaic patterns:

• The encounter on the road. The patient always named, with a placeholder name in written records "sets out along the road, along the path" and meets the affliction personified.
• The lament heard in heaven. The sufferer's cry reaches the Holy Mother Mary, who descends by silver stairs or rides out with a whip of fire in one hand and a sprig of basil in the other.
• The chain of interrogated trees. Mary questions a willow, an apple tree and a pear tree in turn. The willow, which conceals what it has seen, is cursed to bear no fruit and to weep sap each spring; the fruit trees, which answer truthfully, are blessed with abundance. This aetiological episode explains features of the natural world within the healing narrative.
• The restitution formula. Recovery is expressed as the reassembly of the person: strength to strength, blood to blood, flesh to flesh, bone to bone.
• The purity formula. The patient is left "pure and radiant", compared to a star in the sky, dew on the earth, basil in the garden, the full moon, honey in the hive, or a blossoming apple tree in leafing woods.
• The closing disclaimer. Charms recorded from professional practitioners typically end with a formula assigning the healing to a higher authority: "the incantation is from me, the cure is from the Holy Mother Mary, for she knows best."^[4]

Durlić's corpus, drawn from the villages of Rudna Glava and Crnajka (Central Vlachs), Ljubičevac and Prahovo (Eastern Vlachs), and Krepoljin (Western Vlachs), groups the charms as follows:^[1]

Vlach name	Purpose
Đeskînćik đi šojmanje	Against affliction by the Šojmanke
Đi skrisă	To bring about "what is written" to summon the destined marriage partner
Đi dragusta	Love charms, to make a person desired
Đi ljegat / đizljegat barbacî	Binding and unbinding of men
Đe điuokj	Against the evil eye
Đi Suare sâk	Against the "Dry Sun" (sunstroke, chronic headache)
Đi gălbinare	Against jaundice
Đeskîntjek đe izdat	Against izdat, a sudden constricting seizure of the chest
Đe boala grja	Against the "heavy sickness" (epilepsy)
Đi Muma Padure	Against the Forest Mother
Đe moroju ăl viu	Against the living vampire (prikoljić)
Apă dă vînturj	Against the vetrinje, the wind demons
Đeskînćiśe đi întorsură	The "returnings" reversal of malign magic

Each type of charm prescribes its own apparatus, and substitution is forbidden. Representative examples recorded in the field include:^[1]

• Against the Šojmanke a new, previously unused vessel filled with honey, into which frankincense and basil are placed; the mixture is stirred with a new wooden spoon while the charm is recited three times at the hearth, in the morning, on an empty stomach. The charmed honey is then eaten in small quantities until recovery.
• For the destined partner a kerchief, a woven ribbon or a shirt is cast into the chimney and transformed in the charm into a cockerel with steel wings and an iron beak, or into a sky-dragon, which is sent out to find the destined person and give them no rest.
• Binding a thread spun from tow, tied in nine knots, sealed inside an elder tube stopped with sheep droppings and hidden beneath the eaves. The corresponding unbinding rites use a coin passed three times through the right trouser leg, then a padlock locked by the patient and opened by the healer, and finally wool taken from a sheep's breast.
• Against the Dry Sun nine pebbles gathered where a cart road crosses running water. Four pairs are wetted and drawn across the patient's forehead during three recitations; the ninth is thrown backwards over the head into water on the way home.
• Against jaundice performed at dusk at a wild rose bush, with a fire shovel of embers, incense, and two threads, red and yellow, which are exchanged between the bush and the patient's neck between recitations. The embers are afterwards cast into water.

The charm Đi Suare sâk rests on a belief in a plurality of suns, some benign and some malign. The sun visible daily is the good sun and bears a personal name, Pau (Pavle); the "dry sun" is an extinguished sun that gives neither light nor warmth and that enters the head of a man who works bare-headed in summer fields, producing prolonged and severe headaches.^[1]

The best documented Vlach amulet is the Soldier's Hazel (aluna vojnjiśaskă), prepared in anticipation of war and believed to protect a conscript from bullets. A hazelnut gathered at midnight on the feast of the Transfiguration was hollowed out and filled with mercury, marble, a plover's feather, uncut grass, incense, gold, a nail clipping from a child born out of wedlock, the bone of a wren, and a shred of fern, while the accompanying charm was recited three times; it was then sewn into the soldier's uniform. The charm proceeds by a chain of analogies as quicksilver cannot be caught, as water does not wet the feather, as rust does not seize gold so may no bullet strike the bearer. In contemporary use the amulet is carried as a general luck charm.^[1][5]

A small number of charms are performed with the aid of draśi (devils), whose power is traced to Šojtan, described in Vlach cosmogony as God's blood-brother at the creation of the world. The rite is undertaken only by the most powerful practitioners: the woman goes at night to a river where a willow branch touches the water, undresses, enters the water, grasps the branch in one hand and a black-handled knife in the other, and feigns cutting the branch while reciting. She must not err in a single word nor show fear as the devils begin to emerge, since a mistake allows them to turn on her.^[1]

Practitioners do not classify this as harmful magic, on the grounds that it concerns destiny the highest order in the world and that restoring a disturbed destiny to its proper course is a beneficial act.^[1]

The întorsură or "returning" occupies a central place in the repertoire. It is performed with water, basil, and objects capable of cutting or piercing, which are held to frighten away the demons concealed within a spell. Short returnings are recited three times; where the affliction is judged grave, the Great Returning (Întorsura a mare) is used a text of more than two hundred and fifty verses that must be repeated nine times, sometimes on several consecutive days.^[1]

Its rhetorical core is an escalating exchange: the sender is said to have struck with one hand, the reciter returns with two, then three, and so on up to nine, ten and eleven. The spells are ritually "salted, peppered, garlicked and censed" that is, made unbearable loaded onto a cart, and driven back along the road, over the hillside and into the house of the sender. The practitioner is careful to specify that what is sent back is only the evil, and not the good of the household, its children or its livestock.^[1]

Durlić argues that the conventional Christian-derived opposition of white and black magic is a poor fit for the Vlach material, since the local distinction is drawn by power rather than by morality. The severity of a misfortune determines which supernatural agents are enlisted; for slight illnesses spoken words suffice, while grave damage may require summoning devils to settle accounts with the perpetrator. A practitioner who deals with such demons was traditionally regarded not as unclean or evil but as powerful and useful indeed more useful than one who prepares remedies for love troubles.^[4]

In a study first published in 1995, Durlić argued against the prevailing view that the Vlach cult of the dead is animistic, proposing instead that it is fundamentally animatistic: that is, the dead are conceived as continuing a bodily rather than purely spiritual existence.^[2] He supported this with a series of ritual details, among them:

• the categorical distinction between muarća ku rînd ("regular death", with a lit candle in the hand) and muarća fara rînd, dying în njegura, "in darkness";
• the Paradise candle, made overnight before the funeral for those who died without light, during whose dedication the maker enumerates aloud every ordinary bodily action the deceased will need to perform in the other world since any action not named cannot be performed there;
• the dedication formula at pomana memorial meals, in which each object is touched, kissed, named and its purpose stated so that it may cross the boundary and become the dead person's personal property, contrasted with the simpler Serbian formula addressed to the soul alone;
• the practice of waking, washing and feeding the dead at the graveside;
• the exhumation of the recently dead usually a young person deeply mourned on the fortieth day, in order to wash, comb and reclothe the body before reburial, a case of which Durlić documents at Debeli Lug near Majdanpek in 1992.^[2]

Related beliefs concern demons formed from living or dead human beings: the vrkolak, which devours the sun and moon and causes eclipses; the vlva (Serbian zduhać), a weather demon protecting the village from hail; the prikoljić or living vampire; and the moruonj, the vampire proper.^[2]

Durlić proposes a regular relationship between fatalism and magic: the stronger the fatalism of a culture, the more elaborate its magic. In this reading Vlach magic is "a disguised rebellion against Fate" which nonetheless presents itself as service to Fate, since it returns a disturbed course of events to the groove already written. This ambiguity, he argues, is precisely what gives the practice its legitimacy and longevity.^[2]

In a paper first presented at Zaječar in the 1990s, Durlić introduced two terms to account for the durability of the tradition.^[4]

Magical statistics refers to the different threshold of proof operating in the rural setting. Rational statistics requires a phenomenon to recur across many cases before belief is warranted; in the peasant world, a single personal experience is sufficient to establish lasting conviction, provided the experience falls within the domain of the sacred and matches a pattern already contained in the inherited "catalogue" of tradition. Tradition is thus not passively inherited but continually re-confirmed by the personal experience of nearly every individual, which simultaneously sacralises the person who has the experience.

Magical alibi refers to the closing formula of the charms, which assigns effectiveness to the Holy Mother Mary rather than to the practitioner. Durlić compares the practitioner's role to that of a clerk in a state service: the laws are made by a higher authority, and the practitioner is authorised only to invoke them. Because the outcome is never her responsibility, no failure can discredit her, and the institution of the practitioner is never itself called into question. In his summary, magical statistics maintains the world of symbolic representations while the magical alibi maintains the world of instrumental practice.^[4]

The largest published corpus of Vlach incantations was assembled by Paun Es Durlić (b. 1949), ethnologist and long-serving curator of the Museum in Majdanpek. Durlić grew up in the household of his grandmother Stanka Brandušonje, a well-known healer from Gornji Poreč, and was permitted as a child to sit beside her while she treated patients.^[1]

The material was gathered over decades of fieldwork in circumstances rarely available to an ethnographer. Durlić was accepted as a pupil by several of the most prominent living practitioners the position of "chosen" successor to whom a great practitioner hopes to transmit her entire body of knowledge which gave him access to rituals and texts normally withheld from the uninitiated. The first to accept him in this way was Veselinka Bkić (Baba Visaljina, 1915–2000) of Rudna Glava, described by Durlić as the last authentic Vlach healer to hold an unshaken faith in the power of her own practice; she was illiterate and spoke no Serbian.^[1]

The charms were recorded in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, in collaboration with Dejan Balčanović, Velimir Trailović and Dragan Stojanjelović. Named practitioners in the corpus include Veselinka Bkić, Jelena Rajković, Stana Janković, Janko Nikolić and Paun Rucić (Rudna Glava); Desanka Prvulović, Mila Novaković, Krina Vojinović, Sofija Zlatić and Ruža Mučić (Crnajka); Slobodanka Rajković (Ljubičevac); Radmila Rajnić and Magdalena Dobrivojević (Prahovo); Nikolija Nikolić (Krepoljin); and Jon Mušlja (Podgorac).^[1]

The corpus was published in Vlasi na zalasku sunca ("Vlachs at Sunset", Majdanpek, 2020); the section on magic appeared in English translation in 2026 as Vlach Magic: The Definitive Truth Based on Field-Documented Rituals.^[1][6] Independent scholarly work on the same material includes Slavoljub Gacović's studies of charming in the Vlach cult of the dead^[7] and Annemarie Sorescu-Marinković's survey of the prospects for a corpus of Vlach Romanian charms, which situates Durlić's collection within the wider Romanian charm-research tradition established by Sanda Golopenția and others.^[3]

The tradition is documented in a period of rapid contraction. The Vlach vernacular in which the charms are recited is severely endangered, and Durlić's later work including the online lexicon Vorbar and the introductory study Izdah umirućeg jezika ("The Last Breath of a Dying Language") frames the recording of the charms as language documentation as much as ethnography.^[8][9] Rural depopulation, the disappearance of the last illiterate monolingual practitioners, and the loss of the ritual settings in which the charms were performed have all reduced active transmission; several categories of charm, such as the Soldier's Hazel, survive only in transformed and secularised use.^[1]

• Vlachs of Serbia
• Romanian folklore
• Incantation
• Evil eye
• Cult of the dead
• Folk healer
• Homolje

Primary corpus

• Durlić, Paun Es. Vlasi na zalasku sunca. Majdanpek: Pekus, 2020.
• Durlić, Paun Es. Vlach Magic: The Definitive Truth Based on Field-Documented Rituals. Pančevo, 2026.
• Durlić, Paun Es. Basme iz Gornjeg Poreča.
• Durlić, Paun Es. Rumînji în zovîrnjit đi suare. Povješć alu Rumînj đin Poreśa, Pjeku al đi Sus šî cînuturlji veśinje. Majdanpek: UG Pekus, 2020.
• Durlić, Paun Es. Sveti jezik vlaškog hleba / Sacred Language of the Vlach Bread. (Based on 104 field expeditions in 74 Vlach villages.)

Studies by Durlić cited above

• "Kult mrtvih kao osnova za određenje religije Vlaha", Etno-kulturološki zbornik 1, Svrljig, 1995, 232–240.
• "Magijska statistika i magijski alibi", in "Za zdravlje": iz istorije narodne medicine i zdravstvene kulture, Zaječar, 1999, 281–288.
• "Pokladni priveg obredna vatra iz kulta mrtvih kod Vlaha severoistočne Srbije", Etno-kulturološki zbornik 2, Svrljig, 1996, 110–115.
• "Leska kao muški apotropejon porečkih Vlaha", Razvitak 198–199, Zaječar, 1997, 112–116.

Other ethnographic and theoretical literature cited in the source

• Bandić, Dušan. Tabu u tradicionalnoj kulturi Srba. Belgrade, 1980.
• Bandić, Dušan. Narodna religija Srba u 100 pojmova. Belgrade, 1991.
• Birket-Smith, Kaj. Putovi kulture. Zagreb, 1960.
• Durkheim, Émile. Elementarni oblici religijskog života. Belgrade, 1988.
• Erlich, Vera. U društvu sa čovjekom. Zagreb, 1978.
• Gacović, Slavoljub. "O bajanju i vračanju u Vlaha istočne Srbije", Razvitak XXVI/3, 1986, 88–99.
• Golopenția, Sanda. Desire Machines: A Romanian Love Charms Database. Bucharest, 1998.
• Jovanović, Bojan. Srpska knjiga mrtvih. Niš, 1992.
• Kazimirović, Radovan. Tajanstvene pojave u našem narodu. Zemun, 1986.
• Kulišić, Špiro; Petrović, P. Ž.; Pantelić, N. Srpski mitološki rečnik. Belgrade, 1970.
• Malinowski, Bronisław. Magija, nauka i religija. Belgrade, 1971.
• Morin, Edgar. Čovek i smrt. Belgrade, 1981.
• Pavićević, Vuko. Sociologija religije. Belgrade, 1980.
• Petrović, Sreten. "Mitologija, magija, običaji", Kulturna istorija Svrljiga I, Niš–Svrljig, 1992.
• Shah, Idries. Orijentalna magija. Belgrade, 1989.
• Šešić, Bogdan. Opšta metodologija. Belgrade, 1980.
• Tokarev, Sergei A. Rani oblici religije i njihov razvoj. Sarajevo, 1978.
• Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture. London, 1871.
• Vlahović, Petar. "Neke etnološke odrednice Vlaha severoistočne Srbije", Zbornik radova Muzeja rudarstva i metalurgije, Bor, 1980.
• Zečević, Slobodan. "Samrtni ritual i neki oblici kulta mrtvih u stanovništva vlaškog govornog jezika Krajine i Ključa", GEM 30, Belgrade, 1968.
• Zečević, Slobodan. Mitska bića srpskih predanja. Belgrade, 1981.
• Zečević, Slobodan. Kult mrtvih kod Srba. Belgrade, 1982.

• Paun Es Durlić official website (online since 1999)
• Vlasi na zalasku sunca, full text (PDF)
• Vlach magic: bilingual examples with commentary (PDF)
• "Magijska statistika i magijski alibi" (Serbian original)
• Vorbar online lexicon of Vlach culture
• The Last Breath of a Dying Language (2026)
• Video archive of Vlach ethnographic material