CROATIAN FAIRY WORLD

The sequel to the series of postage stamps under the name Croatian Fairy World introduces two exceptional motif novelties: the monster orko and the little devil macić who, in the reflections about the pagan inheritance, belong to the folklore demons. This means – as the contemporary Croatian folklorist Ivan Lozica explains – that they are “creatures like people, impetuous and unpredictable, in a way both of them are on the other side of the good and evil. Macić is a bit better than orko, he often helps people to find their way to money or he protects them from some disaster. Both of them, though, frighten people and can even harm them” (Pagan Heritage, Zagreb, 2002). Though they are mentioned by the folklorist Antun Ilija Carić in his work Popular Belief in Dalmatia (1897), these two creatures have scarcely made an appearance in written literature, not even in children’s literature, but have remained in the area of oral literature. Trying to find an answer to this surprising fact, Ivan Lozica offered a really contemporary solution: “There is a possibility that their demoniacal and protean characteristics have not allowed them to be transferred into fairy tales and stories (though Orcus is well known in German classic and romantic literature, and Orco is a frequent figure in the Rumanian fairy tales); they might have been too inconstant and ethically ambivalent to make a career of literary figures. I suppose there might also be some other possible reasons for their being disregarded. They are creatures of non-Slavic origin. We can find them in Croatia and Slovenia but, for instance, they cannot be found in Serbia. As they cannot be found in all the south-Slavic areas, they are considered not to be autochthonous, “ours”. They are thus perceived to be a foreign influence, though they were possibly in these regions even at the time of the arrival of the Croats to the Adriatic. Could demons be politically objectionable, could they even be victims of ethnic cleansing? Why should macić, who used to be a common and most frequent nightly scarecrow in Dalmatia some hundred years ago, be almost unknown?” From the great amount of recorded variants of orko and macić we have selected the most attractive ones. Orco in Istria is, therefore, the nightly headless giant who stands with one leg on a dry stone wall, and with the other on the second one, while macić in Velo Grablje on the island of Hvar is a child with one leg and a small red cap that turns round in the flame.