Srpski Zet: Promaja Won't Kill You!

About the author: Sale is puzzled by this strange fear, and he wants his window(s) to remain open.

Crazy hot, weekday, summer afternoon in Belgrade, with stifling humidity and not much in the way of a breeze. I've just climbed aboard bus 56 along Ulica Kneza Miloša. It's packed with sweaty, sticky, and smelly humanity, and the air conditioning appears to be broken. Everyone wears the same worn expression, as if their brains have melted from thinking about the heat. And every single window of the bus is closed. 

Wait, what? Yes, CLOSED!

“That’s weird,” I think to myself as, like I would in Montreal, I instinctively slide the window nearest to me as wide open as it will go. Suddenly, I'm getting dirty looks, like a stranger who has unwittingly crossed an invisible line and, through ignorance, offended the natives. My relief from the heat is short-lived: the old man next to me brusquely extends his arm and slides the window shut with an angry snap, muttering, “Strašno!”

That was before someone explained promaja to me, the Balkan fear of the draught. Its power persists in the face of the infernal Serbian summer, against both logic and science. Much like other superstitions, it comes with a complementary lack of evidence to support it. Many people won't cross a black cat's path or walk under a ladder, but this was unique and, like other customs I have come across in my travels throughout Serbia, I knew it must have an equally intriguing history. And without any documented origin, my speculative fancy ran wild.  

The nature of this fear, particularly with illness or malady as the consequence of its neglect, reminded me of a rhyme from when we were very small. We would hold hands and dance a cute sort of kolo, and then fall to the ground at the end after singing these lines:

Ring around the rosie,

Pocket full of posies,

Husha, husha,

We all fall down!

It was a leftover from the Black Death of the fourteenth century, surviving as an innocent children's game, and in sequence it details a symptom on the skin, then a ‘treatment’, the subsequent sneezing, and finally the grim outcome. The posies were meant to ward off the evil spirits causing the illness, but the rhyme reveals the futility of this measure: the result was still death. So much for superstitions, then. 

I wonder if this is promaja's origin: a medieval fear of the bubonic plague that became part of the local culture and was preserved when the Ottomans froze their subjects in time. Truly, the sense of historical stagnation one feels amongst the ruins and walls of medieval Serbian monasteries and fortresses suits this possibility, filling the time between that era and the post-Ottoman Serbian state with an interlude that preserved many old customs. 

But I've heard other stories, like the one where Promaja was originally the name of a pagan-Slavic wind demon. This idea is also captivating, not just for what might be a fascinating connection with the Serbian people's more distant past, but because both theories need not be mutually exclusive. Perhaps the earlier fear of the wind demon was conflated with the horror of what must have seemed a new and frightening disease in the fourteenth century, and was then reinforced by seasonal flu viruses and colds over the centuries.

These possibilities taken together imply that promaja could have multiple layers to its origin and evolution, or it may just mean that I'm charmed by the idea. As with the successive civilisations that have left their ruins scattered about, I would think that even an old superstition can reveal part of the Serbian story, like a secret that hides in plain sight.

And wouldn't your Zet be just the person to expose it?