Dragons,
Monsters &
Creatures

The legend

Long before Kraków became the city we know today, a terrible creature was said to have made its home among the rocks above the Vistula.

The oldest surviving written version appears in Wincenty Kadłubek’s chronicle, composed around the end of the twelfth century. His monster is not yet called the Wawel Dragon. He calls it an olophagus — a “whole-swallower” — living in the winding passages of a rock or cave during the reign of the legendary ruler Krak. The beast demanded cattle. If the offering failed, people became the substitute.

Krak’s sons could not defeat it by force, so they devised a trap. Animal hides were stuffed with burning sulphur and left as bait. The creature swallowed them and died from the fire within. But Kadłubek’s story does not end with the monster. The younger brother murdered the elder, claimed the dragon had killed him, and was eventually exposed and banished. Their sister Wanda then succeeded them.

Over the following centuries the legend kept changing. Jan Długosz placed the beast firmly in a cave beneath Wawel Hill and gave Krak a more direct role in the plan. By the late sixteenth century the story had gained another famous hero: in Joachim Bielski’s 1597 chronicle, the clever plan is credited to a cobbler called Skub or Skuba. The dragon eats the sulphur-filled bait, rushes to the Vistula to drink, and bursts.

Szewczyk Dratewka belongs to a separate later children’s tradition and is sometimes conflated with Skuba in popular retellings. That distinction matters, because the legend did not arrive fully formed. For more than eight hundred years writers have been reshaping it — handing the victory from princes, to a ruler, and eventually to an ordinary craftsman armed with a particularly unpleasant meal.

The landscape helped keep the story alive. Smocza Jama — the Dragon’s Den — is a real cave beneath Wawel. Large prehistoric animal bones still hang at the entrance to Wawel Cathedral and were long associated with the dragon, although they are no evidence that any such beast existed.

Today visitors can walk through the cave and emerge beside Bronisław Chromy’s metal dragon on the Vistula embankment. Every few minutes it breathes fire. The medieval monster may have changed dramatically on its journey through history, but Kraków has never really allowed its dragon to die.

The legend

In late-sixteenth-century Warsaw, two five-year-old children — a swordsmith’s son and a neighbour’s daughter — were said to have gone digging beneath a building that had collapsed some thirty years earlier. They did not come back.

The condition of the children when they were found caused alarm. An elderly royal barber-surgeon named Benedykt was called to consider what could have killed them. His conclusion was extraordinary: a basilisk was hiding below.

For early-modern Europeans, the basilisk was not merely a fairy-tale monster. Learned writers still discussed the creature as part of the natural world, describing a deadly beast whose gaze could kill. Benedykt therefore proposed a weapon that did not require anybody to look directly at it: mirrors. If the creature saw its own reflection, he reasoned, it would destroy itself.

Two condemned men were offered the chance to face it. One was from Warsaw; the other, a Silesian, volunteered. He was dressed in leather hung with mirrors, given protective spectacles, iron tongs and a torch, and sent down into the cellars while a crowd reportedly numbering more than two thousand gathered above.

In a crack in the wall of a neighbouring cellar he found the creature lying still. Using the tongs, he pulled it out. The early description is already strange enough without later embellishment: it was said to be about the size of a hen, with a blue crown-like crest, a ridged back and yellow-spotted eyes compared to those of a toad. The fact that it was found dead supported the explanation that the mirrors had made the basilisk see itself.

Over time Warsaw’s storytellers moved and reshaped the tale. Nineteenth-century writers such as Roman Zmorski and Kazimierz Władysław Wójcicki associated the lair with Krzywe Koło in the Old Town. Artur Oppman later developed one of the best-known literary versions, while popular retellings introduced tailors, apprentices and increasingly elaborate monsters.

The result is really two traditions sharing one creature: an early-modern “monster report” and the later Warsaw legend built around it. The original account is arguably the stranger of the two — a condemned Silesian wrapped in mirrors, descending beneath the city with spectacles, a torch and a pair of iron tongs.

The legend

The earliest Warsaw emblem does not look much like the modern mermaid. A city seal from 1400 shows a hybrid armed creature — human above, monstrous or winged below, carrying sword and shield. Over the following centuries the image changes, eventually settling into the fish-tailed woman now inseparable from Warsaw.

The narrative legends arrive much later. In Artur Oppman’s version, fishermen capture a mermaid whose singing persuades a guard to free her; she then becomes Warsaw’s protector. Ewa Szelburg-Zarembina gives her a role in guiding a lost prince toward the future city. Another popular strand connects her with Sawa from the folk etymology of “Wars + Sawa”, while the much-repeated tale of two mermaid sisters — one in Copenhagen, one in Warsaw — is a modern popular explanation rather than medieval folklore.

That makes Syrenka unusually useful for the archive: it is both a real heraldic history and a family of later legends, and the two should be shown beside one another rather than blended into an invented ancient tale.

The legends

Ask for the story of Boruta and you immediately run into a problem: there is no single story.

Boruta is less a character from one legend than a supernatural resident of the Łęczyca region who has spent generations accumulating tales around himself. Sometimes he is a devil, sometimes something closer to an older forest spirit, sometimes a cruel nobleman — and occasionally, just to make classification inconvenient, he helps people.

One of the best-known stories connects him with King Kazimierz Wielki. During the construction of Łęczyca’s brick castle in the fourteenth century, the king’s carriage supposedly became trapped in the marshy ground. A remarkably strong young man named Boruta appeared and pulled it free. Rewarded for his help, he later became associated with the castle itself. Tradition eventually transformed him into a harsh lord whose body vanished after death and whose demonic spirit remained in the cellars, guarding hidden treasure.

Other tales give him completely different roles. Boruta may appear as a miller who helps the poor, a trickster roaming the countryside, or a drinking companion of another Polish devil, Rokita. He is said to take many forms: a great bird over the marshes, a black horse galloping through the night, an owl in town, or a miller visiting mills after dark.

His most recognisable appearance, however, is that of a Polish nobleman: tall, moustached and dressed in a kontusz, doing his best to hide the inconvenient horns and tail that reveal what he really is.

The name itself may preserve something older. In Old Polish, boruta is connected with pine woodland, and folklorists have linked the figure with traditions surrounding forest beings such as the borowy or leszy. That is an interpretation of his development rather than part of the legends themselves, but it suits a supernatural character born in a landscape of woods, marshes and difficult roads.

There is therefore no need to force Boruta into one artificial plot. His story is the collection of stories — the many shapes of a devil who became inseparable from Łęczyca.

The legend

Stories of giants appear across Kashubia and the wider southern Baltic landscape. Later Kashubian collections give them the name stolëm. They are human-shaped but enormous, strong enough to uproot trees and throw boulders, and traditions disagree about whether they were cruel persecutors, helpful predecessors or beings punished and turned to stone.

The most interesting material is local. Around Kościerzyna, lakes and shorelines are attributed to the giants’ work. At Mirachowo stone heaps become their graves. Węsiory’s ancient stone circles are folded into the tradition as a giant settlement or petrified remains, even though archaeology identifies the site with the Wielbark culture of the first centuries AD. Large glacial erratics elsewhere become “stolëm stones”, sometimes carrying hollows interpreted as giant fingerprints or handmarks.

This is a strong example of folklore behaving as landscape memory: real geological and archaeological features receive supernatural explanations, and the story shifts from one stone to another rather than forming a single canonical narrative.

The legend

High in the Karkonosze, pleasant weather can turn quickly. Cloud closes over the ridge, wind appears from nowhere and familiar paths vanish into mist. For generations the people living around these mountains had someone to blame: the ruler of the range.

Today Poles commonly call him Liczyrzepa or Duch Gór. German tradition knows him as Rübezahl, while Czech stories call him Krakonoš. The names differ, but they belong to the same borderland figure — a shape-shifting mountain spirit who could appear as an animal, monk, traveller or guide, raise storms, mislead wanderers and punish those who behaved badly in his domain.

One of the earliest striking images appears on Martin Helwig’s 1561 map of Silesia, where the name is rendered as “Rübenczal”. The creature shown there is not yet the familiar bearded mountain guardian of later art. He is strange and hybrid, more beast than old man. Most of the surviving early written material comes from the seventeenth century; Johannes Praetorius recorded several forms of the name in 1662.

The famous turnip-counting story is later literary material. Johann Karl August Musäus popularised it in 1783, drawing on older motifs but reshaping them into his own tale. In his version the mountain spirit abducts a princess named Emma and tries to keep her entertained by magically transforming turnips into companions. She persuades him to count the turnips. While the mighty ruler of the mountains is occupied with this ridiculous task, she escapes.

From the episode comes the mocking interpretation of Rübezahl as the “turnip counter” — rendered directly into Polish as Liczyrzepa. The true origin of the name remains debated, and tradition warns that it is not necessarily a name the mountain spirit appreciates hearing.

Over time his personality softened. Older stories could make him dangerous or demonic; later ones increasingly turned him into a gruff guardian of the Karkonosze, capable of punishing arrogance but also rewarding honesty or protecting the mountains.

That long, multilingual history is part of the point. Liczyrzepa is not exclusively Polish folklore retrofitted onto the Sudetes. He is a shared German-Czech-Polish mountain figure whose identity changed along with the people telling his stories.

The legend

Beneath the palace on Warsaw’s Ordynacka Street, according to legend, lay a place almost nobody had seen: a hidden underground chamber — sometimes imagined as a subterranean lake — filled with treasure.

And somewhere inside it lived a golden duck.

The duck was no ordinary animal. She was an enchanted princess, and by the nineteenth century Warsaw storytellers were sending soldiers, apprentices and cobblers below the city in search of her fortune.

The hero eventually reaches the hidden chamber and meets the Golden Duck, who offers him wealth on one condition: the money must be spent entirely on himself. In one common version he must spend one hundred ducats a day for three days without sharing any of it; in Artur Oppman’s later telling, a shoemaker’s apprentice receives a hundred ducats and faces the same essential test.

At first the challenge seems absurdly easy. The young man buys clothes, food and pleasures that had previously been beyond his reach. But eventually he encounters somebody poorer than himself. Some versions make the stranger a beggar; another tradition connects him with a veteran of the Battle of Leipzig.

The hero knows the condition. One coin given away is enough to lose the supernatural fortune.

He gives it anyway.

The bargain immediately collapses. The treasure is lost, and in some tellings even the enchanted world beneath the palace disappears with it. Yet the ending is not always unhappy. One version allows the young man to prosper through his own work, become a master shoemaker and marry. The point is not that generosity destroys him; it is that he refuses wealth that can only be kept through selfishness.

The physical setting adds another layer of charm. The building commonly called Ostrogski Castle is more properly a palace, and today it houses the Fryderyk Chopin Museum. There is no documented underground lake full of treasure — but there is a Golden Duck fountain beside the palace, giving the legend a very real place in modern Warsaw.

The Golden Duck may have failed to make its hero rich, but it succeeded rather better at surviving in the city’s imagination.