Magic, Curses
& the
Supernatural

The bargain

According to the best-known form of the legend, the Kraków nobleman Twardowski wanted knowledge and power beyond ordinary study. He made a bargain with the Devil: supernatural ability in exchange for his soul.

But Twardowski wrote a condition into the contract. The Devil could take him only in Rome. Twardowski had no intention of going there.

For years the trick seemed to work. The legend made him a sorcerer capable of summoning spirits, and the most famous episode tied him to King Zygmunt August. After Barbara Radziwiłł’s death, the grieving king supposedly asked to see her again. Twardowski conjured an apparition and warned him not to touch it. A cracked metal mirror preserved at Węgrów later became identified as the glass used in the ritual.

The historical figure beneath the legend is uncertain. Scholar Roman Bugaj proposed Lorenz Dhur, rendered in Latin as Laurentius Durus: durus and Polish twardy both mean “hard.” Michał Rożek also points to Łukasz Górnicki’s Dworzanin polski of 1566 as the oldest Kraków notice of a Twardowski figure. These are historical clues, not proof that one identifiable magician created the whole legend.

The loophole closes

Eventually Twardowski enters an inn called Rzym — Rome. The Devil appears and claims that the contract’s condition has been met.

Twardowski prays or sings a hymn to the Virgin Mary. The Devil loses his grip, but Twardowski does not return to Earth. He lands on the Moon, where a stable later tradition gives him a spider companion called Maciek, lowered on a thread to bring news from Kraków.

Several Polish inns later claimed to be the legendary “Rome.” The best known survives at Sucha Beskidzka, but the building is much too late to be the original setting. It is a physical home adopted by the legend rather than evidence for it.

Adam Mickiewicz gave the tale its most famous comic literary form in Pani Twardowska. There, the Devil discovers that one of Twardowski’s conditions is to spend a year living with Twardowski’s formidable wife — and flees instead.

The core joke survives every version: Twardowski writes the small print, and Hell eventually finds its own interpretation.

The prophecy

Wernyhora appears in Polish tradition as an old Cossack bard who foretells catastrophe: Poland will fall, the country will be divided, and one day it will return.

The wording changes from copy to copy. Some versions imagine restoration with foreign help. What stays constant is the shape — national death followed by resurrection.

There is no secure evidence that Wernyhora himself existed. Joachim Lelewel published the prophecy in the review Patriota in December 1830, just as the November Uprising began. Later scholars argued over whether any of the text was genuinely older or whether the prophecy acquired authority by predicting events that had already happened.

Its cultural afterlife made the uncertainty almost irrelevant. Słowacki used Wernyhora. Matejko painted him in 1883–84, with a nobleman recording the prophet’s words. The painting hangs in Kraków’s Sukiennice gallery.

Then Wyspiański placed Wernyhora inside Wesele. In the play he effectively steps out of Matejko’s image and entrusts the golden horn — the great chance for national action — to the wedding party.

Wernyhora therefore belongs here not because an authenticated supernatural prophet walked the steppe, but because Polish culture repeatedly chose to make him real.

The sabbath

Local tradition places witches’ sabbaths on the summit of Łysa Góra. They flew there at night, brought storms, spoiled milk and spread sickness. Then the bells of the Holy Cross abbey began to interrupt their gatherings.

According to one legend, Lucifer ordered his servants to carry an enormous boulder to the summit and crush the monastery. Before they could finish, a bell rang — or a cock crowed — and the supernatural strength failed. The stone crashed onto the slope and shattered into the gołoborze, the great fields of broken rock still visible today.

Geology explains the stone fields naturally, but the mountain already possessed older layers of sacred meaning. Jan Długosz himself described a pagan sanctuary there and supplied names such as Łada, Bóda and Leli. Archaeology has identified a stone rampart around the summit, though its dating remains disputed rather than securely early medieval.

That uncertainty is part of the story. A mountain already remembered as sacred or forbidden was ideal ground for later witches, devils and Christian counter-legends.

The hidden army

A shepherd — sometimes a boy called Jaśko — discovers an opening in Giewont and follows sounds from inside. There he finds a hall filled with sleeping knights, heads resting on swords and horses ready nearby.

One wakes and asks a single question: Is Poland in danger?

The shepherd answers that the time has not yet come. The knight tells him to leave. When he later tries to find the entrance again, it has vanished.

Another tradition gives the story an even more patriotic shape. The knights rise when the Zygmunt bell calls them toward Kraków, only to be sent back because the country does not yet require their final return.

Andrzej Stopka-Nazimek published several Tatra versions in 1899, drawing on highlander tales. The mountain itself helps the legend: viewed from Zakopane, Giewont resembles the profile of a giant lying on his back. Landscape and story reinforce one another until it becomes hard to imagine one without the other.

The man and the legend

Michał Sędziwój was born in 1566 at Łukowica and died in 1636 at Kravaře, in what is now the Czech Republic. He became one of Europe’s best-known alchemical writers, moved through royal courts and diplomacy, and later gained a reputation as a designer of mines and foundries.

His Novum Lumen Chymicum circulated widely. His writing about a life-supporting component of air later made him seem uncannily close to discoveries that would come much later.

Legend gave him the ultimate alchemist’s achievement. Before a monarch, Sędziwój supposedly transformed ordinary metal into gold. The identity of the ruler shifts with the telling: Prague and Rudolf II dominate one tradition, while Matejko’s famous painting places the demonstration before Zygmunt III.

That is exactly why the story works. The transmutation is legend, but it grows around a man whose genuine intellectual career was already extraordinary enough to attract it.

The judgement

The story is set at Lublin’s Crown Tribunal. A poor widow brings a case against a powerful magnate. The judges have been bought, the evidence is ignored, and she loses.

In despair she turns toward the courtroom crucifix and declares that devils would judge more fairly.

That night, according to the legend, the court assembles again. This time the judges are devils. They hear the case and find for the widow.

One of them places a hand on the table and burns its print into the wood as the seal of the supernatural verdict.

A pine table with a dark hand-shaped mark really survives in Lublin’s National Museum. But the object complicates the story rather than proving it. Research suggests the tabletop is probably from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, much later than the traditional date of 1637. The first written description linking the mark to the legend appears in 1876.

So the handprint is real. The table is real. The corrupt court of 1637 has not been identified. The Devil’s involvement remains somewhat harder to subpoena.

Lost underground

The recorded castle legend names the shepherds Szymek and Wojtek. They enter the cellars carrying blessed chalk and paschal wax, protection for a treasure hunt beneath Czorsztyn.

They find chests. Then the light fails. The treasure disappears. So does the way out.

Eventually they crawl through a narrow opening and return to the village — only to find their cottages ruined and everyone they knew gone. The tradition says it is as though a hundred years have passed.

Those precise names and ritual objects depend on the printed source cited by the castle article and should be treated cautiously until that source is read directly. But the underlying story is securely recorded as a Czorsztyn legend: treasure, enchanted underground space and catastrophic lost time.

It ends without explaining where the men went. The cellar is not simply underground. For a while, it is somewhere outside ordinary time.

From wetlands to castle cellars

Boruta belongs to the marshy world around Łęczyca. His name is recorded before the nineteenth-century literary versions, and later folklorists connected him with woodland and wetland spirit traditions that gradually became interpreted as devils.

Kazimierz Władysław Wójcicki’s 1837 collection helped fix the image of Boruta as a nobleman-devil associated with Łęczyca Castle and its cellars.

A later origin story brings in Kazimierz the Great. The king’s carriage becomes trapped in the marshes and a tremendously strong young man pulls it free. Reward eventually turns the helper into the supernatural lord of the castle.

Boruta guards treasure and changes form. He can appear as an owl, a black horse or a miller. He frightens, tricks and sometimes helps poorer people against the powerful.

That contradiction is the important part. Boruta is not simply Satan relocated to Łęczyca. He is a regional supernatural personality whose older landscape associations were gradually translated into the language of the Devil.

Rokita is a separate figure and should remain separate. A story about a pot of gold carving a trail beside the Liswarta belongs to a geographically different Boruta tradition and is best left outside this core version.

Today Łęczyca Castle preserves hundreds of folk sculptures of Boruta. After centuries guarding the place, he has effectively acquired his own headquarters.

A legend forms in real time

During conservation work in 1973, a team opened the tomb of Kazimierz IV Jagiellończyk and Elżbieta Rakuszanka in Wawel Cathedral. The tomb had remained sealed for centuries.

In the years that followed, several people connected with the work died. Retellings disagree sharply over how many, how quickly and how unusual the cluster really was. That uncertainty did not prevent newspapers from comparing the event with the supposed curse of Tutankhamun.

Microbiologist Bolesław Smyk identified Aspergillus flavus in material from the tomb. The fungus can produce dangerous toxins, and later studies of crypt environments have found many potentially harmful microorganisms.

But presence is not causation. No evidence establishes that Aspergillus killed the people later included in the curse story. Other explanations have been proposed, and the death count itself changes between retellings.

That makes the story particularly valuable here. This is not an ancient curse surviving from the Jagiellonian court. It is a modern legend forming around a documented archaeological event, real deaths and a scientific discovery that sounds almost supernatural when compressed into one sentence.

Atlantis of the Baltic

Vineta is remembered as a magnificent trading city whose wealth became arrogance. In later tellings the sea destroys it for pride, luxury, impiety or corruption.

The drowned city does not disappear completely. Bells can supposedly be heard beneath the water. Streets or buildings may briefly reveal themselves. The lost place remains close enough to remind the living what was punished.

Behind the legend lies a real historical puzzle. Medieval writers described an important emporium around the mouth of the Oder under names such as Jumne or Julin. Wolin is an excellent archaeological match for that trading centre. Later manuscript spellings helped produce the name Vineta, and scholars have long debated how Vineta, Jumne, Julin and Jomsborg relate to one another.

The sunken-city story itself is later. It belongs more broadly to German and Pomeranian Baltic tradition than to specifically Polish folk culture, so the connection must remain explicit rather than nationalised after the fact.

But Wolin gives the legend a powerful Polish visitor connection: a real early-medieval trading centre beneath a story of a city too rich to survive.