Older Women in Balkan Folklore: Wisdom, Death & the Witch

The older woman occupies an unusually complex place in the folklore of the Balkans.

She may be the keeper of family memory, the woman who knows the words spoken over the dead, the neighbour consulted when a child is ill, or the person who remembers which custom must be observed at a particular moment. In stories, she may also appear as a prophetess, a witch or a figure whose knowledge makes others uneasy.

These images are not interchangeable. They emerge from different traditions and tell us different things about the position of women in the communities that preserved them.

Yet they share a common setting: a world in which knowledge was carried through families, ritual responsibilities shaped everyday life, and the boundaries between the living and the dead were marked by custom.

Menopause belongs within this wider history of women’s lives. It should not, however, be mistaken for a single documented passage into supernatural power. The historical evidence is stronger for women’s ritual responsibilities, beliefs about menstruation, the symbolism of age and the social position of older women than it is for a distinct Balkan doctrine of menopause.

To understand the older woman in Balkan folklore, it is necessary to look beyond the modern image of the wise crone and return to the customs, stories and social relationships from which these figures emerged.

A Region of Many Traditions

There is no single Balkan folklore tradition. Serbian, Montenegrin, Bulgarian, Albanian, Macedonian, Romanian and other communities developed their own customs, stories and religious practices. Beliefs also differed between villages, generations and religious communities.

Orthodox Christian practice, household custom and local ideas about spirits, illness and protection could coexist. They did not always form a consistent system.

For this reason, claims about the role of older women need to be tied to particular sources and places. Research on Serbian popular religion, for example, offers valuable evidence about women’s relationship with death and mourning. Montenegrin literature and oral tradition preserve striking images of older female figures. Studies of Serbian folk healing reveal how knowledge was transmitted and maintained by practitioners.

These sources do not describe every Balkan woman. They offer something more useful: particular examples of how women’s knowledge and social position were understood.

The Woman Who Knew the Customs

In rural communities, much practical knowledge was transmitted orally.

Women learned from mothers, grandmothers, neighbours and other experienced members of the household. Knowledge of childbirth, food preservation, household remedies, plants, animal care, mourning and seasonal customs was acquired through observation and repeated practice.

Much of this knowledge would not necessarily have been described as magic. It belonged to the organisation of ordinary life. Yet its importance could give the woman who possessed it considerable influence.

An older woman might remember the words used in a blessing, know how a household prepared for a funeral, or understand the customary response to illness or misfortune. She might know which plants were gathered at a particular season, how a remedy was prepared, or who in the village was known for treating a particular complaint.

Such knowledge was not automatically respected. A woman’s standing depended on her family, reputation, economic circumstances and relationships with others. A respected grandmother and a socially isolated widow could experience old age very differently.

Still, age could bring a kind of authority that was difficult to acquire in youth: the authority of having witnessed, remembered and practised the customs of a community over many years.

Women and the World of the Dead

One of the most revealing aspects of Serbian popular religion is the close, ambivalent relationship between women and the dead.

In her 2022 study, L’au-delà – une sphère féminine: L’autre monde, la mort et la femme dans l’imaginaire et la religion populaires serbes, Andja Srdić Srebro examines the place of women in popular Serbian understandings of death and the afterlife.

She describes women as having important responsibilities in several funeral and mourning practices. In many cases, it was women who washed and prepared the deceased, assisted bereaved families and carried out rites of mourning.

These responsibilities made women more familiar with the practical and ritual dimensions of death. Their relationship with the deceased was not simply one of grief. It was also expressed through the customs that accompanied the dead and maintained the relationship between the living and those who had passed away.

This association was ambivalent. Women could be understood as close to the world of the dead, while also being essential to the care and remembrance of the deceased.

It is important not to turn this into a claim that only older women handled the dead. The responsibilities described in the research were not necessarily restricted by age or menopause. A woman’s role could depend on kinship, household custom and the particular requirements of the funeral.

Nevertheless, older women could acquire considerable experience of these rites over a lifetime. They might become the people who instructed younger relatives in the proper customs and remembered what needed to be done.

The knowledge was practical, but it also carried emotional and religious weight.

Mourning as Women’s Knowledge

In South Slavic traditions, women’s mourning could take a highly formalised form.

Lamentation was not merely the expression of private sorrow. It could give public language to grief, preserve the memory of the dead and articulate the obligations of the living towards the deceased.

A lament might recall a person’s qualities, describe the loss suffered by the family or speak directly to the dead as if the relationship continued beyond the grave.

In a society where oral tradition carried much of a family’s memory, the ability to perform and remember these forms of mourning was significant.

Women were not simply present at funerals. In many documented traditions, they were among the people who gave mourning its words and structure.

The association between women and death should therefore be understood through both ritual responsibility and popular imagination. It does not require the assumption that women possessed a special supernatural power because of their age.

The Old Woman and the Witch

The older woman also appears in Balkan literature and folklore as a figure associated with witchcraft, prophecy and dangerous knowledge.

In South Slavic traditions, the word vještica is commonly associated with a witch. Other female figures, including prophetic or supernatural women, belong to different local narratives and should not all be treated as the same character.

An especially striking example appears in Petar II Petrović Njegoš’s nineteenth-century work The Mountain Wreath (Gorski vijenac).

The poem includes an old woman from Bar who appears before a gathering of Montenegrin men as a prophetess-witch. She claims to possess knowledge of witchcraft, but the episode becomes a political deception: she has been sent to confuse the men.

The figure is an outsider, and her age and position are used to shape how the men interpret her. She is treated as suspicious and potentially dangerous, yet also as vulnerable to the threats of others.

The scene is a literary construction, not an ethnographic record of how all Montenegrin communities understood older women. Its value lies in what it reveals about the imagination of the period: an old woman could be represented as occupying an uncertain position between the familiar social world and the supernatural.

The episode also reflects the gendered nature of the poem. The gathering is dominated by men, and the old woman becomes a figure through whom questions of deception, authority and belief are explored.

She is not a simple portrait of a village healer or wise woman. She is a character shaped by the political and literary purposes of the work.

This distinction matters. Folklore and literature can preserve powerful images of women, but those images do not always describe the lives of the women who inspired them.

The Healer and the Keeper of Hidden Knowledge

The figure of the folk healer provides another perspective on women’s authority.

In Serbia, traditional healing and charming practices were transmitted through personal instruction, family relationships and local networks. Some practitioners were known for their ability to perform charms, diagnose misfortune or carry out protective and healing rituals.

Sonja Petrović’s study, Charmers on the Folk Practice of Charming in Serbia (2018), draws on field interviews and written sources to examine the role of these practitioners. It discusses how magical knowledge was acquired, protected and passed on, and how charmers understood their relationships with patients and official medicine.

The study is useful because it looks beyond the charm itself and considers the person who performs it. Knowledge was not simply a collection of words or recipes. It was also a social responsibility, a form of expertise and, in some cases, a source of personal standing.

Not all charmers were women, and not all practitioners were old. But the study helps explain why an experienced woman with a reputation for healing or ritual knowledge might be consulted when ordinary remedies seemed insufficient.

It also shows that folk practice was not frozen in an ancient past. Practitioners adapted, combined methods and negotiated their place alongside changing medical and social institutions.

Age, Menstruation and the Question of Menopause

The female life cycle carried social and ritual meanings in many Balkan communities.

Menstruation, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood could all affect how a woman was treated and what was expected of her. Ethnographic research from Serbia and Bulgaria records beliefs about menstrual blood, fertility and ritual restrictions.

These beliefs are important for understanding the cultural setting in which menopause occurred. They show that women’s bodies were not regarded as purely private or biological matters. They were connected to the household, family continuity, religious practice and the perceived order of the community.

However, the evidence does not establish a single Balkan belief that a woman became spiritually protected, magically powerful or immune to supernatural harm when menstruation ended.

It is tempting to imagine menopause as a passage from reproductive vulnerability into a new state of authority. That is an evocative interpretation, but it should not be presented as a documented universal tradition.

A more careful reading is that a woman’s social position could change as she moved through different stages of life. Her responsibilities, family relationships and accumulated knowledge might change with age. Menopause was one part of that larger transition, not necessarily its sole cause.

For a closer examination of menstrual blood, its ritual meanings and the customs recorded in Serbian and Bulgarian research, see Menstrual Blood in Balkan Folklore: Taboos, Magic & Ritual Boundaries.

For the wider European context of menopause, older women and folk belief, continue to Menopause in Folk Magic: Power, Fear & the Unnamed Threshold.

The Older Woman Was Never One Figure

The older woman in Balkan folklore cannot be reduced to the wise grandmother or the feared witch.

She could be a keeper of family memory, a mourner, a healer, a neighbour, a ritual practitioner or a character in a story shaped by fear and suspicion. Sometimes these roles overlapped. Sometimes they belonged to entirely different social worlds.

Her authority might come from experience, kinship, reputation or knowledge. Her relationship with death might be practical and ritual rather than supernatural. Her portrayal as a witch might reveal the anxieties of a community more than it reveals anything about the lives of real women.

The most interesting point is not that age automatically made a woman powerful. It is that knowledge accumulated over a lifetime could become valuable, while the same woman might remain subject to the social restrictions and suspicions of her community.

The old stories preserve both sides of this position: the woman whose knowledge was sought, and the woman whose knowledge was feared.

Further Reading

This article distinguishes documented ethnographic material and literary representations from broader interpretation. The traditions discussed belong to particular communities and historical contexts, not to every Balkan people or generation.