Romanian mythology - Mitologia romaneasca - Vlaska mitologija

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Meşterul Manole
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In Romanian mythology, Meşterul Manole (roughly: Manole the Craftsman) is the architect of the Curtea de Argeş Monastery in Wallachia. The Manole myth was expressed in the folk poem known as Monastirea Argeşului ("The Monastery on the Argeş River").

His wife Ana (in full Ana lui Manole - Ana, Manole's woman) would have been walled within the church by Manole himself. This was explained as having been provoked by the constant wall tumblings which would have made further work impossible. Manole's plea to God would have resulted in a vision, telling Manole that the only way in which he was ever to finish building the church would have been to sacrifice his own wife.

A fragment of the poem depicts the struggle the oblivious Ana took in order to reach the construction site. A devoted wife, she aimed to show up in time with her husband's meal. Manole would have been watching her from atop the walls, begging God to present her with all possible challenges. While God paradoxically listened, and unleashed all sorts of small-scale disasters, Ana kept on walking.

After the building was finished, Manole and his fellow workers were stranded on the roof of their own creation by the ruler Negru Vodă. Prince Negru appears to be a fusion the mythical Radu Negru and Neagoe Basarab, the actual builder of the church. The account states that the Prince would have been jealous at the thought that the magnificence of the building might have been surpassed as long as the architect was still alive.

The action forced Manole and his team to build themselves wings out of shingles (the only material available to them) and attempt to fly off to safety. They all fail, but Manole flies furthest, crashing on a spot that was caused to burst water (the fountain on one side of the church).

Many Romanian writers had this motif as source of inspiration. Among them, Lucian Blaga (in his Meşterul Manole theatre play) brought forth a modern take on the myth. In Blaga's version, Manole's self-sacrifice is not prompted by any gesture of Prince Radu, being instead seen as a personal journey.

A similar tale in Hungarian culture is Kőműves Kelemen ("Kelemen, the bricklayer"), whose synopsis is essentialy equivalent to Manole's story.

In Romanian folklore, Muma Pădurii is an ugly and mean old woman living in the forest.


Muma Pădurii literally means "the Mother of the Forest", though "mumă" is an archaic version of "mamă" (mother), which has a fairy-tale overtone for the Romanian reader (somewhat analogue to using the archaic pronouns like "thou" and "thy" in English). A few other such words, typically protagonists of folk-tales, have this effect.

Muma Pădurii is a spirit of the forest in a very ugly and old woman's body. Sometimes she has the ability to change her shape. She lives in a dark, dreadful, hidden little house. This (step-) mother of the forest kidnaps little children and enslaves them. In one of the popular stories, at some point, she tries to boil a little girl, alive, in a soup. However the little girl's brother outsmarts Muma Pădurii and pushes the woman-monster in the oven instead, similar the story of Hansel and Gretel. The story ends on a happy note when all kids are free to go back to their parents. Instead of saying "she's ugly", Romanians sometimes say "she looks like muma pădurii".

She is thought to attack children, and because of this, a large variety of spells (descântece in romanian) are used against her.