Baba Yaga

This strange building, rendered by contemporary artist Yasen Stoilov, is the moveable homestead of the legendary Baba Yaga of Slavic origin. Her stories probably go back much farther in time than our written sources permit us to see, so scholars have argued about the meaning of her tales.

Baba Yaga appears as an old woman who rides about on a mortar (or sometimes a broom) and wields a pestle weapon — you can see an illustration from 1894 _Tales of the Russian People_ by Gatsulk). Her small hut runs around the forests of Eastern Europe on magical chicken legs. Many Slavic peoples — from Russians to Ukrainians to Romanians, Czechs, etc have folkloric tales about her, but her role in these tales varies a lot.

Baba Yaga is a villain in about 2/3 of the folkloric stories. In tales when the hero is a boy, Baba Yaga frequently wants to eat the child and stuff him in an oven (á la “Handsel and Gretel). It turns out there was an actual practice of “baking” sickly children by popping them in an oven for a short while (I know crazy right?), but these stories have also been interpreted from a Freudian lens, where the oven is a womb and the boy needs to separate from his mother. And because Baba Yaga has a big nose and sometimes turns men to stone in the stories, Freudians have also thought the tales represent male castration fears. Ahem.

Sometimes Baba Yaga does other terrible things to her victims, like gauges out their eyes or decapitates them. But on other occasions the Baba Yaga helps the hero or heroine by giving them information that assists their quests. She has been interpreted as a forest mother, lunar witch, underworld Goddess, or a storm cloud — but her genesis seems ultimately knowable.

In Russian, the sounds associated with her moniker “bony leg” just seem fun to pronounce: “Baba Yaga kostianaianoga.” I’d surely have kept up her stories for that. Really, though, she had me at the chicken-leg hut.