Purger and Purgerica
Beneath the Cloak of Darkness: Witches, Fear, Fire and Reason
Imagine eighteenth-century Zagreb. As you walk through the dark, narrow streets of Gradec, it is not only cats that watch you from the rooftops, but fear itself. In those days, when “eyes seemed to grow in the darkness”, every unusual sound or a neighbour’s suspicious glance could become a death sentence.
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Even today, the roof of the Kamenita Vrata (Stone Gate) tower bears a reminder of those beliefs – a steel mace mounted with the intention of catching a witch’s cloak as she swept past on her broomstick in low flight.
According to popular belief and the accusations recorded in court, witches were thought to possess a wide range of powers that enabled them to influence everyday life. It was believed that they could transform themselves into animals, most commonly cats, flies, or birds such as crows and ravens, allowing them to spy on people unnoticed. They were also said to control the weather, conjuring hailstorms and tempests that destroyed crops while riding upon black clouds. Witches were reputed to brew potions capable of inspiring love or provoking hatred.
Official witch persecutions in Zagreb began in the fourteenth century, and the oldest surviving court record of a witchcraft trial dates from 1360. Although isolated cases had appeared earlier, systematic persecution and mass hysteria developed over several key periods.
The first recorded trial in Gradec took place in 1360 against Alice and Margaret. At that time, the accused still had the right to prove their innocence through the sworn testimony of jurors and were not subjected to torture. By the end of the fifteenth century, however, the publication of the papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus (1484) and the notorious manual Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches, 1486) made persecutions across Europe – including those in Zagreb – increasingly brutal and dependent upon systematic torture.
Following the Church Synod of Trnava in 1611, which ordered regular preaching against witchcraft, the number of trials in Zagreb and the surrounding region rose dramatically. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries marked the height of the persecutions. Particularly infamous were city judges and captains such as Đuro Porta and Ivan Khayll, who between 1698 and 1705 conducted dozens of trials without delivering a single acquittal. Over the centuries, around 250 official witch trials were recorded in Zagreb (and possibly even more, according to some estimates), while at least 106 people were executed, most often by burning at the stake at the execution ground known as Zvezdišće, on the site of what is now the Tuškanac cinema.
Take the case of Matija Paun. Matija was a woman who chose to live and dress as a man. In a world that could not tolerate difference, this was declared “unnatural” and taken as proof of a pact with the Devil. Agata Golić, on the other hand, was pricked with needles by the judges as they searched for the so-called “Devil’s mark” – an ordinary mole that did not bleed was enough to condemn someone as a witch.
The courtroom itself was often the most terrifying place of all. Barica Cindrić, one of Zagreb’s best-known alleged witches, endured a living nightmare. At first she bravely remained silent, but after being stretched on the rack and tortured with fire, she confessed to anything – pacts with the Devil, witches’ sabbath at crossroads – simply to make the pain stop.
Yet in this dark story, one woman decided that matters could not continue in this way: Empress Maria Theresa. When the case of Magda Logomer Herucina reached her – a woman accused of turning herself into a fly and flying around sick people – the Empress declared, “Enough!”
Maria Theresa did not believe in witches; she believed in medicine and reason. She summoned Magda to Vienna, ordered physicians to examine her, and concluded that the accusations were nothing more than the products of ignorance and malice.
In order to put an end to the general madness and the flood of baseless accusations, a series of legal reforms concerning witch trials was gradually introduced. An ordinance issued in 1740 for the Austrian hereditary lands required that every death sentence in a witchcraft trial receive the Empress’s personal approval. In practice, this meant that every accused woman had to be taken to Vienna at the expense of the town bringing the charges.
Under her influence, the Croatian Parliament passed a law on 26 March 1756 requiring that all death sentences for witchcraft handed down in Croatia be submitted to the Empress for confirmation. As she never approved a single such sentence, the trials effectively came to an end.
The new criminal code of 1768, the Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana, significantly tightened the standards of evidence in cases involving alleged magic, making convictions almost impossible. The abolition of torture in 1776 delivered the final blow to the witch trials.