A Dream of Unknowing - Tales of a Carpathian Witch

Introduction

The White Carpathians -

In the winter of 2012 eight recordings were made over several weeks of conversations with Marus Pohansky. He was 68 years old and soon to die. Each recording was made at length, some recordings being more than six hours long, and were mainly records of his life as one of the last Carpathian Witches; a tradition that dates back in this region many hundreds of years.

He was a direct descendant of Jakub and Anka Pohansky, the infamous Witches of Osikovce, whose story is told later in this book, and also descended from Alex Koza who witnessed the tragic killing of Dr. Ladislav Horvath, also retold below, a crime which still haunts the beautiful hills of this region today.

I was fortunate enough to meet him, listen to his stories, get drunk with him and hear him sing his songs during that long winter, and it's a time I look back on often with fondness. As the Carpathian Mountains change forever under the cold rationale of progress, the likes of Old Marus and his tales will become more and more important if the traditions are not to be lost forever.

However, there is a new generation of Carpathian children, more enlightened than their parents perhaps, who do not see the glitter of gold or look with longing at the latest plastic gadget, and I met a number who had come to see Marus Pohansky the winter I was there. They were ardent, youthful and seeking, and came in search of things that science and the rational world told them no longer existed.

In the evenings we talked of Myth and Magic, and recited legends that filled the room with a hundred generations of understanding. As the room grew hazy with the smoke of cigarettes and the sweet warmth of plum brandy, our host would speak of many things, and we, like children would hold our breath in wonder at a world so far removed.......yet just beyond the haze of reason. There are not many people you meet today who can hold an audience of adults spell-bound with a fairy-tale but that is exactly what we were: bound by the beauty of his words, and wrapped in the images he painted before us with such clarity and familiarity, that it seemed as if he himself had experienced these things.

He was a story-teller, mystic, witch, poet, and a man who believed that only by keeping the traditions of our ancestors did we have any chance of surviving past 'the arrogance that science and technology has bred in us' - and it was good to see his words struck a chord with some.

In the few months that I was with him he was never short of visitors; a constant stream of people, mainly young, was coming and going having heard about him 'from a friend of a friend'. They came from Slovakia, Hungary, Russia, Austria, Lithuania, Germany, the Czech Republic, Serbia and of course, myself from England. Some stayed only an hour and some months but I think the impact he made upon all of was the same. He left us feeling hopeful in a world (especially the West) where a belief in 'something afar' is seen as a foolish thing.

One such pilgrim who made a big impression both on myself and Marus, a woman named Bea, arrived just before the end of January and stayed with me in my house for several months. She very quickly formed a special bond with Marus, and it's my belief that she reminded him of his wife who had died many years before: Bea is her in spirit, he had said to me once, yet never said exactly whom he meant.

I always assumed he meant Aneta, his wife, who had died many years before. He told me when I first arrived that he had been married and that his wife had died within days of delivering their stillborn son, yet it was something he had not spoken of since, at least not to me.

However, when Bea arrived he became more reminiscent about the past, and I would sometimes see him watching her as she moved about the cramped kitchen or in the evenings when we sat by the fire. I don't think she noticed it, herself, but I would sometime see Marus lay down his book, or stop in mid-sentence and glance across the room towards Bea; never sad, I would say, but contented as if the final piece had just fell in to place.