Why a crossroads
The folk worldview divided space into what belonged to us and what belonged to others. The house, yard and field belonged to us; the forest and marsh belonged to others, and the boundary between them was considered the most unsettled place. A crossroads was a boundary in the purest sense: it did not belong to any one road.
The same logic applied to the threshold, window, bathhouse and bridge. All of them were places of transition, so they had the most rules: people did not greet each other across a threshold, cross themselves in a bathhouse or tell fortunes on a bridge without good reason.
Leave illness behind. An ill person's belongings were left at a crossroads: the trouble was thought to leave with whoever picked them up or simply walked past.
Tell fortunes. People believed the future could be heard more clearly in such a place, and girls went there to listen for sounds on the nights of the Christmas season.
Bury without the usual rites. Those who were not supposed to be buried in a cemetery were left at a crossroads, outside consecrated ground but also outside the village.
Avoid it at night. At night, people tried to pass a crossroads quickly and without looking back. The rule was simple, and that was why it endured.
The first point also explains a familiar prohibition: do not pick up someone else's belongings from the road. Behind it was not thrift, but the belief that along with the object, you might also pick up the trouble it was meant to take away.
Not only among the Slavs
The crossroads as a special place appears in many different traditions, from an ancient goddess of roads to rituals in West Africa and the Caribbean. The similarity is explained not by borrowing, but by the nature of the place itself: a point where paths meet and the usual order does not apply.
It is important to understand that we are talking about beliefs, not about the properties of the landscape. Ethnographers describe what people believed and how they behaved, and the value of these records lies precisely in showing how people marked out space.
Traces of this way of marking space have survived to the present day. Roadside signs, crosses and memorials at forks in the road continue the same logic: a boundary place needs a marker, or it remains no one's.
Why was a crossroads considered a special place?
What other places followed the same logic?
Sources
- In the East Slavic tradition, the crossroads belongs to the boundary places, along with the threshold, window, bathhouse and bridge
- it is associated with rituals for getting rid of illness, Christmas-season fortune-telling and burials outside cemeteries. Similar beliefs about crossroads have been recorded in a number of other cultures
Next in the “Slavic Myths” series
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