Gejda on DeviantArthttps://www.deviantart.com/gejda/art/Morning-426182138Gejda

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Morning

Published: Jan 11, 2014

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Description

I finally got around to start doing manips again, and this year I decided to try and focus more on images that actually tell a story rather than just show pretty girls in pretty dresses. This one, however unlikely it may seem, is a continuation of my Slavic creatures series.

The creatures I attempted to show here are actually the birds. They were called leleks. They were about the size of a sparrow, but easily distinguished from regular birds - most importantly, they were completely black, including legs and beak, which was long and crooked at the end. They had white, crystal clear eyes. You could recognize one by its voice - it was shrill, mournful; their songs sounded like an infant whimpering or the wind wailing between the rafters. Those songs were called lel, or lelanie.

Leleks sing a hymn to call the soul into the Nether World, and it can be heard by everyone around, though only the one that is about to die hears the song so clearly he can even tell apart the words. A lelek usually sits over the head of this person - on a branch, on a roof of a house, top of a haystack. It not only leads souls to Nawia(Slavic name for the nether world), but it also leads nawkas - who are the Goddesses of the Nether World - towards the soul, as they are otherwise completely blind.

Info translated from Barbara and Adam Podgórscy's "Wielka księga polskich demonów" - "The great book of Polish demons".

Hope you like it.