Tradition / Region: Romanian Mythology
Alternate Names: The Heavy Wagon; The Mountain Car; The Vespers Wagon
Category: Object, Wagon
The Myth
About thirty years before the tale was told, a farmer’s wife from Malmkrog was harvesting grain on a field high up the mountainside. Her small son, no more than four or five years old, sat in the shade of a few sheaves, restless and bored while she worked.
Below the field the slope dropped steeply into an old, half-cleared forest. It was late afternoon, and the village bells began to ring for vespers. According to custom and belief, people were meant to stop their labor and return home at that hour, but the woman remained in the field.
Then from the nearby woods came a sudden uproar.
The boy later said he heard the crack of whips echoing through the trees, along with loud shouting and calls of “Hi!” and “Ho!” It sounded as if many unseen men were straining to haul a heavily laden cart up the steep, trackless mountainside. The noise of wheels, crashing wood, and clattering harness rang through the forest, though no one could be seen.
Panic seized the woman. She ran to her child, snatched up what she had brought from home, and took his hand. Behind them the din grew louder — the shouts, the cracking whips, the grinding of the burdened wagon — as if the unseen drivers were drawing ever nearer.
Without looking back, she fled with the boy down the mountain toward the village.
That evening she told the men who had already returned from their work:
“When the bell rang for vespers, they came with the Heavy Wagon. Never again will I stay on the Hattert once the church bell rings.”
And from that time on, people remembered the tale and kept to the old custom, leaving the mountain fields when the bells began to sound.
Gallery
Sources
sagen.at contributors. (n.d.). Der schwere Wagen. In sagen.at, from https://www.sagen.at/texte/sagen/rumaenien/siebenbuergen/derschwerewagen.html
Interpretive Lenses
Religious Readings
- Christian Ascetic Deep Dive
Philosophical Readings
- Nietzschean Deep Dive
Psychological Readings
- Jungian Deep Dive
Esoteric Deep Dive
- Hermetic Deep Dive
Political / Social Readings
- Marxist Deep Dive