Umbrarium

In Greek popular belief the kallikantzaroi — καλικάντζαροι, with scores of local names from Pagana in Cephalonia to Planetaroi in Cyprus — live under the earth for most of the year, sawing at the great tree that holds up the world. When the trunk is almost through, Christmas arrives and they forget the tree, swarming to the surface for the Dodekaimeron, the Twelve Days from Christmas to Theophany on the sixth of January. Above ground they are pranksters and polluters: they come down chimneys, foul food and wine, spoil milk, break furniture, devour the Christmas pork, and frighten people. Archaeologist Afendra Moutzali, writing for Archaeology Wiki from family memory as well as folklore, places them among the night powers of the longest dark, when the unbaptised interval of the feast leaves waters and houses less guarded.

While they riot among the living, the world-tree heals. On Epiphany the priest's blessing of the waters and the house-to-house sprinkling with basil and the Cross chase them below, where they find the trunk whole and must start the sawing again. The cycle is yearly and, in the tales, unwinnable. Householders kept the fire of the Twelve Days burning with christóxylο, Christ's wood, sometimes a marriage of male and female trees. Salt or an old shoe thrown on the flames, bells in the village square, tar or charcoal crosses on doors, a pig's jaw at the chimney, and a sieve or a ball of flax left for them to count — they cannot finish before the cock, and three is a holy number they skip — are among the recorded protections. Leo Allatius already described related Chian beings in the seventeenth century.

Appearance is not agreed. Some picture them tall, black, ragged, in iron shoes; others small, lame, goat-legged, one-eyed, and stupid; they eat snakes and also love fritters. Children born at Christmas were in some places thought at risk of joining them, and were tied with straw or garlic, or had toenails singed. Scholars have argued Byzantine carnival maskers, underworld dead of the winter solstice, and remnants of Anthesteria-like open graves. The Farasa Cappadocians spoke of the dead climbing chimneys in these nights. The beings are Greek and Anatolian seasonal spirits, not a standing army of demons and not Krampus under another name, though they share with him the midwinter licence of the dark.

Read with care, the kallikantzaros is a way Greek-speaking households marked the anxious hinge of the year: the sun's standstill, the unblessed water, the chimney as a road. The stories are still told at Christmas, sometimes as children's fright, sometimes as custom around the fire. They do not ask the listener to believe in a literal world-tree so much as to keep the hearth, welcome the priest's water, and remember that isolation in the longest nights is when the house feels most permeable.