The Village Taboos on Borrowing and Carrying Fire

The Village Taboos on Borrowing and Carrying Fire turn the handling of an everyday necessity into a matter of both survival and peril. Fire must be carefully preserved, yet sharing it or taking it beyond the household is believed to invite misfortune; its practical value and its feared consequences are inseparable in village life.

Fire as a Necessity

Fire is central to the portable stove called a Comet, a one-quart preserve can perforated with small holes and swung by a wire handle. Kept alight, it provides heat and a place to cook; losing it is serious, especially because matches are scarce and costly, and people with matches economize by splitting them in half. The Comet itself is crucial for approaching settlements guarded by dogs and, in winter, for avoiding frostbite and having cooked food.

This dependence gives household firekeeping an exact routine. Fuel is kept burning in the stove or oven, and before bed women bank the embers under ash so they will last through the night. At dawn, they make the sign of the cross before blowing the fire back to life. The ritual accompanies a spoken understanding of fire as a force that is not naturally friendly to people and must be treated with care.

The Prohibitions

The customs distinguish preserving fire within the household from transferring it elsewhere. Sharing fire, and particularly borrowing it, is considered a source of misfortune: villagers fear that a person who borrows fire on earth may have to return it in hell. Carrying fire out of the house is also avoided because it may cause the household’s cows to stop giving milk or become barren. If fire goes out during childbirth, the consequences are believed to be disastrous.

These prohibitions extend beyond the ordinary act of tending a hearth. Fire is not treated as a neutral possession to be passed freely between households; its movement is subject to danger-laden rules. The practice of banking embers and carefully relighting them thus serves both practical preservation and observance of a wider folk belief.

Scarcity and Exchange

The Comet’s dependence on fire is matched by the difficulty of obtaining its metal container. Cans are found along railway tracks used by military transports, and peasants living on opposite sides of the tracks compete over them. Teams of men and boys search with sacks and carry axes to deter rivals. The scarcity of the container, like the scarcity of matches, makes the ability to keep a fire going a material concern as well as a customary one.

That concern belongs to a wider economy of limited resources and forced obligations. Under German occupation, peasants must provide much of their meager harvest both to regular troops and to the Partisans; refusal can bring punitive raids. In one village, German soldiers arrive three times a year to collect foodstuffs and materials. Elsewhere, villagers barter produce for supplies, while Lekh exchanges birds for food and other essentials. These details place fire customs in communities where access to basic goods is precarious, without making the beliefs themselves simply an effect of wartime scarcity.

Meaning in Village Life

The rules express a tension: fire is indispensable, but it is not trusted. It must be guarded, kept alive, and approached through ritual, while lending or carrying it can expose a household to feared harm. Practical routines and supernatural explanations reinforce one another, shaping how a resource is maintained and how its transfer is understood. In this setting, the taboo is not an abstract prohibition; it is part of the daily management of warmth, food, animals, and risk.