Baba Yaga

The tale of Baba Yaga

Deep in the old forest, where the birches grow so close that daylight forgets the way, stands a hut on a pair of giant chicken legs. It turns as it pleases, and it shows its door only to someone who knows the words: "Little hut, little hut, turn your back to the forest and your front to me." Around it runs a fence of human bones, and on every post sits a skull whose empty eyes light up when night falls.

This is the home of Baba Yaga, the old woman of the woods, called Bony Leg in many villages. She does not ride a horse or a broomstick. She flies in a great wooden mortar, steers it with a pestle, and sweeps away her own tracks behind her with a birch broom, so that no one can follow her home.

Vasilisa and the fire

The best-known tale begins with a cruel stepmother. One dark evening every fire in the house goes out, and the girl Vasilisa is sent to Baba Yaga to beg for a light. Everyone knows what that means: she is not expected to come back.

On the way, three riders pass her: a white rider at dawn, a red rider at noon and a black rider at nightfall. Baba Yaga sets Vasilisa impossible chores: sweep the yard, cook the supper, sort a bushel of grain from the dirt before morning. She promises to eat the girl if a single task is left undone. But Vasilisa carries a small doll, her dead mother's blessing, and each night the doll does the work while she sleeps.

When Baba Yaga asks how she managed it, Vasilisa answers only, "By my mother's blessing." The witch wants no blessings in her house. She sends the girl home with a skull on a stick, its eyes burning with fire. That night the skull's stare turns the stepmother and her daughters to ashes.

Witch, mother, judge

Baba Yaga is never simply evil. She eats the foolish and the rude, yet she helps the brave and the polite. She gives heroes a horse, a ball of thread that rolls the right way or advice about Koschei the Deathless. She tests everyone who comes to her door, and her first question is always the same: did you come of your own will, or were you sent?

Baba Yaga in Battle of Myths

Baba Yaga is a cost 3 Slavic hero with two aspects. As the Hexmother (mage and mystic) she casts Hex, cursing several enemies at once with magic damage and a weakening hex. As the Witch of the Hut (mystic and guardian) she calls Hut on Chicken Legs: Izbushka stomps onto the board as a fortified hut that guards her, and she heals herself.

Like every Slav she carries the Cycle of Morana: the first time she falls, she rises again as a spectral spirit.

Did you know?

• Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (1874) has a movement called The Hut on Hen's Legs (Baba Yaga).
• Some tales speak of three sisters, all named Baba Yaga, living deeper and deeper in the forest.
• Her hut is often called Izbushka, "little hut". In Battle of Myths you can fight in her yard: the arena Baba Yaga's Hut.