Anabell

Anabell takes her name from the Kingdom of Juliana and its symbol - the Zois’ bellflower.

She is a young girl who feels at home in the magical mountain Kingdom of Juliana. Dressed in white and sometimes adorned with a flower wreath, it is said that the animals and flowers are her kin, as well as the mountains, rivers, and everything in between.

Some people believe that Anabell is entirely fictional, a figment of some story-tellers vivid imagination.

Others claim she was one of the bele žene” (white ladies) - fairies who wore white clothes and lived in remote, hard-to-reach areas.¹ They had the gift of prophecy and brought prosperity and fertility wherever they lived. They used their powers to help shepherds, farmers, and the poor. They did not like to be thanked for benevolent acts and woe betide any human who dared set foot in their kingdom without their permission. The most famous of these fairies lived in the Komna plateau, a magical mountain paradise beneath Mount Bogatin in the Julian Alps of Slovenia over a thousand years ago. Although they disappeared long ago, people still remember and cherish the lessons they taught:

That was in the old days in Slovenia. They were honoured and renowned and although it is more than a thousand years since they have disappeared, people still remember a lot of the things they learned from these learned women.²

In my mind, Anabell was a desetnica (the tenth daughter), someone connected with the sacred, compelled to roam the world teaching others. Slovene folk tales have a distinct tradition of the "desetnik" (tenth son) and "desetnica" (tenth daughter).³ They represent a tithe of some sort and must leave home, either as a sacrifice to a deity or perhaps denoting the sacrifice involved in the long, arduous process of attaining wisdom as a model initiate (ordained person, druid).⁴ They are strongly connected with prophecy or fatal destiny, and the sacred.⁵ They must be given alms wherever they roam.⁶ Some have traced the origin of this tradition to Irish missionaries, but Slovene academic Monika Kropej believes it stems from the Indo-European cosmological myth and that they represent a tithe to the Slavic deities Perun and Mokoš, or are a personification of these same deities.⁷

As to whether Anabell was real or imaginary, I know the answer in my heart. She comes to me every time I lose myself in the miracle that we call nature.

1. Monika Kropej & Roberto Dapit, Visoko v gorah, globoko v vodah: Velikani, vile in povodni možje (Ljubljana: Didakta, 2008), 30.

2. Sibile. Nekaj od Slovencov, Novice II, No.2, 169 quoted in Monika Kropej, Supernatural beings: from Slovenian myth and folktales (Ljubljana: Žalozba ZRC, 2012), 146).

3. In the Primorska region of Slovenia, the tenth or twelfth brother was called kresnik. In Gorenjska (Upper Carniola) the tenth brother and tenth daughter were called rojenjak or rojenica, respectively, connecting them with the Fates. Monika Kropej, The tenth child in folk tradition, Studia mythologica Slavica, 3, (2000), 75-88.

4. Monika Kropej, The tenth child in folk tradition, Studia mythologica Slavica, 3, (2000), 75-88.

5. Ibid., 76.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.