Stilzel, the Orc of Sumava

Reading as rough as Sumava itself

Free continuation of Legends and legends of old Sumava. Stories told by the inhabitants of Šumava about a villainous foundling named Stilzel, who managed to tame the devil himself.

A cranky, disfigured, man-hating miller, one day shot down from the sky a boy tangled in a stork's nest. He took an ugly and disheveled villain named Stilzel to his place. The miller, who was feared by the people but continued to have grain milled in his mill because he was honest, was sometimes visited at night by a man with black, piercing eyes. Stilzel was accepted by the miller as his own, but when one day the forester forced the boy to reveal the miller's hiding place in the forest where he often poached, the old curmudgeon banished the boy. Stilzel then wandered the hills, slept in hollows, fed on the crops of the fields. Because the peasants were afraid that the mischievous halama would become a pest, they decided to teach him how to work. He was hired as a municipal horse herder. Soon he was approached by the fellow with the black, piercing eyes, who promised to look after a herd of restless horses for him. The devil himself, who Stilzel later tricked himself. Hans Watzlik recounts the stories of the Šumava foundling, whom he neither judges nor glorifies. A reading as harsh as Šumava itself can be.