Witches in Bulgaria
I love how despite all of the prejudice against witchcraft, and the occult in general, my language at least gives credit to the practitioners: In Bulgarian the word for witch is вещица (veshtitza) and it means “wise/capable woman” (our language is gender specific, the male equivalent is вещер (veshter) which means “wise/capable man”). It extends to our healers as well - знахарка (znaharka) and знахар (znahar), which means almost the same thing - “knowing woman/man; one who knows things”. There’s another word too - лечител/лечителка (lechitel/lechitelka) which literally translates as healer, but znahar is traditional. There’s also the ever-so-popular врачка (vrachka) which comes from Old Bulgarian and has passed into several Slavic languages as well. It’s original meaning is “healer, doctor” but nowadays it’s used alongside баячка (bayachka) as “someone who practices verbal magic; enchantress, spell-caster” and both words have lost their male form (or at the very least it’s rarely used). No wonder that all of the church’s attempts to “ban witchcraft officially” fail here… In fact a study from a couple of years ago shows that Bulgarians and Romanians are the most frequent customers of witches and fortune tellers in Europe. *Almost forgot to include our word for fortune teller - it’s ясновидец/ясновидка (yasnovidetz/yasnovidka) and it means “clear-seer; one who sees things clearly”.
