The kulshedra is the great monster of Albanian folklore: a huge, many-headed, fire-breathing serpent, usually imagined as female, who brings drought by holding back the water that people and their land depend on. Her enemy is the dragua, the storm hero who fights her in the thunder.

Where the name comes from

The word is usually traced to the Latin chersydrus, a kind of water snake. It is a fitting origin: for all her fire, the kulshedra's power is above all over water.

How a kulshedra is born

A kulshedra is not born a monster. She begins as a bolla, a serpent. In the belief recorded in many parts of Albania, a bolla that lives long enough without being seen by human eyes keeps growing, and in time becomes a kulshedra, with wings and more and more heads. Accounts give different numbers of heads, with seven, nine and twelve all common.

Drought, fire and stolen water

The kulshedra is above all a bringer of drought. She spits fire, scorches fields and dries up the springs. In many folk tales she sits at the source of a spring or a river and lets no one drink unless they pay her, often with a human life, until a hero comes to kill her and set the water free. Some accounts also link her to floods, storms and destruction of every kind.

Descriptions of her shape vary. She is most often a vast serpent or dragon, but some tellings give her a monstrous, half-human female form instead.

The battle with the dragua

The kulshedra's great opponent is the dragua, a human-born hero with hidden wings. Their clashes are fought in the sky: thunder is the sound of their battle and lightning is the dragua's weapon. When the dragua wins, the water she held back pours down as rain. After Christianity spread, the same role was often taken by saints, so that in some tales it is St George who slays the beast.

A serpent who hoards water and a storm hero who frees it is a very old pattern, found across Indo-European myth, from Indra and Vritra in the Rigveda to the dragon-slaying stories of Europe. The kulshedra is Albania's version of that ancient enemy.

The kulshedra in Nendheu

In Nendheu, the kulshedra has dragged the mountain springs down into the world beneath the earth, and the land above is dying of thirst. You play as Arbër, a dragua, and you fight her head by head: every head you sever frees a spring, and the heads that remain change how they fight back. Read more in our announcement.

Sources and further reading

  • Robert Elsie, A Dictionary of Albanian Religion, Mythology and Folk Culture (2001).
  • Robert Elsie, Albanian Folktales and Legends.

Folk beliefs vary from region to region. Where accounts differ, this article describes the most commonly reported version.