Juniper has attracted travelers and explorers for centuries, and the peculiar appearance of its peak stirs the imagination like no other peak in Croatia. On each side of the world it shows a different shape, and the peak overhanging rock stands out. Klek sa 1181 meters above sea level it is not among the highest Croatian mountains. But the rocky limestone peak makes it higher and seemingly inaccessible. Once upon a time, he must have inspired awe.

The ridge of the mountain seen from the east, from the direction of Ogulin, looks like a huge petrified giant. Div is lying on his back, his head is the main peak of Klek, and the feet of the sleeping mountain are two cliffs of Klec. The giant seems to be fast asleep, but some other creatures do not give him peace during stormy nights. Legend has it that when lightning flashes and thunder cracks around Klek, that witches they call for a village on its top.
Historian and writer Rudolf Strohal At the end of the 19th century, he wrote down folk tales about Kleč witches in the form of stories. The heroines of the stories, the witches from Klek, cook mysterious herbs and oils, smear themselves with them, fly to Klek or ride a servant to the top, devastate inns, dance witches' dances for hours, kill husbands and devour children... and engage in all sorts of other witchcraft and wickedness. . However, many of the myths that Strohal notes as folklore are actually the statements of women accused of being witches, as well as witnesses and judges at actual witch trials in northwestern Croatia during the 17th and 18th centuries.
///In the homeland of my grandmother
Klek was often mentioned as the place of their meetings in witches' confessions at those trials. This applies not only to the trials of women from Ogulin and the surrounding area, but also, for example, to women from Zagreb. Klek's widespread notoriety was already reported by Slovenian historian and scientist Johann Weichard Valvasor in travelogues published in 1649. Some of the women convicted of being Klečko copernicus ended their lives at the stake. One of the witches, however, according to folk legend, was petrified. At the entrance to the village of Bjelsko at the foot of Klek there is a mushroom-like rock, which the people call (Visi) Baba.

Witches – fairies who use evil spells
And while the persecution and extermination of witches in Western Europe peaked in the 17th century, in Croatia the most terrible forms of torture and execution of women accused of being witches began only in 1698. They ended with the decree of Empress Maria Theresa in 1758. In the accusations against witches, they are accused of having made a pact with the devil and communed with him. They turned people into animals, destroyed the harvest, seduced husbands... and many other things that always had nothing to do with folk superstition. In the folklore of the Karlovac region, witches were often just fairies who used evil spells.
But, for the inquisitors of that era, witches were also herbalists and other women who engaged in "pagan" treatment and healing, but also self-conscious girls who refused to be obedient in the "man's world" imposed by the nobility and the church of the time. That's how the Croatian ban Nikola Frankopan fell ill at Christmas in 1620 in Bosiljevo "... because the witches used their spells to deprive him of the ability to use his legs." A witch came to the patient and boasted that she would cure him with witchcraft and secret spells...". This allegedly did not work for her, and the ban was cured by a priest. Strohal, however, points out: "Such female witch doctors had a very high reputation among the people. People trusted them much more than doctors. More recently, at the same time, the witch doctor's grandmother disappears."

When they are from the rocks of Kleka "banished" witches, people dared to visit him. Thus, in 1838, the King of Saxony and botanist Friedrich August II climbed Klek. accompanied by Ogulin officer Josip Jelačić, later Croatian ban. After climbing Klek in 1874, Dr. Johanes Frischauf, a university professor from Graz, met in Ogulin with officer and writer Buda Budisavljević, and lawyer and writer Vladimir Mažuranić (son of Croatian ban Ivan Mažuranić). The meeting was the impetus for the founding of the Croatian Mountaineering Society in Zagreb that same year.
Apart from Klek, legends about witches are also hidden in Ozalj, and fairies are hidden in Rastoki
After Klek, the area of Ozalj once had a bad name for "baba's business". Historian Emilij Laszowski mentions that even in his time, at the beginning of the 20th century, the inhabitants of Trg believed that the Kupa on the night of the witches which are driven there in carriages. For example, Dora Lagenka was burned as a witch in Ozlje in 1694, and Bari Petruša from Vivodina was beheaded in 1749 and then thrown into the pyre with her body.
As well as in Ogulin, and in Ozlje and elsewhere in the vicinity of Karlovac even today, as pointed out by the curator of the City Museum of Karlovac Igor Čulig, "... we expose the still deep-rooted tendency of some residents of this region to at least suspect witchcraft in unusual, and especially unfortunate, cases." Čulig also wrote a play about the witch Bara Petruša, which was performed in the old town of Dubovac in 2000.

The legend of the villas in Rastoke has existed as long as the village of Rastoke itself. While the spoon workers of the mill were grinding corn and wheat all night long, the millers and millers were hanging out with kerosene lamps and telling various stories from their lives long into the night. Meanwhile - Raštok villas would take the horses that the millers left under the haylofts to rest for the journey back home. In the early dawn, the fairies would bring back the horses - panting, tired, sweaty and with lots of tiny braids from their manes. They, on the other hand, would wash their clothes in Slunjčica, dance the circle and dance, call the millers to join them...
///The town of Slunj received the UNWTO World Tourism Award

Even today, they like to gather, so everyone who really wants to can see them and spend time at the Vila Kosa waterfall...
///Where in Croatia can you see fairies?
Source: TZ Karlovac County
Cover photo: Vjekoslav Žgela