There were gypsies, rich gypsies.
These gypsies traveled through the forests in a large camp. In one family there was a young guy, for whom the time had already come to go and get married. This guy's name was Vaida.
Vaida was good to everyone, but he had only one drawback - he stuttered badly.
Vaida heard that there and there, in such and such a camp, there was the beautiful Ruzha. So he decided to go and woo this Rouge.
Vaida drives up to the camp where Ruzha lived. Stopped nearby. He thinks: “If I go to get married according to the ritual, then they might refuse me when they find out that I stutter. Let me steal Ruzh secretly from my parents.”
I did it as I intended.
One fine morning Ruzha went to fetch water. As soon as she approached the river, Vaida jumped out of the bushes, grabbed her, threw her on her horse and said:
- Shout or scream, but you still need to be my wife.
What should Rouge do? So this is fate. She had to tie a scarf around her head, she had to go into someone else’s tent at someone else’s will, call someone else’s daddy “dadka,” and call someone else’s womb “womb.”
And everything might have been fine if Vaida hadn’t stuttered. And because of this, Ruzha’s life with Vaida did not work out at all.
In short, Ruzha ran away from such an unbearable life back to her parents. Well, relatives are relatives. They forgave her for breaking the gypsy law and let her live back with them. And besides, he took her away like a thief, impudently...
And Vaida, when he learned that his wife had run away from him, cursed her with a terrible curse. He fell in love with her, and this made the grief bitter and the melancholy stronger.
One day, it was some holiday, Ruzha was going to church. She walks and suddenly sees a chain lying near the road. Ruzha came closer, moved this chain with her foot, and it wrapped itself, as if alive, around Ruzha’s leg and dragged the beautiful gypsy underground. Ruzha was speechless with fear, and without saying anything or screaming, she went underground. As soon as she disappeared underground, a spreading rowan tree, red and beautiful, grew in this place. You look at her and you just want to break a twig for yourself.
And it had to happen that Vaida and his parents were driving along the same road to the same church. When Vaida saw a rowan tree, he immediately directed his horse towards it, and his hand naturally reached out to pick a branch. But he barely touched the rowan leaves when she whispered to him in a human voice:
- Vaida, na phagir mire vasta! Me som Ruzha - bari wounds. (Like, don’t break my hands, Vaida, I’m Ruzha, a big lady.)
Vaida was so frightened that he even fell off his horse to the ground. For three days then his father and mother looked after him, barely leaving. Only after this incident did Vaida change a lot. He sold all his horses, sold all his farmstead and built a chapel around this rowan tree. The dome of this chapel was made of crystal so that light could penetrate into it.
So Vaida began to live in this chapel, and every night Rouge came to him in human form, and in the morning she again turned into a mountain ash. This was the punishment that awaited them in life: hers for breaking the gypsy law, and him for deceit.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru