A merchant passing spends the night in the hut of a poor family in which a child is being born. He overhears a conversation between the three Fates about the destiny of the new-born boy. The first wants to see him hanged when he is grown up and the second drowned while the third foretells that he will spend the entire wealth of the merchant who is present in the room.

Now the merchant tries to escape his fate. He takes the boy with him and leaves him alone in the forest, hoping that he will die. But the baby is found by some girls who take him to their home. The boy grows up with his foster parents. By chance the merchant hears about the foundling; he realises who this young man is and gains him as his son-in-law by marrying him to his daughter. He orders his servants to throw the man into the well when he is fetching water. To lure his son-in-law to the well, he pretends to be sick and asks his daughter to send her husband to fetch water from the well. The daughter indignantly refuses to send her husband to the well just for a glass of water and hands her father some water from the supply in the house. When the merchant later goes to the well himself, the servants, blindly obeying his orders, throw him into the shaft by mistake.

Since antiquity, stories and myths about fate as well as the belief in the (mainly female) gods or Fates have been documented and disseminated. In Greek mythology, it is the deity Moira (or Fate) who in her threefold personification as three Moirai determines the fate of the new-born; in Roman mythology it is the Parcae and, in a slightly different context, in the nordic mythology the Norns. Three fairies who determine the further fate of the child immediately after its birth were also embedded in the beliefs of many Romani groups and in southern European countries. Among the Kalderash, the fairies take their names from the Romanian Fates’ ursitoare as ursitorija or vursitori in Romani – see, for example, the well-known work by Matéo Maximoff, “Les Ursitory”. Roma in Macedonia and Serbia frequently use the term sudbenice from Slavic sudbina (fate).

An important element in stories about fate is the fulfilment of the prophecy through the very attempt to prevent it. The variant ‘O trogvco’ [The Merchant] of Slobodanka Jovanović mostly follows the popular plot (AT 930) of the adoption of the new-born baby with the intention of killing it, the child being abandoned, its survival, integration of the young person into the family as a son-in-law – in Jovanović’s version arranged intentionally by the merchant. In the end this version differs from the basic narrative type: the merchant is killed when he attempts to have his son-in-law murdered. It is not necessary to mention the fulfilment of the prophecy – that the young man will get through the family fortune. With the death of the merchant, the way is paved for the unfolding of fate.

Literature

Fennesz-Juhasz, Christiane; Cech, Petra; Halwachs, Dieter; Heinschink, Mozes F. (ed.). 2003. Die schlaue Romni: Märchen und Lieder der Roma / E bengali Romni: So Roma phenen taj gilaben. Klagenfurt: Drava Verlag (Transkript und deutsche Übersetzung / transkripto taj njamcicka translacija / transcript and German translation: 75–87).