Custom & practice

Krampus

The horned companion of Saint Nicholas in the Alpine lands — the dark half of the December visit, who frightens the wicked while the saint rewards the good.

In the Alpine regions of Austria, Bavaria, South Tyrol, Slovenia and neighbouring lands, Saint Nicholas does not come alone. On the night of the fifth of December he is shadowed by Krampus — a horned, cloven-hoofed, fur-covered figure with a long lolling tongue, clanking chains and bells, and a bundle of birch switches. Where the saint rewards good children, Krampus is there for the bad: to swat, to frighten, and in the old threat, to bundle the very worst into his basket and carry them off.

The tradition survives most vividly in the Krampuslauf, the «Krampus run», in which people in elaborate hand-carved wooden masks and heavy pelts roam the streets after dark, chasing and startling onlookers by torchlight. The costumes are serious craft, often made and kept over many years, and the runs are loud, sooty and genuinely alarming — a sanctioned eruption of the wild into midwinter.

Krampus pairs an older, pre-Christian figure of the dark winter with the Christian saint, so the fearsome and the benevolent arrive together. Suppressed at various times by church and state, the custom has proved stubborn and is flourishing again — folk tradition doing what it does best, keeping the shadow in the story.