A Greek folktale from the Black Sea coast of Turkey begins, There once was a man who had one son. He called the boy and said, My son, I will give you some advice and I want you to pay heed. Whenever you go somewhere and meet a hairless man, do not accept his greeting, but turn back home. The father dies and the boy tries to heed his advice, but soon discoversnightmarishlythat he lives in a land full of hairless men and so is forced to do business with them.

At first glance, the presence of this hairless man in this story seems unremarkable. The motif of men losing their hair occurs as a plot element in many folktale repertoires around the world and across time. A few examples occur in stories about sexual infidelity. In an ancient Roman fable, Aesop tells of a man with two wives, each of whom wants him to look more like her. The younger one pulls out all his gray hairs, the older his black hairs, so that he ends up bald. In 17th-century France, La Fontaine repeats the story in verse, but he transforms the man into a wealthy suitor who refuses to marry either of the women once they have plucked him bald. In Korea, the man is an adulterer whose mistress yanks out the gray; to feign innocence, he insists his wife pull out the dark. Other stories explain how St. Peter lost his hair (19th-century Germany) or a vulture lost its feathers (20th-century Burma). Essentially, what all these narratives have in common is that they emphasize the vanity or folly of the hairless one.

But the case in the Greek story above is quite different. The losing of hair not the issue. The hairless man isn’t depilated in the course of the story: he’s hairless by nature, smooth of face, unable to grow either a beard or a mustache. And that provokes the question: Why does the father feel the need to warn his son against him?

If we look broadly at the way the hairless man is characterized in Middle Eastern folktales, a more sinister portrait emerges. The hairless man is consistently cast as a villain. He occurs commonly enough that he has his own name, in Greece, usually spanos and in Turkey kiose. Not merely vain or foolish, he is instead actively malicious and despicable, and there are a couple of reasons for this.

In the folktale universe, where there is rarely any examination of a character’s internal motivations, characterization tends to be done through external appearance. Therefore, heroes, heroines, and other benevolent characters tend to be beautiful or at least easy to look at. Physical defects, likewise, are a sign of moral deficiencies. The inability to grow a beard or mustache in societies that highly value facial hair on men is an insurmountable failing, and is therefore used by folk narrators to mark a deeply untrustworthy villain.

Further, his defect makes him something of a monster. In a region where being male means to have facial hair, he is not fully male; where a smooth face is the sign of a woman, he is not at all female. Existing in this indeterminate condition, he is considered a monster, an other, and therefore despicable.

It is significant that the father tells his son that the best way to deal with meeting a hairless man is to stop in his path and return home, because such a caution echoes warnings against a peril that villagers would have commonly feared in their daily lives, namely the Evil Eye (which is a beliefwidespread back to ancient times among Indo-European and Semitic culturesthat an envious glance can bring severe harm to people, their livestock, or property). Even today, amulets against it are one of the commonest visible features of Greek life to the casual tourist: strings of blue beads or ceramic garlic cloves festoon shops, baby strollers, trucks, boats. The Evil Eye also changes a person’s luck, and can cause someone on the verge of success to fail. The Evil Eye does not appear in folktales; in its place we find the hairless man. He often appears, for example, to foil a young man who is on his way to the market with top-value goods to trade. Although not terribly bright, the beardless villain initially cheats the hero out of his expected fortune (only to have the tables turned later), seemingly out of envy or sheer malice. He acts as a worthy adversary, but is always defeated by the end of the story; the hero usually by repays him for his treachery through his own heightened guile.

The meaning of the hairless man in folktales, then, lies in the Evil Eye. It is a manifestation of malice so common in Greek and Turkish traditional life that it could be said to leave vacuum in folktales by its absence. That vacuum is filled by this smooth faced villain, who is envy and spite incarnate. As such, these destructive emotions are externalized and can be confronted and defeated by the hero, not with strings of blue beads, but through his native wit, strength, and ruthlessness.

Sources:

Bald Stories: folktales about hairless men translated and/or edited by D. L. Ashliman 1998-2000. http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/bald.html

Dawkins, R. M. Modern Greek Folktales. Oxford: Clarendon, 1953.

Dundes, Alan. The Evil Eye: A Casebook. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

Walker, Barbara K. The Art of the Turkish Tale. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993.