They believe that hair and nails have healing properties. But only those cut on Friday

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Hair and nails are the subject of many superstitions and beliefs in many cultures. In the past, they were of particular importance to the Muslim Roma living in the Balkan Peninsula. They attributed magical powers to their cut hair and nails.

Hair and nails have healing powers, but they can also do harm

The Roma believe that nails and hair should be cut on Friday to have healing power. After cutting, they must be burned and it is the ash obtained in this way that has healing power. “If the cut hair and nails had not been burnt and birds and reptiles had carried them to their nests, the person to whom they belonged would have developed consumption or gone mad,” wrote Lech Mróz in his book “Gypsies” (published by Księgi Wiedza). From the book we also learn that hair and nails replace the person to whom they belonged: “So, you don’t need a sick person to cure the disease, and your hair and nails are enough. In the same way, if you want to harm a person, you must make a statue out of egg wax, then pierce the statue and cast spells on his hair and nails.”

There is a way to return love

As Mróz writes, the Roma had “widely developed” love magic: “Gypsies in Serbia, wanting to ensure their beloved’s fidelity, put a few drops of blood from their left leg into his shoe. There is also another way: “you should take a few of your beloved’s hair, boil it eat them with apple seeds, add a few drops of blood from the finger of the left hand, and then the resulting mixture should be chewed by a gypsy in her mouth during the full moon, saying the words:

I’m chewing your hair, I’m chewing my blood. From hair and blood, let the love of us both arise.

Then the woman had to smear the clothes of her chosen one with such a chewed mixture “so that he would never find peace, only with her.”