A — documented

Alkarısı

Türkiye
Anatolia; Yahnikapan, Eskişehir, where a healing «hearth» has been documented in the field up to 2022

Alkarısı — the Anatolian demon that attacks the new mother in the forty days after giving birth and tears out her liver.

In a birthing room, at night, a very tall female figure with long hair and hooked nails bends over the sleeping woman; a needle is driven into the pillow and a piece of iron is set beside the door.

Variants and names: Turkish Alkarısı, Albastı, Al Anası, Al Kızı; in Azerbaijani Hal anası. In the rest of the Turkic world: albastı in Kazakh, Uzbek, Tatar; albarstı in Kyrgyz and Turkmen; almastı among the Karachay-Balkars. The second element is uncontroversial — bas-tı, «it pressed», hence the demon that presses down. On the first, it is not.
What is told: It attacks the loğusa, the woman in the forty days after giving birth. It tears out her liver — in the Central Asian variants the lungs — and runs towards the water: when the organ touches running water, the woman dies. It is tall, with long tangled hair, enormous breasts thrown back over its shoulders, long nails, horse's teeth, and in certain descriptions feet turned backwards. The defences are all household objects: the needle or the pin in the collar and in the pillow, iron, the knife, garlic and onion, bread, the broom, the Qur'an at the bedside, a red ribbon on the new mother, the light left on and the continuous vigil for forty days. And there is the best motif of all: whoever drives a needle into it keeps it at home as a servant, and loses it the instant the needle is taken out.
What it was forthe author’s reading: It gives a name and a face to a death that came suddenly upon a healthy woman. It is not an explanation of suffering in general: it is the explanation of that week, the first after the birth, and it organises around the new mother an apparatus of uninterrupted surveillance.
Where it is attested: The most solid synthesis on the name and on the figure is Edina Dallos, «Albasty: A Female Demon of Turkic Peoples», Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 64, 2 (2019), pp. 413-423, open access. For the Anatolian side: Abdülkadir İnan, Tarihte ve Bugün Şamanizm, Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1954, and the entry «Alkarısı» by Abdurrahman Küçük in the Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 2, 1989, p. 469, which defines it without circumlocution as the cause attributed to lohusa humması, puerperal fever. The belief has been documented in the field recently and more than once: Sivas, 114 informants gathered between 2014 and 2017; Ağrı, 2016; Eskişehir, fieldwork 2020-2022; the Kelkit valley and Isparta, 2025.
Caution: Grade A: a scholarly encyclopaedia, an article in a peer-reviewed ethnographic journal, and — the thing that weighs most here — five pieces of field research published between 2016 and 2025. This is not archival material: it is a belief that someone has gone and verified in person over the last ten years.

What is not demonstrated is the etymology. That al means «red» is a hypothesis, not a fact. Dallos lists four competing proposals and shows that the most popular one limps: in the mythic texts the albastı is yellow or black, not red. The others invoke an Iranian concept, or Old Turkic alp in the sense of «heavy, dangerous». The «red» is probably folk etymology, reinforced after the fact by the red ribbon of the ritual.

I have not confirmed, and therefore I do not assert: a passage on the albastı in Radloff, an entry «Albasti» in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, a treatment in Jean-Paul Roux, nor the pages of Boratav that are often cited.

Reality checkestablished

What has been established today.

Here the real phenomenon is not in doubt, and it is terrible. Puerperal sepsis from group A streptococcus was the principal cause of maternal death until antisepsis, and the clinical picture matches the story point by point: a healthy woman gives birth, for two or three days she is well, then very high fever, delirium, rapid death. It does not «resemble» the attack of the al: it is the attack of the al, seen from another angle. What is notable is that the Turkish literature does not need me to say so — the official religious encyclopaedia, under the entry «Albastı», itself writes that this is puerperal fever.

The historical proportions are better seen elsewhere, because in Anatolia they are lacking: in the obstetric clinic in Vienna, between 1841 and 1843, the ward attended by medical students lost about 16% of the women giving birth against 2% in the midwives' ward — a difference due, as was discovered, to unwashed hands. With prontosil, from 1936, the fatality of puerperal sepsis fell from 27% to 8%. For Ottoman Anatolia there are no reliable historical series of maternal mortality: the first robust national figure is from 2005-2006. I say so because I would not want the Viennese numbers to pass for Turkish ones.

There remain reasonable and unproven hypotheses: that eclampsia — convulsions, coma — and puerperal psychosis, which affects one or two women in a thousand, feed the variants in which it is the new mother herself who sees the al. And it remains speculative, however seductive, that the forty-day vigil was selected because it worked: continuous surveillance means haemorrhage recognised at once, but nobody has ever measured it.

On the Mesopotamian background I am obliged to disappoint. The resemblance to Lamashtu, the Assyro-Babylonian demoness who kills new mothers and newborns, and to Lilith is striking — the same victim, the same amulets, the same iron. But the historical continuity is not demonstrated: the only linguistic link ever proposed, almasty from lamaštu, is judged phonetically untenable, and the critical edition of the Lamashtu texts edited by Walter Farber in 2014 posits no Turkic descent. A typological analogy, then, not a kinship. Which is less romantic and more interesting: it means that the same fear has produced the same figure twice.

Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, entries «Alkarısı» (vol. 2, 1989, p. 469) and «Albastı»; Edina Dallos, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 64, 2 (2019), pp. 413-423; Walter Farber, Lamaštu: An Edition of the Canonical Series of Lamaštu Incantations and Rituals, Eisenbrauns, 2014; Turkey National Maternal Mortality Study, Hacettepe, 2005-2006

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.

Entries that share the motif, the phenomenon behind it or the history of their collection — not the geography.

Alkarısı

Related by theme