Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 October 1892 — A Strange Building Legend. [ARTICLE]

A Strange Building Legend.

Nine master masons who . were engaged in building a citadel in the time of Yoivoid Neagoe found on returning to their work each morning that the portion of the wall which they had completed the day before had fallen to pieces during the night and was lying in a heap of ruins in the ditch. Manol of Curtea, the head mason, informed his comrades onj morning that a voice from heaven had warned him in his sleep the night before that their labors would continue to come to naught unless they all swore on that very morning to i.umure in the structure the first woman, be it wife, mother, daughter or sister, who should arrive with the morning meal of one or either ol them. They all took the oath, and the last had hardly been sworn when Mamol’s own wife appeared, carrying her husband’s breakfast. The oath was kept, and the woman known In the legend as "Flora of the Fields,” was murdered, and her blood and flesh incorporated with the walls of masonry. A curious practice of the Bulgarian masons (the above scene is laid in ■Bulgaria) which survives to this day, testifies ito the vitality of this legend. To insure the solidity of the houses they build they measure with a reed the shadow of the first person who passes after the digging of the foundation has been completed. When the foundation is commenced this reed is buried under the first rock, usually the corner stone.