Unlike Domovik, this figure does not come with a stable, well-documented body of sources. Bzionek, in the materials that exist, appears only briefly and inconsistently—sometimes described as a small protective spirit, sometimes as a forest demon associated with the household and, more specifically, with the elder tree. The references are scattered, often secondary, sometimes reinterpreted in modern regional projects. But that instability turned out to be useful rather than limiting. When a figure is not visually fixed, what becomes visible instead is its function. And in this case, that function is surprisingly consistent: protection, proximity to the home, a bond with the elder, and a role in warding off illness, misfortune, or harmful forces.

At some point it became clear to me that this was not a figure built around threat. And that mattered, because in folk demonology “demon” is not a simple moral category. Alongside harmful beings, there are also protective ones—domestic, boundary-bound, responsive rather than aggressive. Bzionek belongs to that group. And that made the figure immediately relevant for Uboże, which until now had begun to accumulate weight on the side of tension and unease. What was missing was not softness exactly, but a different kind of force—one that protects without becoming harmless, one that stabilizes without disappearing into sentiment.

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That was also the moment when Bzionek stopped being Bzionek. The shift toward a female figure did not come from a need to artificially balance the collection, even if that balance was indeed lacking. It came from the material itself. The elder tree is not neutral in folk belief. It carries a dense symbolic field: healing, protection, but also death, transition, and contact with what lies beyond. It stands very close to the house, yet is never entirely safe to disturb. It protects, but it demands respect. It is medicinal, but also liminal. That combination suggested a different kind of presence—not fully domestic like Domovik, not fully external like Polevik, but something in between, closer to the body, closer to illness and recovery, closer to the fragile boundary between life and death. Translating that into a feminine form felt less like a design decision and more like a consequence of that logic. That intuition was reinforced by the fact that herbal knowledge among the Slavs was often associated with women, making the feminine turn feel culturally resonant as well as symbolically coherent. And, on a more personal note, there was also a quieter impulse behind it: my partner loves elder—especially its scent—so this figure became, in some small way, a gesture in her direction too.

From the beginning, I wanted to avoid turning the elder into a decorative motif. In many contemporary interpretations, plants are reduced to visual accessories—something added on top of a character rather than something that defines it. Here that would completely miss the point. The elder is not an addition; it is the condition of the figure’s existence. In folk practice it was treated with a kind of cautious reverence. It was planted near homes, used in healing, approached with ritual gestures, associated with both protection and passage. So Bzionka could not simply wear the elder. She had to emerge from it. That is why the leaves began to function as something between a covering and a shelter, the flower became central, almost like a mark or seal, and the darker berry tones introduced a second layer—something less immediately readable as purely alive, something closer to depth, shadow, and weight.

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The early visual attempts were mostly about avoiding the obvious. It would have been easy to push the design too far in either direction—toward something overtly dark and supernatural, or toward something soft and decorative. Neither felt right. Instead, the form gradually moved toward stillness and weight. Bzionka does not need to act in a dramatic way. She does not chase anything away. She remains. That decision shaped the entire silhouette. The proportions became more compact, more grounded, less expressive in a conventional sense. Her presence comes from position rather than movement. She sits at the edge of the cultivated space—near the garden, near the boundary, near the place where the human order thins out. That position carries meaning on its own. She is not inside, but she is not outside either. She watches the place where things cross.

What I find most interesting about her is that her character does not emerge from narrative action but from that placement. She is not aggressive, but she is not passive. Not warm in the domestic sense, but not hostile. She is attentive, and in this context attention itself becomes a form of power. That is also why I did not want to over-define her expression or exaggerate her features. The figure works best when it feels stable, grounded, almost quiet—something that does not need to announce itself in order to be effective.

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As with the other figures in this series, I am not trying to reconstruct a historically fixed being. Bzionka is not a direct ethnographic recovery. She is built from a small, unstable cluster of references: a regional spirit, a connection to the elder tree, a protective function, and a presence near the household. Everything beyond that—the form, the gender, the tone—is interpretation. But it is an interpretation that tries to remain answerable to the underlying structure rather than to any single visual description.

With her, something in the world of Uboże finally settles into place. She introduces a kind of protection that is neither internal nor external, but tied to the boundary itself. She brings in associations that were not fully present before: illness, care, restraint, respect for what grows close to the home but does not belong entirely to it. And she shifts the balance of the collection—not by softening it, but by deepening it. Because not every force in this world needs to move, confront, or demand attention. Some of them simply remain where they are, holding the line in ways that are not immediately visible.

That changes everything.

A figure of the house can feel protective. A figure of the bathhouse can feel enclosed. But a figure of the field has to carry something else: distance, exposure, heat, and labor. Britannica links Polevik to Poludnitsa, the noon spirit of the field, which already says a lot about the atmosphere around him. This is not just cultivated land. It is land under the sun, under effort, and under a certain kind of tension.

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What I liked most while working on him was that he does not come down to us as one perfectly fixed image. In some descriptions he is black like the earth, with grass for hair. In others he appears in white. He is seldom seen, which makes him less like a stable portrait and more like a presence tied to the field itself. In some places, offerings were left to him for fertility, which places him close not only to the land, but to its yield.

That gave me a lot of freedom, but also a very clear direction.

I did not want him to feel like another domestic spirit moved outdoors. I wanted him to feel as if he had risen from the crop itself. That is why the design began leaning toward a sheaf-like shape — something simpler, more vertical, more bound to harvest than to architecture. The early sketch already pushed me in that direction. Once the sickle appeared beside him, the whole figure became easier to place. He stopped feeling like a generic creature and started feeling field-born.

That was really the point of this one.

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Not to make him complicated, and not to over-explain him, but to let the character carry the field in a direct way. Grain, cutting, season, exposure. Something a little dry, a little watchful, and a little strange, but still readable enough to belong inside Uboże.

I also liked that Polevik naturally shifts the mood of the whole series.

He is less interior than the others. Less domestic. Less tied to corners, thresholds, or enclosed rooms. He stands in a wider space, and because of that he brings a different rhythm with him. More air around the figure. More distance. Less shelter.

So in this case, a lot of the work was simply about reducing him until only the essential things were left.

Not adding more detail, but finding the shortest visual route to the idea. A spirit of the field does not need much before he starts to make sense. A shape close to grain. A hint of harvest. A body that feels more like part of the crop than a visitor standing in it.

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Strictly speaking, older source traditions do not always treat these as perfect one-to-one synonyms. In Britannica’s overview of Slavic religion, the ovinnik is tied to the drying-house, while the gumenik is linked to the storehouse. At the same time, both belong to the same broader logic: each important part of the household economy had its own spirit, attached not to abstraction, but to a very specific place. For the purposes of Uboże, that closeness is exactly why I am comfortable bringing them together around one grain-bound figure.

That distinction matters to me because Ovinnik does not belong to the center of the house in the same way Domovik does, and he does not belong to the intimate heat of the bathhouse in the way Bannik does. He belongs to the space of harvest, storage, drying, and waiting — to the place where grain becomes security, but also where one accident can turn a season’s work into loss. Older descriptions of Slavic place spirits repeatedly connect them to specific structures and even to the very timber from which those structures were built.

Even the word gumno helps set that tone. In Polish historical usage, it referred not only to a farmyard with buildings, but earlier to harvested grain laid up for threshing. That older meaning is especially useful to me here, because it keeps the figure close not just to architecture, but to the material reality of grain itself.

That is what drew me to this character.

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Ovinnik/Gumiennik feels less like a domestic companion and more like a keeper of reserves — a figure tied to what has already been gathered, what must be protected, and what remains exposed to fire, weather, neglect, or simple human carelessness. Britannica even notes a nineteenth-century Russian sacrifice made to the ovinnik in the drying house, which says a lot on its own: this was not treated as a decorative superstition, but as a spirit whose place had to be acknowledged.

When I started drawing him, I wanted that to stay visible.

I did not want him to feel like just another small creature with a different hat. I wanted him to carry something of the barn, the threshing floor, the stored crop, and the rougher edge of farm life. That is why the design kept moving toward something simpler and sturdier: a compact silhouette, a worn cap, a piece of grain in the mouth, and a presence that feels a little more rural, a little more practical, and a little less “inside the home” than the other figures.

For me, that is where this character began to work.

Not as a perfect reconstruction, and not as an attempt to pin down one final folkloric image, but as a way of giving shape to a place and its mood. If Domovik is closer to the house itself, then Ovinnik belongs to the stored harvest just beyond it — to the part of the world where survival has already been gathered, but still has to be guarded.

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And, as with the earlier figures, part of the work here was simply spending enough time with him for that logic to become visible. Sketching, simplifying, adjusting proportions, stripping things back, and trying to find the point where the character starts to feel less invented and more placed.

For now, this feels like the right direction.

Not final, not closed, but clear enough to move forward.

Unlike a household spirit tied to the hearth or the everyday rhythm of the home, Bannik belongs to the banya— to a place that is still close to domestic life, but already carries a very different mood. In traditional Rus culture, the bathhouse was not only a place for washing. It was also connected with healing, divination, and other moments of transition, which made it both useful and unsettling at the same time.

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That is exactly what interested me about him.

Bannik is not simply another domestic creature. He belongs to a room shaped by steam, heat, silence, privacy, and a certain kind of tension. Folk belief treated the bathhouse as a place with its own rules, and the spirit tied to it had to be respected accordingly. Traditions recorded around the bathhouse include gestures of caution, offerings, and ritual behavior directed toward spirits understood as “masters” of a specific place.

When I started drawing him, that difference became the most important thing to hold onto.

I did not want Bannik to feel like Domovik with a different prop. I wanted him to feel more local to his own space — more shaped by the bathhouse itself. That is why I kept returning to objects and forms associated with bathing: the bucket-like hat, the beard-wrapped towel around his body, the sleepy but slightly watchful expression, the sense that he belongs somewhere warm, enclosed, and a little uncomfortable.

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What helped me most in thinking about the design was the idea that these beings are often defined less by one fixed appearance and more by the place they inhabit. Research on bathhouse-spirit traditions also points in that direction: what matters first is the connection to the bathhouse itself, and only then the visual form that grows out of it.

Because of that, drawing Bannik became less about illustrating folklore literally and more about trying to condense a place into a character.

I wanted him to feel old, compact, and slightly severe, but not overly dramatic. A figure that could still fit the broader tone of Ubože, while carrying a different atmosphere than the beings connected more directly to the house. Less familiar, perhaps, and a little more awkward. Not necessarily hostile, but not fully comforting either.

That balance was important to me.

Part of the work here was simply spending time with the figure long enough for that tone to become visible — sketching, simplifying, adjusting shapes, and trying to understand what should stay and what should be reduced. So this was not only a matter of “designing a character,” but of trying to give proper form to something that already had a cultural and symbolic weight behind it.

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For now, this is the direction that feels right.

Not as a final answer, and not as a perfect reconstruction, but as a version that begins to place Bannik where he belongs: not in the center of the home, but just beside it, in a room with its own heat, its own rules, and its own spirit.

Not simply what it should look like, but what kind of logic it should carry. What kind of weight. What kind of relationship it should have to the house, to the people inside it, and to the atmosphere of the world around it.

Because once a figure like that appears, it is never only a design problem. It is also a question of tone.

And in a world like Ubože, tone matters from the very beginning.

If I wanted to approach this in the strictest possible ethnographic way, I probably would have begun elsewhere. Domovik, as such, belongs most clearly to the East Slavic sphere: to the figure more commonly described in scholarship as the domovoy or domovyk, a house spirit tied to the household itself. In standard reference and ethnographic accounts, this being is associated with the stove, the hearth, the threshold, the inner life of the home, and even with older layers of ancestor worship. Polish materials do preserve related household-spirit traditions, especially in eastern borderland contexts, but the domowoj/domovik type enters that space through a recognizably Eastern Slavic background rather than as a universally stable Polish household figure.

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That distinction mattered to me from the start, because I did not want to pretend I was reconstructing something purely “original” or purely “national” in a neat and uncomplicated sense. I am not doing reconstruction here. I am building a world. And worldbuilding, at least for me, becomes more honest when it admits the distance between source and form instead of trying to hide it.

This is also why I kept Ubože as the main name of the project.

There is a specifically Polish history of naming domestic spirits, and historical research shows that these names did not remain stable over time. Terms that once referred to protective household beings later drifted, in early modern usage, toward meanings closer to a genie or even a devil. That semantic instability is part of what makes this terrain so interesting to me. It means that the old domestic figure was never fully fixed. It moved. It was reinterpreted. It became heavier in some contexts and gentler in others. And that gives me room to treat Ubože not as a museum label, but as the tonal center of the world itself.

Within that world, however, I wanted one figure to be more directly bound to the house.

That is where Domovik begins to make sense for me.

Not as a perfect equivalent to every Polish domestic spirit, and not as a claim that all these traditions are interchangeable, but as a more precise household presence: a being tied to the interior, to habitation, to order, to proximity, to the moral and emotional weather of a home. That is an inference I am making from the overlap of the sources rather than a one-to-one historical equation, and I think it is better to say that openly.

What I find especially useful in the scholarship is that it does not really give us one single, final image of Domovik.

It gives us something better than that.

It gives us a field of recurring functions.

Across sources, the house spirit is less a fixed illustration and more a stable cluster of relations: it belongs to the house, it guards the family and its wealth, it reacts to disorder, it marks the threshold between safety and disturbance, and it often appears not as a fully visible creature but as a presence signaled by knocks, sounds, moods, warnings, or small disturbances in domestic life. Regional studies from Ukraine also show that the image is not uniform; the domovyk can be described differently from place to place, with different emphases placed on appearance, function, ritual practice, and moral character.

That, to me, is the crucial point.

The figure is not strong because it is visually standardized.

It is strong because it holds together a set of meanings: house, warmth, continuity, vigilance, memory, habit, protection, mood. Even the more familiar descriptions of the domovyk as a small, hairy man living near the stove are less important to me as literal instructions than as traces of a deeper pattern: this is a being that belongs where the house is most alive, most inhabited, most shared.

And once I understood that, the visual decisions became easier.

It meant I did not need to chase a falsely “correct” reconstruction of a folkloric creature.

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I did not need to produce an illustration that merely says: old man, beard, hut, folklore. I could instead ask a different question: what visual language makes a figure feel truly domestic, slightly uncanny, protective, old, compact, and memorable all at once? What kind of silhouette belongs to a being that is small enough to disappear into a corner, but strong enough to define the feeling of a house?

This is where my own version begins to separate itself from the archive while still remaining answerable to it.

The Domovik I am building for Ubože does not need to look like a direct ethnographic recovery. He needs to retain the house-bound logic of the older figure. He needs to feel as though he comes from the interior of a home rather than from the outside world. He should carry warmth, secrecy, and a slightly stubborn dignity. He should feel ancient, but not monumental. Familiar, but not entirely harmless. Not evil, but not empty of force either.

That ambiguity is important, because the sources themselves do not give us a purely sentimental creature. The domovoy/domovyk protects, but he also judges. He rewards proper order and can react badly to neglect or offense. In some regional material, the image even becomes more ambivalent or openly dark under later Christian reinterpretations. So the figure is never just “cute.” It is intimate, but intimacy is not the same thing as softness.

There is another reason I do not want to over-literalize him.

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The broader Slavic and Balkan material shows just how fluid the role of household guardian can become. In some Balkan traditions, that domestic protector is not imagined primarily as a small old man at all, but as a serpent bound to the house and the family line. For me that is a very useful reminder: the deepest layer of the figure is not one single body shape. The deepest layer is the bond between spirit and dwelling. The house comes first. The visible form comes later.

So in Ubože, Domovik becomes the principal household being not because I need him to stand in for every Slavic domestic spirit, but because he gives me the clearest way to hold several things together at once.

He allows the house to become a living place rather than a neutral setting.

He allows domestic space to have its own psychology.

He allows humor and strangeness to coexist.

And he allows me to place one figure exactly where I want him: close to the home itself, close to its rhythm, close to the things that gather around everyday life without ever fully becoming visible inside it.

That is also why I kept the world’s title as Ubože while letting Domovik settle more specifically into the role of the house-bound being within it. Ubože remains, for me, the broader tone: the wider field, the name that holds the atmosphere of the project. Domovik, by contrast, becomes more local, more interior, more precise. Less the name of the whole world than one of its key domestic intelligences.

The images throughout this post follow that process from sketch toward a more resolved figure. Not because the final answer has already been found, but because each stage makes the next decision slightly more visible.

That is usually how these things reveal themselves anyway.

Not all at once, and not in a straight line.

First as a tone.

Then as a relation.

And only after that, as a character.

right at the beginning, I had a bit of extra time, so I managed to refine the series logo further. I wanted to base it on the Vesica Piscis motif, which is formed by overlapping two circles and, when expanded further, leads into the structure known as the Flower of Life. Beyond its symbolism, I also simply really love this visual element and often try to weave it into my work.

Another important element is the rosette — a symbol that can be connected to the Slavic thunder mark, as well as to associations with Perun and Rod and later on the christian god or maybe even god in general in some way. I wanted to place that motif within the context of the sacred corner, which was a distinctive and meaningful part of Slavic identity and the traditional order of the home.

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Even though the series is meant for children, I want to frame it through elements of Slavic culture and demonology, because it is incredibly rich — not only in terms of spirituality and the presence of various spirits, but also in the way it understands the world and reality as a whole. What especially interests me is that time was perceived in a much more cyclical way, rather than as something strictly linear.

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Because of that, I wanted to connect the idea of corners and darkened spaces — places where spirits were believed to dwell — with the roundness and cyclical nature of life, in the way the Slavs may have understood it. That combination became the foundation for the direction of this logo.

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One of them was the name.

For quite a while I was circling around different versions: more literal ones, softer ones, more stylized ones, more “foreign-sounding” ones, shorter ones, longer ones, versions that looked better written down, and others that perhaps sounded better when spoken aloud. There were quite a few of them — Ubożyki, Ubozhiks, Ubozhik, some in-between forms, simplifications, abbreviations, more folkloric versions and more brand-like ones. As always with things like this, at first you try to hold everything at once, and then eventually return to what is simplest.

And that is exactly why, at least for the time being, I’m settling on the name Ubože.

This is not a random choice, nor some kind of “temporary temporary” solution, but rather a conscious closing of a certain stage. As of now, this is the version that feels most honest to the whole thing. The shortest one, the clearest one, and one that still leaves some space instead of explaining everything all at once. Visually, it carries something familiar — it can easily evoke “uboże” — and at the same time, through the use of ž, it gains a slight foreign accent, a subtle shift, something a little older, a little stranger, yet still soft. And that tension feels exactly right to me.

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For a project connected to little beings, fable-like atmosphere, humor, and a strong sense of form, the name itself cannot be too heavy. It also cannot be overly complicated. I wanted something easy to remember, something that works well as a mark, something I can draw, rearrange, test in different variations, and something that already carries a certain rhythm within it. Something that does not fall apart after the first use and does not require an explanation every single time of how it is supposed to be read.

Looking through the successive letter sketches and name variations, it became increasingly clear to me that the longer forms have their charm, but they are also heavier, more angular, and less flexible. They might work better as an extended form, a subtitle, a collective name, or something more deeply rooted within the world itself. But Ubože works immediately. It has a simple weight to it. It is compact. It sits well on the page. It can be stylized without losing readability. And more importantly, it makes it possible to build a visual language around it without constantly overcomplicating the matter.

So yes: for now, Ubože is the name I consider the final version for this stage of the work.

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No doubt things will still shift, transform, or reveal more of themselves along the way, because a process like this is never completely linear. But sometimes it is good to place a period, even if only for a while, in order to keep moving forward.

And this is where that period has been placed.

The rest will reveal itself slowly.