Women, Whispered Prayers, and Traditional Healing Practices in Podlachia: A Critical Synthesis of the Szeptunki Tradition

This article examines women’s therapeutic knowledge through the traditional healing practices of the szeptunki (also szeptuchy, “whisperers”) of Podlachia, a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional borderland in north-eastern Poland. Their repertoire includes kołtun, urok, strach, wiatr and róża, treated through whispered Orthodox prayers, the sign of the cross, and materials such as wool, beeswax, ash, linen and flax. Drawing on published Polish-language ethnography, interview narratives, documentary films and fieldwork reported by other scholars, the article asks why a form of healing authority that remains locally meaningful is becoming difficult to transmit. It argues that the same conditions that authorise the szeptunka—older age, gendered domestic experience, religious discipline, secrecy, kin-based transmission and continual availability—also make succession increasingly demanding. The analysis links the female life course to embodied ritual practice, relations with Orthodox clergy and medical pluralism, while treating male successors and male znachorzy as important counterpoints to a simple women/men binary. It also shows how clerical delegitimisation shapes the way practitioners present their own work. Published evidence from 2010–2025 documents active practitioners while also recording growing uncertainty about succession. The szeptunki therefore illuminate not simply the persistence of a healing tradition, but the changing social conditions under which therapeutic authority can be reproduced.