In describing the Callicantzari, although the diversities of their outward form are almost endless, two main classes of them must be distinguished, because corresponding with that physical division there is also a marked difference in character. The two classes differ physically in stature, and, while all Callicantzari are essentially mischievous in character, the mischief wrought by the larger sort is often of a malicious and even deadly order, while the smaller sort are more frolicsome and harmless in their tricks.
The larger kind vary from the size of a man to that of a gigantic monster whose loins are on a level with the chimneypots. They are usually black in colour, and covered with a coat of shaggy hair, but a bald variety is also sometimes mentioned. Their heads and also their sexual organs are out of all proportion to the rest of their bodies. Their faces are black; their eyes glare red; they have the ears of goats or asses; from their huge mouths blood-red tongues loll out, flanked by ferocious tusks. Their bodies are in general very lean, so that in some districts the word Callicantzaros is applied metaphorically to a very lean man[512]; but a shorter and thickset variety also occurs. They have the arms and hands of monkeys, and their nails are as long again as their fingers and curved like the talons of a vulture. They are sometimes furnished with long thin tails. They have the legs of a goat or an ass, or sometimes one human leg and one of bestial form; or again both legs are of human shape, but the foot so distorted that the toes come where the heel should be[513]. Hence it is not surprising that they are often lame, but even so they are swift of foot and terrible in strength. ‘They devour their road at the pace of Pegasus,’ wrote Leo Allatius[514]; and at the present day several by-names bear witness to their speed. In Samos they are called Καλλισπούδηδες[515], ‘those who make good speed’; in Cyprus Πλανήταροι[516], ‘the wanderers’; in Athens they have the humorous title Κωλοβελόνηδες, formed from the proverbial expression βελόνια ἔχει ’στὸν κῶλο του, ‘he has needles in his buttocks,’ said of any one who cannot sit still, but is always on the move[517]. Their strength also has earned them one by-name, reported from Kardamýle in Maina, τὰ τσιλικρωτά, said to be formed from the Turkish _tselik_ (‘iron’), in the sense of ‘strong as iron[518].’