Karakoncolos

The karakoncolos is a winter figure of Turkish folklore said to roam the streets in the coldest part of the season, Its name is tied to the Greek kallikantzaros, and scholars disagree over whether the word began in Turkish or Greek.

Turkish Wikipedia says the karakoncolos walks the streets during the zemheri, the coldest stretch of winter, and asks those it meets where they are coming from and where they are going. The answers must contain the word kara, black, as in coming from Karasu or going to Karakışla. Anyone who answers otherwise is struck and wounded with the huge comb it carries. To guard against it, people hide the combs in their houses on winter days rather than leaving them out.

Daily Sabah, retelling the travels of Evliya Çelebi, says Circassians told him of a yearly night of karakoncolos, when Circassian and Abkhaz witches fly up and fight a great battle in the sky, and that people could go out and watch it safely. The paper says the word means an imaginary creature, a witch or a demon in popular speech.

The origin of the word is disputed. John Cuthbert Lawson argued in 1910 that the Turks took it from the Greeks, because the season when they feared the karakondjolos followed the Christian calendar and not their own. He did not know whether the belief had lasted. Wikipedia's article on the Greek kallikantzaros gives the opposite case: Bernhard Schmidt wrote in 1871 that the word has no Greek explanation, and a form recorded among the Greeks of Stenimachos (Asenovgrad, Bulgaria), karkántsalos, points to an Albanian word taken from the Turkish kara-kondjolos, which joins koncolos (bloodsucker or werewolf) to kara (black). Wikipedia says scholars of Albanian, Maximilian Lambertz (1973) among them, backed the Turkish-Albanian origin.