This intriguing criminal story from Bolesławiec is recounted by Kamilla Dudek in the 2011 Bolesławiec Yearbook:
Two altarists (clergy responsible for caring for an altar) lived in a small room. One of them had a cat, which greatly irritated the other clergyman.
When the animal’s owner went for a walk, his companion attacked the cat with a stick. The animal barely escaped with its life. In retaliation, however, it leapt at the attacker’s throat and killed him. When the cat’s owner returned, he found his friend dead; he saw no one else in the room except the cat.
This medieval legend was passed down as a demonic account of the devil attacking a clergyman in the form of a cat—the keeper of a church altar, known as an altarist. In the Middle Ages, being an altarist was a common occupation; they were paid for caring for an altar. Smaller churches had one altarist, while larger ones had several. In Wrocław, one can still see the altarists’ house: two small tenement houses known as Jaś and Małgosia, near St. Elizabeth’s Church.
What greatly intrigued us, however, was whether a cat could tear the carotid artery of an adult man. So we conducted a mini-investigation, checking whether a cat could actually kill a human being by biting him in the neck.
There are two carotid arteries, running along both sides of the neck. Around the breastbone and collarbone, the carotid artery is easy to feel; this is where the pulse is checked. The carotid artery divides into an external and an internal section. The external and internal sections perform separate functions, with the internal one being decidedly more important. The carotid artery does not run close enough to the surface for a cat’s teeth to damage it to the extent that a person would bleed to death. Among threats to the carotid arteries, doctors list atherosclerosis, cancer and aneurysms—but not cats.
We do have the story of Krzysztof Stępień, reported by Super Express in 2008 under the headline “The cat bit through my throat because I snored,” but we do not know whether it is true. Even if it is, Mr. Krzysztof survived the attack, while the altarist in our story was not attacked by a cat in his sleep, but while beating the animal with a stick.
We do have a documented 2018 case involving the death of a 33-year-old Dane as a result of a cat bite. The man had been visiting the cat at an animal shelter. The cat bit him on the finger, and a bacterial infection developed—probably because the cat damaged blood vessels during the bite, allowing bacteria that proved exceptionally dangerous to the Dane to enter his veins. As a result of negligence by the Danish health service and coexisting illnesses, the man died four months after being bitten.
And we found the famous Kraków murderer from the 1960s: Karol Kot, known as the Vampire of Kraków. However, in this case Kot has an ironclad alibi: he was not alive in the Middle Ages.
In short, the legend recounted by the chronicles and Kamila Dudek contains a grain of truth. The man attacked the cat with a stick. It is possible that when the cat’s owner returned home and found his colleague abusing his pet, he attacked the aggressor himself, and the blame was then simply placed on the cat—and, with time, on the devil himself.
The text from the 2011 Bolesławiec Yearbook is an excerpt from K. Dudek’s master’s thesis, “Bolesławiec Painted in Words and Images,” which was recognized
in the fifth edition of the “Bolesławiec Mayor’s Award Competition for the Best Master’s or Doctoral Thesis on the History and Contemporary Life of the City of Bolesławiec” in 2011.