Laura Wright 
Somewhere beneath a mountain, a king is sleeping.
His sword remains beside him.
His warriors sleep nearby.
Years become decades. Decades become centuries.
Kingdoms rise and disappear while the sleepers remain untouched by time.
But they are not dead.
According to legend, they are waiting.
One day, when their country faces its greatest danger, the mountain will open. The king and his warriors will awaken, take up their weapons, and return to the world.
Variations of this story appear across Europe and beyond. King Arthur sleeps. Charlemagne sleeps. Frederick Barbarossa sleeps. Sebastian of Portugal sleeps. Brian Boru sleeps.
Even America’s Rip Van Winkle belongs to the larger family of supernatural sleepers.
But one of the oldest and most influential versions concerns seven young Christians who fled persecution in the ancient city of Ephesus.
They entered a cave to escape death.
Then they fell asleep.
When they awakened, the world they knew was gone.
The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus
The story begins during the reign of the Roman emperor Decius.
Decius ruled from AD 249 until 251 and became associated with a severe persecution of Christians throughout the Roman Empire.
According to the legend, the emperor came to Ephesus, in what is now western Turkey.
Christians were ordered to worship the Roman gods.
Those who refused faced punishment and death.
Seven young Christians would not submit.
They prayed and fasted while persecution spread through the city. Eventually, the emperor’s attention turned toward them.
The seven were given an opportunity to reconsider.
Instead, they abandoned their possessions and fled.
Their destination was Mount Celion.
The Cave
The seven young men disappeared into a cave in the mountains.
Decius was furious.
According to the legend, their families were questioned and the mountainside was searched, but the fugitives could not be found.
The emperor then ordered caves in the area sealed.
If the Christians were hiding inside one of them, they would never emerge alive.
But something very different happened to the seven fugitives.
They slept.
And they continued sleeping long after Decius was dead.
The Roman Empire changed.
Christianity, once persecuted, became accepted and eventually dominant.
Generations lived and died.
Still, the seven men slept.
The Cave Opens
According to the version preserved in the original account, approximately 360 years passed.
An Ephesian farmer wanted to construct a stable near Mount Celion.
He needed building materials and discovered convenient piles of stones blocking caves on his property.
The farmer began removing them.
One cave opened.
And seven men emerged.
They were identified in the story as Maximian, Malchus, Marcian, Dionysius, John, Serapion, and Constantine.
To the seven sleepers, almost no time had passed.
They believed Decius was still emperor.
They were terrified that his soldiers were still searching for them.
Even more remarkably, they still possessed coins belonging to the world they remembered.
But that world had vanished centuries before.
Awakening in Another Age
This is the central horror and wonder of the sleeper legend.
The sleepers themselves haven’t changed.
Everything else has.
Imagine walking into a cave believing that soldiers are pursuing you.
You sleep.
You awaken the following morning.
You leave your hiding place and discover that everyone you ever knew has been dead for centuries.
Your parents are gone.
Your brothers and sisters are gone.
Your friends are gone.
The government that wanted you dead no longer exists.
Even the money in your pocket belongs in a museum.
The Seven Sleepers had escaped Decius.
They had simply escaped him by outliving his entire world.
Their miraculous sleep became one of the great legends of the medieval world and spread far beyond Ephesus.
The Sleepers Beneath the Mountains
The Seven Sleepers belong to a much larger tradition.
Again and again, folklore places important figures beneath mountains, inside caves, or within hidden chambers.
Unlike the Seven Sleepers, however, many of these heroes have not awakened yet.
They are still there.
Waiting.
And they will return only when a particular moment arrives.
Charlemagne Beneath the Mountain
Old traditions from the German and Austrian regions claimed that Charlemagne had never truly disappeared.
He sat upon a throne beneath a mountain.
He still wore his crown.
His sword remained beside him.
There the great emperor waited for the coming of the Antichrist.
When that final struggle arrived, Charlemagne would awaken and return to avenge the blood of the saints and martyrs.
History said the emperor was dead.
Folklore preferred to keep him in reserve.
Frederick Barbarossa
A similar and particularly famous German legend concerns Frederick Barbarossa.
Barbarossa died in 1190.
According to folklore, however, he sleeps beneath the Kyffhäuser with six of his knights.
One version tells of a shepherd who discovered an opening into the mountain.
Inside, he found the emperor sitting asleep at a stone table.
Barbarossa’s great red beard had continued growing throughout his supernatural sleep.
The shepherd awakened him.
Barbarossa asked only one question.
Were the ravens still flying around the mountain?
They were.
Then it was not yet time.
Barbarossa returned to sleep.
The Emperor’s Growing Beard
Another version gave the sleeping emperor a different condition for awakening.
Barbarossa could not return until his beard had grown long enough to wind three times around the stone table.
Until then, Germany did not require him.
The emperor slept.
His knights slept.
The mountain kept them.
Sweden developed a similar tradition involving the Knights of Ålleberg, sleeping warriors who would rise when their country needed them.
The location changed.
The idea remained.
The heroes aren’t gone. They’re waiting.
Thomas the Rhymer
Scotland had its own supernatural sleeper.
Thomas of Erceldoune, better known as Thomas the Rhymer, became one of the great figures of Scottish folklore.
Thomas was remembered as a prophet and supernatural figure whose legendary powers eventually rivaled those attributed to Merlin.
According to one tradition, Thomas sleeps beneath the Eildon Hills.
There he waits.
The original account gives his awakening a remarkably specific condition.
Thomas will remain asleep until the Turks leave Constantinople.
Like Barbarossa, Thomas exists somewhere outside ordinary time.
The world continues above him.
He waits beneath it.
King Arthur Is Not Dead
Perhaps no sleeping-hero tradition is more famous than that of King Arthur.
Arthur does not simply die.
He goes to Avalon.
Other traditions place Arthur and his warriors asleep beneath mountains or inside hidden chambers.
Someday Britain will need him again.
Then Arthur will return.
It is the same fundamental promise found in the legends of Barbarossa and Charlemagne.
A beloved ruler may disappear from history, but folklore refuses to surrender him completely.
Death becomes sleep.
The grave becomes a hidden kingdom.
And the ending becomes a promise:
Not yet.
Owen Lawgoch
Welsh tradition also attached the sleeping-hero motif to Owen Lawgoch.
Like Arthur, Owen could be imagined not as permanently lost but as waiting for the proper moment to return.
Other Arthurian sleeping garrisons were associated with Snowdonia.
Mountains were particularly suitable places for these legends.
Their interiors were unknowable.
A person could stand before an enormous mountain and imagine almost anything concealed within it.
A cavern.
A palace.
An army.
A sleeping king.
Brian Boru Still Waits
Ireland had its own great sleeping hero.
According to one tradition, Brian Boroimhe, or Brian Boru, was not entirely gone.
He remained asleep, waiting for the day when Ireland would require him again.
The original account connects his awakening with a future Fenian insurrection.
Again, a historical ruler had been transformed into a supernatural reserve of national strength.
When ordinary people could no longer save the country, the old king would awaken.
Sebastian of Portugal
Portugal developed one of the most powerful versions of the same belief around King Sebastian.
Sebastian disappeared during the disastrous Battle of Alcácer Quibir in 1578.
His loss produced a national legend.
The king would return.
He had not abandoned Portugal forever.
Somewhere, somehow, Sebastian waited.
The old king would come back when his country needed him.
The historical man had disappeared.
The legendary king became immortal.
Sleeping Heroes Across Europe
The motif appeared almost everywhere.
In Switzerland, three trolls supposedly slept beneath a mountain awaiting their time to awaken.
A Bohemian legend placed three sleeping miners at Kuttenberg.
In Serbian tradition, Prince Lazar became associated with supernatural sleep.
Norwegian legend included Olaf Tryggvason.
Spanish tradition remembered Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler of Granada, as another sleeper.
Scandinavian lore placed Sigurd among the heroes resting until they were needed again.
The identities changed dramatically.
Kings.
Knights.
Prophets.
Miners.
Trolls.
But they all shared the same peculiar relationship with time.
They were people who had left the ordinary world without entirely leaving it.
St. John at Ephesus
Even Ephesus accumulated another sleeper tradition.
One legend claimed St. John the Divine remained asleep there.
The connection is fitting.
The city already possessed the famous story of seven men who slept through centuries.
Another holy sleeper could easily find a home in the same legendary landscape.
Finn of Fethmingr
An Icelandic story offers a smaller and perhaps more unsettling variation.
A man named Finn of Fethmingr entered a cave.
While inside, he suddenly became extraordinarily sleepy.
Finn lay down upon a rock.
He closed his eyes.
When he awakened, he left the cave.
Three years had passed.
There was no sleeping army.
No national crisis.
No great king awaiting resurrection.
Just a man who went into a cave, fell asleep, and discovered that time outside had continued without him.
That version brings the legend surprisingly close to a story familiar to Americans.
Rip Van Winkle
Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle belongs unmistakably to the same great family of tales.
Rip enters the Catskill Mountains.
He encounters mysterious figures.
He sleeps.
When he returns to his village, everything has changed.
Years have passed.
People he knew are dead.
The political world itself has been transformed.
Rip left a British colony.
He awakened in the United States.
The supernatural sleep allows a single human being to cross an enormous historical boundary without experiencing the years between.
That is exactly what happens to the Seven Sleepers.
The world changes while the sleeper does not.
Why Do We Keep Our Heroes Sleeping?
The recurrence of this story across so many cultures is probably not accidental.
The sleeping hero solves a painful problem.
What do people do when they cannot accept that someone important is truly gone?
Folklore provides an answer.
He isn’t dead.
He is sleeping.
Arthur didn’t disappear forever.
Barbarossa isn’t gone.
Sebastian may return.
Charlemagne is waiting.
The king has merely withdrawn from the world until the moment he is needed again.
It is a remarkably hopeful form of ghost story.
The dead do not haunt the living.
They wait to save them.
The Mountain as a Doorway
Mountains and caves appear repeatedly in these stories for good reason.
A grave is final.
A cave isn’t.
A cave is an entrance.
It leads somewhere we cannot see.
That allows the imagination to continue beyond the opening.
Perhaps somewhere beneath the hills there really is a stone chamber.
Perhaps knights sit sleeping around a table.
Perhaps swords remain beside them.
Perhaps a king’s beard has been growing for eight hundred years.
And perhaps, occasionally, one of them rolls over in his sleep.
When the Sleepers Move
The original article preserves a wonderful old proverb associated with these legends.
When sorrow or trouble threatens, people might say:
“The sleepers are rolling on their sides.”
It is a beautiful image.
The disaster hasn’t arrived yet.
The heroes haven’t awakened.
But somewhere beneath the earth, they have felt something.
After centuries of perfect sleep, they stir.
The Miracle of the Seven Sleepers
The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus began as a religious legend about persecution, faith, miraculous preservation, and the passage of time.
But the idea became something larger.
Across cultures, people repeatedly refused to allow certain heroes to die.
They placed them beneath mountains.
They surrounded them with knights.
They left swords within reach.
Then they gave them a condition.
When the ravens disappear.
When the Antichrist comes.
When the country faces its greatest danger.
When the appointed hour finally arrives.
Then they will awaken.
Perhaps that is why the sleeping-hero story has survived for so long.
Ghost stories usually tell us that the past refuses to leave.
The legend of the sleeper says something different.
The past has left.
It simply hasn’t gone very far.
Somewhere beneath the mountain, it is waiting for us to need it again.
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