A bannik is the spirit of the bathhouse in Slavic folklore, a being who rules the banya, the steam bath that Slavic households treated as one of the most sacred and most dangerous places they owned. Respect him and he may bless and foretell; offend him and the steam turns against you.
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The name bannik comes straight from banya, the Slavic bathhouse. He belongs to the same family of place-spirits as the domovoi of the house and the dvorovoi of the yard, each the guardian of a particular threshold. The bathhouse earned its own spirit because of what it was: set apart from the home, heated to a fierce heat, a place of birth, healing, and ritual where the ordinary rules of the household did not apply.
The bannik is a spirit to be handled with care. He can tell fortunes, and folklore preserves the rites for asking him: presenting your back in the dark bath and reading his touch as the answer, a soft stroke for good fortune, a scratch or a blow for ill. He is also genuinely dangerous, said to scald or suffocate those who bathe at the wrong hour or who fail to leave the bath in proper order. Bathers were told to go in shifts, never too late, and to leave water and a fresh room for him.
He is one of the clearest windows into how the Slavs lived with their spirits: not as distant gods but as unseen householders with rules you learned young. The banya's liminal character, a place of steam, nakedness, birth, and healing, made it the right home for a spirit who was both oracle and hazard. The custom to "knock thrice" and ask leave before entering is part of a whole etiquette built around not crossing him.
In MORANA: The Open Grave, he is Bannik Steamveil, a Hearth Spirit whose design is protective: "Ward. Reborn: give a friendly Spirit here Ward." He shields, and when he returns from the Open Grave he passes that protection on, the steam-veil that guards those who keep the rites. His flavour is the bathhouse warning itself: "Knock thrice, or do not enter." He is a Hearth defender whose whole character is the courtesy owed to a dangerous host.
See Bannik Steamveil in the Grimoire.
The bannik is folk horror at its most domestic and most exact: a spirit who lives in a specific room and enforces specific manners, with real menace for the careless. As a MORANA card he anchors the Hearth faction's theme of protection and rite, and he teaches, in one line of flavour, the oldest lesson of Slavic household spirits, that safety is a matter of respect.
Sources: General references on the bannik (for example the Wikipedia entry "Bannik") and Slavic traditions of household and place-spirits such as the domovoi, alongside ethnographic accounts of the banya and its customs. This page retells public-domain folklore in our own words for background; folk tales vary by region and teller. The card described is part of the planned First Turning set. This page describes MORANA only and does not reference any other product.