Ok, so here is the croissant that started all this mess:

When asked about what kind of animal might it be, the woman said: "It's this, oh, what is it called... A lagun!"

The devil works fast, but The Krakow Animal Welfare Society works faster:

They already made a merchandise with an illustration of the lagun - they posted information about it on Facebook on Tuesday evening and by the Wednesday morning everything was already sold out.

My university professors are so delighted about this story that they are writing tons and tons of limericks, moskaliks and lepiejs (those two last genres are very popular, ridiculous and humorous types of short poems, in last decades popularized by Wisława Szymborska) and posting them on official Facebook pages of our university departments, and I am dying of laughter.

Important update on the story: owners of cafés and bakeries in Kraków realized that this wonderful idiocy that took over the country could bring them profit and help animals, and started selling croissants labeled as laguns: i.e. Massolit Café & Bakery is sending 10% of income from selling laguns to the Krakow Animal Welfare Society. Thankfully laguns are selling like hotcakes and bakeries don't plan to stop making them, so the story that started and could quickly die as just another seasonal nonsense transformed into a tool for helping small, helpless, vulnerable creatures, far less dangerous than vicious lagun.

This is how cyptids get started.

It’s also *exactly* the kind of story behind the invention of new pastries. If there’s some little change on the ingredient level that can make a “lagun” distinct from an ordinary croissant, then a new pastry will have been born, complete with fanciful cookbook-ready lore.

Queued up for April 15, 2024 the 3rd anniversary of the Krakowski Lagun.