Strigoi

Strigoi are troubled spirits in Romanian folklore, said to rise from the grave, to shapeshift, to become invisible and to draw the life from their victims. The word derives from the Latin strix, a night-bird of ill omen, and is related to the verb a striga, “to scream.” Folklorists distinguish the strigoi viu, a living sorcerer; the strigoaică, a witch; and the strigoi mort, a dead person who returns, considered the most dangerous because he torments his own family until its members die.

Traditional belief held that people were likely to become strigoi if they were the seventh child of the same sex, died unmarried, took their own lives, were cursed by a witch or lived sinfully. Described features included a bald crown or a tail-like, hairy spine, and a fear of garlic and incense. Drought, hail and failing milk were blamed on them. Regional names include moroi in Wallachia and western Transylvania.

Written sources are scattered. Dimitrie Cantemir’s Descriptio Moldaviae (1714–1716) described them as witches or warlocks rather than blood-drinkers, and the ethnographer Teodor Burada recorded burial customs in 1882. Elsewhere, Johann Weikhard von Valvasor described the Istrian villager Jure Grando, called a štrigon, who was said to have returned from the grave after his death in 1656 until villagers beheaded him in 1672; it is considered the first written account of a vampire.

Remedies in the villagers’ accounts included putting a stake or thorn through the heart, beheading and burying the body face down, or digging up the corpse and burning its heart. Some of these customs were reported into the twentieth century, and a case in 2004 in Dolj County, in which a family exhumed and burned a relative’s heart, led to a court sentence. Many Romanians treat the belief now as folklore, and it differs from the fictional Count Dracula of Bram Stoker’s novel.

In tradition the strigoi may look like a living person, a pale corpse that has not decomposed, or an animal (cat, dog, owl); the living strigoi is marked by a hairy or tail-like spine and a bald crown.

Villages, graveyards and crossroads in rural Romania, especially after a suspicious death, around St Andrew’s Night (30 November) and in times of drought.

The strigoi is part of Romanian folk heritage and a staple of horror fiction, and tourism around ‘Dracula’s Transylvania’ draws on it, though Stoker’s count is a literary invention. Scholars are still collecting living narratives from Transylvania and Romanian communities abroad.