Strigoi

The strigoi is the central figure of Romanian vampire folklore: the dead man who does not rest and comes back upon his own. The name comes from the Latin striga ("witch"), by way of Romanian strigă, and tradition divides it into two classes that are not two creatures. The strigoi vii are living people endowed with an occult power, often born with a caul of membrane over the head or as the seventh son of seven brothers, and their spirit leaves the body while they sleep. The strigoi morți are corpses that come out of the grave. Tudor Pamfile, who gathered the vocabulary in Mitologie românească (1916), further warns that this same figure is called moroi in Transylvania, in western Muntenia and in Oltenia, and vidmă in Bucovina, and that the differences villagers drew between those names were local and inconstant. Suicide, violent death, lack of baptism and unexpiated sins were held to predispose to this fate.

The strigoi morți are described as remarkably preserved corpses, ruddy-faced, with nails and hair seemingly grown and fresh blood in the mouth; features that later ethnography has explained by the normal processes of decomposition, misread by those who opened the pit. They are credited with prodigious strength, the power to drain the living and the power to change shape: Pamfile records that the strigoi turns into a greyhound or a wolf, and other collections add the dog, the cat and the insect. Its typical action is not wandering but domestic, and therein lies what is peculiar to the Romanian case: it returns to its house and its family, consumes the vitality of its own while they sleep and brings sickness, exhaustion and death, besides misfortune upon cattle and crops. The strigoi vii, by contrast, work through the night journey of their spirit, and cause nightmares and ills without seemingly leaving their bed.

Romanian folklore ordered a whole repertoire against them. As prevention the suspect was buried face down, garlic was put in his mouth or thorns around him, and the graves of those who had died badly were watched. To confirm the suspicion the body was exhumed: if it appeared incorrupt, rosy and with fresh blood, it was held to be a strigoi. Ritual destruction, as Agnes Murgoci describes it in The Vampire in Roumania (1926), consisted in driving a stake of ash, oak or hawthorn into the heart, beheading the corpse and laying the head at its feet, taking out and burning the heart, or burning the whole body and scattering the ashes, which were sometimes mixed with water and given to the sick of the house to drink. These practices, documented in Romanian villages well into the twentieth century, helped to shape the image of the vampire that Bram Stoker popularised in 1897; it is worth noting, however, that neither the bat, nor the mist, nor the count's coffin belongs to them, but to the novel.