Strigoi, the Restless Dead of Romania

The word strigoi reaches back to Rome. Latin writers described the strix, a screeching bird of the night believed to attack sleeping infants; the poet Ovid tells of such birds in his Fasti. In late Latin striga came to mean a witch, and in the Romance languages of the Balkans the word survived. In Romanian, strigoi (feminine strigoaică) became the name for people, living or dead, who harmed their neighbours by supernatural means.

The belief belongs to a wider world. Across south-eastern Europe villagers feared that certain dead did not rest but returned to their homes, bringing sickness and death. Slavic peoples, Greeks, Albanians and Hungarians had their own names for such beings. In the 1720s and 1730s Habsburg officials sent to newly conquered parts of Serbia reported cases in which villagers had exhumed bodies they believed responsible for a series of deaths. Their reports caused a sensation in Western Europe, where the Serbian word ‘vampire’ entered learned debate and popular reading.

How old Romanian strigoi beliefs are is difficult to say, because written records of village life are scarce before the 19th century. Romanian folklorists such as Simion Florea Marian, and later foreign collectors such as Agnes Murgoci, recorded what villagers told them about birth, death and the strigoi. Their accounts show a belief with many local variations, woven into the Orthodox Christian calendar and funeral customs of the countryside.

Folklore distinguished two kinds. The strigoi vii, living strigoi, were ordinary men and women thought to have been marked from birth. A child born with a caul, with a small tail or as the seventh child of the same sex could be destined to become one. At night, it was said, their souls left their sleeping bodies, sometimes in the form of an animal, to steal the milk of other people’s cows, the richness of their fields or the health of their families. On certain nights they gathered at crossroads or on hilltops to fight one another.

The strigoi morți, dead strigoi, were people who returned from the grave. A living strigoi would become one after death, but so might someone who died unbaptised, by suicide or under a curse, or a corpse over which a cat had jumped. The dead strigoi came back to its own house, troubling relatives and draining their life and that of their animals. Illness spreading through a family, or a body that seemed not to have decayed, could be taken as signs.

The related moroi was understood differently from region to region. In some places it was the spirit of an unbaptised child, in others simply another word for the dead strigoi, and in others a milder sort of ghost. Folklorists stress that village belief was never a single system: names, signs and remedies changed from valley to valley.

The most famous protection is garlic. On Saint Andrew’s Eve, the night of 29–30 November, strigoi were believed to roam with special freedom. Households rubbed garlic on doors and windows, on the chimney and on the horns of cattle, and in some villages young people kept watch through the night over bowls of garlic in a custom known as guarding the garlic. Saint George’s Eve, in April, was the other great night of danger, when living strigoi were thought to steal the fertility of the coming season.

Funerals were also a defence. Watching over the body, keeping animals away from it, proper church rites and the regular memorial meals for the dead all helped ensure that the dead stayed at rest. When a series of deaths struck a family, villagers might suspect a strigoi and, in the past, open the grave. Records of such exhumations continue into the 20th century, and in 2004 a case in a village in southern Romania, in which relatives exhumed a man’s body, led to criminal convictions. Such events are rare today and are condemned by the Church and the law.

Stories of strigoi were not only frightening. They expressed fears about sudden death, failed harvests and envy between neighbours, and gave communities a way to explain misfortune and act against it.

Scholars have also asked what lay behind the signs villagers saw in the dead. The American folklorist Paul Barber argued that many features of the returning dead in Eastern European reports, such as bodies that looked swollen, flushed or undecayed when graves were opened, match the ordinary natural changes after death, which villagers without medical training read as evidence that the dead had been active. Epidemics, which killed several members of a family one after another, could easily seem to be the work of the first to die. Such explanations do not exhaust the meaning of the belief, but they help show why it was so convincing to those who held it.

Western readers know the strigoi mostly through Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897. Stoker never visited Romania. He drew on travel books and on Emily Gerard’s essay Transylvanian Superstitions of 1885, which described beliefs about the undead and used the word nosferatu. He took the name Dracula from an account of Wallachia that mentioned the 15th-century prince Vlad III, son of Vlad Dracul, ‘the dragon’, a name from his father’s membership of the Order of the Dragon.

The Count, however, is Stoker’s creation: an aristocrat in a castle who drinks blood, casts no reflection, commands wolves and travels to London. Village strigoi were not nobles and were often neighbours or kin. Vlad III, known for his cruel punishments and his wars against the Ottomans, was remembered in Romanian tradition as a stern but just ruler, and nothing in folklore made him a strigoi. Later films added more: the idea that sunlight destroys the vampire comes from Nosferatu in 1922.

Today strigoi appear in Romanian literature and film, and the Dracula legend draws tourists to Bran Castle in Transylvania, which has little real connection with Vlad. In some villages the garlic of Saint Andrew’s Eve survives as a living custom, a reminder that behind the Gothic vampire lies an older folk world of the restless dead.