What is a strigoi?
Romanian tradition distinguishes two kinds. The strigoi viu is a living person who was born with particular signs and can send out their soul at night to harm livestock, crops or people. The strigoi mort is a dead person who returns from the grave, haunts their family and drains their life force. It is often said that a living strigoi becomes a dead one after death.
Where the word comes from
The word goes back to Latin strix, a shrieking night owl that was already seen as a bird of ill omen in antiquity and was associated with witches. Related figures are the striga of Polish and Slovak tradition and the Italian strega, the witch.
Protection
If people suspected a strigoi, they opened the grave. A corpse that had not decayed, or that seemed to have shifted position, counted as proof. The heart was cut out and burned, and sometimes the ashes were mixed with water and given to sick people to drink. Garlic, holy water and stakes are also part of the repertoire.
A case from 2004
In January 2004, men in the village of Marotinu de Sus in Oltenia opened the grave of a relative who had died shortly before. They removed his heart, burned it at a crossroads and gave the ashes to a sick young woman to drink. The case went to court and became known across Europe.
From strigoi to vampire
The image of the modern vampire emerged in the 18th century from reports of graves being opened and the dead mutilated in Serbia and other border regions of the Habsburg Monarchy. Maria Theresa had her personal physician, Gerard van Swieten, examine such cases. His report was followed by an imperial ban on opening graves out of fear of vampires. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, on the other hand, has little to do with Vlad III: Stoker only found the name in 1890 in a footnote by William Wilkinson. His picture of the vampire comes largely from Transylvanian folk belief as Emily Gerard had described it in 1885 and 1888, and so from the world of the strigoi. The idea that Dracula and Vlad are the same figure goes back only to Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally in 1972.