What is a striga?
Polish folk belief held that some people are born with two souls. They could be recognized by signs such as two hearts or two rows of teeth. When such a person dies, only one soul passes into the afterlife. The other stays in the body, and the dead person becomes a strzyga (female) or strzygoń (male) who returns at night to harm people and livestock.
Where the word comes from
The linguist Aleksander Brückner traced the word back to Latin strix, the shrieking night bird of the Romans. In the Fasti, Ovid tells how such birds come to the cradle of the boy Proca at night and suck his blood. The Romanian strigoi and the Iberian bruxa come from the same root.
Graves with sickles
Archaeological finds show how seriously people took this fear. In the cemetery at Drawsko, some of the dead had been buried with a sickle laid across the neck, so that they would cut off their own heads if they tried to rise. In 2022, a team led by Dariusz Poliński found a woman in Pień with a sickle at her throat and a padlock on her toe. The media called her “Zosia.”
From folk legend to fantasy
In 1852, Roman Zmorski published the tale “Strzyga” about a cursed king’s daughter who climbs out of her crypt at night. In 1986, Andrzej Sapkowski turned it into the first Witcher story. In 2003, the literary scholar Magdalena Roszczynialska examined how closely Sapkowski’s story follows the tale.
Episode on this topic
Further reading
- Roman Zmorski: “Strzyga,” in: Podania i baśni ludu w Mazowszu, 1852.
- Andrzej Sapkowski: “Wiedźmin,” in: Fantastyka, 1986.
- Magdalena Roszczynialska: “Nowa baśń: ‘Strzyga’ Romana Zmorskiego i ‘Wiedźmin’ Andrzeja Sapkowskiego,” 2003.
- Aleksander Brückner: Mitologia słowiańska i polska.
- Lesley Gregoricka et al.: “Apotropaic Practices and the Undead,” PLOS ONE, 2014.
- Paul Barber: Vampires, Burial, and Death, Yale University Press, 1988.