3 Undead Creatures in Transylanian Folklore (#137)

What’s the one place people immediately associate with vampires? That’s right – Transylvania. In pop culture, Transylvania is commonly associated with vampires because of the influence of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula and the many subsequent books and films that have been inspired by the tale. And apparently, a big part of Transylvanian culture is the collection of spooky legends, myths and haunting creatures that haunt the country.

On the website Transylvania Trips, they said that since they were kids, they were told (before sleep, or when they were naughty) that these divine and creepy creatures often interact with humans, which led to many a spooky night.

So, in this episode today, I thought I’d use the article I just mentioned as inspiration and share a few of the legends, myths, and creatures that may or may not haunt the Romanian region of Transylvania. I also noticed that, as there commonly is, there’s often a connection to similar creatures in Greek mythology, so this is going to kind of be a fusion of the two.

Strigoi

Strigoi in Romanian mythology are troubled spirits that are said to have arisen from the grave and have the ability to become invisible, transform into animals, and to gain vitality from the blood of their victims. Some liken them to an upgraded version of zombies, mixed with elements of ghosts, vampires, and werewolves (but they can become any animal).

One of the earliest mentions of a historical strigoi was in around the 1500s or 1600s, in the region of Istria. The villager named Jure Grando is believed to have been the first real person described as a vampire because he was referred to as a in contemporary local records. Grando supposedly terrorised his former village sixteen years after his death, before eventually being decapitated by the local priest and villagers.

Johann Weikhard von Valvasor wrote about Grando’s life and afterlife in an encyclopaedia he wrote in 1689, which was the first written document on vampires. Grando was also mentioned in stories that were much more elaborate, full of fantastical details to make the story more interesting and sensational.

An 1865 article on Transylvanian folklore by Wilhelm Schmidt describes the strigoi as nocturnal creatures that preyed on infants. He reports a tradition in which, upon the birth of a child, one tosses a stone behind oneself and exclaims “This into the mouth of the strigoi!”

In 1909, Franz Hartmann mentioned in his book An Authenticated Vampire Story that peasant children from a village in the Carpathian Mountains started to die mysteriously. The villagers began to suspect a recently deceased count was a vampire, dwelling in his old fortress. Frightened villagers burned the castle to stop the deaths.

In his book In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires, Radu Florescu mentions an event in 1969 where after the death of an old man, several family members began to die in suspicious circumstances. Unearthed, the corpse did not show signs of decomposition, his eyes were wide open, and his face was red and twisted. The corpse was burned to save his soul.

In February 2004, a woman revealed that she had been visited by her late uncle, a 76-year-old Romanian man who had died in December the previous year. Fearing the deceased might have become a strigoi, the woman's brother-in-law organised a vampire hunting group made up of several family members. They dug up the coffin, made an incision in his chest, and tore the heart out. After removal of the heart, the body was burned and the ashes were mixed in water and drunk by the dead man’s niece, believing that this would put an end to the haunting. Police later arrested six of the family members who participated in the ritual, charging them with "disturbing the peace of the dead". They were sentenced to six months' imprisonment and ordered to pay damages to the family of the deceased. Since then, in a nearby village, people drive a fire-hardened stake through the heart or belly of the dead as a "preventive measure".

A book about Romanian folklore published in 1882 refers to cases of strigoism as well. The strigoi can be a living man, born under certain conditions:

• Be the seventh child of the same sex in a family
• Lead a life of sin
• Die without being married
• Die by execution for perjury
• Die by suicide
• Die from a witch's curse

There are few known methods used by Romanians to identify or get rid of a strigoi. A common way used to identify a vampire was to place a 7-year-old boy dressed in white on a white horse near the graveyard at midday. It was believed that the horse would stop at the grave of the suspected vampire.

In 1887, a French geographer said along the lines of, “If the deceased has red hair, [it’s a concern that he could come back] in the form of a dog, frog, flea or bedbug, and that it enters into houses at night to suck the blood of beautiful young girls. So it is prudent to nail the coffin heavily, or, better yet, a stake through the chest of the corpse.”

Finally, another preventative method from 1892:

• Exhume the strigoi. Remove its heart and cut it in two.
• Drive a nail in its forehead.
• Place a clove of garlic under its tongue.
• Smear its body with the fat of a pig killed on St. Ignatius' Day (17th October).
• Turn its body face down so that if the strigoi were ever to wake up it would be headed to the afterlife.

Iele

The iele, again from Romanian folklore, are feminine mythical creatures described as Faeries with magic skills and great seductive power over men. Iele live in the sky, in forests, in caves, on isolated mountain cliffs and in marshes, and reported to have been seen bathing in the springs or at crossroads.

They mostly appear at night by moonlight, in secluded areas such as glades, the tops of certain trees (maples, walnut trees), ponds, river sides, crossroads or abandoned fireplaces, dancing naked or almost naked, with their breasts covered by their dishevelled hair, bells on their ankles, and carrying candles.

The place where they had danced would after remain carbonised, with the grass incapable of growing on the trodden ground, and with the leaves of the surrounding trees scorched. Later, when grass would finally grow, it would have a red or dark-green colour. Animals wouldn’t eat it, but instead mushrooms would thrive on it.

The iele are said not to be solitary creatures, but gather in groups in the air, where they can fly with or without wings; they can travel with incredible speeds, either on their own, or with chariots of fire. The iele appear sometimes with bodies, at other times only as immaterial spirits. They are young and beautiful, voluptuous immortals, their frenzy causing delirium in onlookers, and with bad tempers. They come in groups of three or seven.

They are not generally considered evil: they resort to revenge only when they are provoked, offended, seen while they dance, when people step on the trodden ground left behind by their dance, sleep under a tree which the Iele consider as their property, or drink from the springs or wells used by them.

Terrible punishments are inflicted upon the ones who refuse their invitation to dance, or the ones who mimic their movements. Anyone who randomly hears their songs becomes instantly mute. A main characteristic is their beautiful voices which are used to enchant their listeners, just like the Sirens from Greek mythology.

They’re invisible to humans, but there are certain moments when they can be seen by mortals, such as when they dance at night. When this happens, they abduct the onlooker, punishing them with magical spells, cause them to fall asleep, and then they dance around their victim, who then disappears forever without a trace.

The iele are also believed to be agents of revenge for God or of the Devil, having the right to avenge in the name of their employers. When they are called upon to act, they hound their victims into the centre of their dance, until they die in a furor of madness or torment.

To please the iele, people dedicated various festival days to them. Anyone not respecting these holidays was said to suffer the revenge of the Iele: men and women who work during these days would be lifted in spinning vertigo, people and cattle would suffer mysterious deaths or become paralysed and crippled, hail would fall, rivers would flood, trees would wither, and houses would catch fire.

People also invented cures against the iele, either preventive or exorcistic in nature: garlic and mugwort worn around the waist, or hung from the hat; or hanging the skull of a horse on a pole in front of the house. There’s also a certain dance that is said to chase them away.

Vrykolakas or Varkolak

Vrykolakas in Greek mythology, also appearing as Varkolak in Romanian mythology, is a harmful, undead creature that shares similarities with numerous other legendary creatures, but is generally equated with the vampire. While the two are very similar, this creature eats flesh, particularly livers, rather than drinking blood, which combined with other factors such as its appearance bring it more in line with the modern concept of a zombie or ghoul.

The etymology of this word is confusing. The word vrykolakas is derived from the Bulgarian word vǎrkolak. The term is a compound word derived from Slovak, Bulgarian and Serbian words meaning “wolf” and “hair” (i.e. having the hair, or fur, of a wolf), and originally meant "werewolf" (it still has that meaning in the modern Slavic languages, and a similar one in Romanian). It is also noteworthy that in an 18th-century story, the author refers to a “werewolf” which may have also been translated as bug-bears, a strange word that has nothing to do with bugs nor bears, but is related to the word bogey, which means spook, spirit, hobgoblin, etc. However, the same word has come to be used in the sense of “vampire” in the folklore of Croatia and Montenegro. But in many places, original folklore generally describes the vârkolak as a subspecies of the vampire without any wolf-like features.

The Greeks traditionally believed that a person could become a vrykolakas after death due to a sacrilegious way of life, an excommunication, a burial in unconsecrated ground, or eating the meat of a sheep which had been wounded by a wolf or a werewolf. Some believed that a werewolf itself could become a powerful vampire after being killed, and would retain the wolf-like fangs, hairy palms, and glowing eyes it formerly possessed.

The bodies of vrykolakas have the same distinctive characteristics as the bodies of vampires in Balkan folklore. They don’t decay; instead, they swell and may even attain a "drumlike" form, being very large, have a ruddy complexion, and are, according to one account, “fresh and gorged with new blood”.

The activities of the vrykolakas are nearly always harmful, ranging from merely leaving their grave and “roaming about”, to engaging in poltergeist-like activity and causing havoc in the community. Among other things, the creature is believed to knock on the doors of houses and call out the name of the residents. If it gets no reply the first time, it will pass without causing any harm. If someone does answer the door, they will die a few days later and become another vrykolakas. For this reason, there is a superstition present in certain Greek villages that one should not answer a door until the second knock.

Legends also say that the vrykolakas crushes or suffocates the sleeping by sitting on them, much like a mare or incubus — as does a vampire in Bulgarian folklore. Unlike vampires, in Greek folklore, the vrykolakas are described more as cannibals than bloodsuckers with a taste in particular for human livers.

Since a vrykolakas becomes more and more powerful if left alone, legends state that its body should be destroyed. According to some accounts, this can only be done on Saturday, which is the only day when the vrykolakas rests in its grave. This may be done in various ways, the most common being exorcising, impaling, beheading, cutting into pieces, and cremating the suspected corpse, so that it may be freed from living death and its victims may be safe.

Belief in the vrykolakas was still common in Greece in World War II, especially in rural areas. During the Great Famine in 1941-42 where around 300,000 Greeks starved to death, the graveyards were so overfilled that many families were forced to bury their loved ones outside of the cemeteries. Since those buried in unconsecrated ground were believed to come back to haunt the living as vrykolakas, this possibility caused much distress for those families who were unable to bury their dead in the church cemeteries, and some families took preemptive steps to prevent their loved ones from becoming vrykolakas such as beheading their corpses.

There are many practices that were intended to prevent a recently-deceased loved one from turning into an undead creature, or to occupy them sufficiently enough that they will not harm the living. Burying a corpse upside-down was a common method, as was placing earthly objects, such as scythes or sickles, near the grave to satisfy any demons entering the body or to appease the dead so that it wouldn’t wish to arise from its coffin. 

This tradition persisted in modern Greek folklore about the vrykolakas, in which a wax cross and piece of pottery with the inscription "Jesus Christ conquers" were placed on the corpse to prevent the body from becoming undead.

Other methods commonly practised in Europe included severing the tendons at the knees or placing poppy seeds, millet, or sand on the ground at the gravesite of a presumed undead; this was intended to keep the vampire occupied by counting the fallen grains.

So… I said I wouldn’t cover vampires, but that last one has a lot of similarities. Obviously, the biggest undead origin story to come out of Transylvania, as I mentioned at the beginning, is Dracula. So in my next Patreon exclusive bonus episode, I’ll be talking all about the story of Dracula! If you’re interested, head over there and sign up.