Death of a Strigoi
Stories of vampires are, in fact, very old in Romania; however, they prefer to call these creatures strigoi. They are seen as ghosts, undead, immaterial things; they are usually a recently buried member of the family, who returns to haunt his relatives and drain their life forces, sometimes in dreams. In order to bring peace to the family and to the undead itself, some "rituals" need to be performed.
These are very secret practices that, I was surprised to learn, still continue today. In January 2004, one such episode became public and created a scandal.
After Petre Toma of the village of Marotinu de Sus died in a field accident in December 2003, his relatives complained that a child's illness was to blame on Toma, since some neighbors claimed they had seen him posthumously walking in his yard. Something had to be done.
Six local men then volunteered to enact the ancient Romanian ritual for dealing with a strigoi. Just before midnight, they crept into the cemetery on the edge of the village and gathered around Toma's grave.
It seems that the destruction of a strigoi has some parallels with the methods used by Stoker's heroes to destroy Dracula. But rather than drive a stake through the creature's heart, the six men dug Toma up, split his ribcage with a pitchfork, removed his heart, put stakes through the rest of his body, and sprinkled it with garlic. Then they burned the heart, put the embers in water, and shared the grim cocktail with the sick child.
The "what the-?" award goes to:
Toma's daughter. She was angry at her relatives. It was not because they had desecrated the body of a dead person that deserved more respect, but because she had not been invited to the ritual! |
