Old superstitions about vampires die hard in Romania

From the London Telegraph:

It was just before midnight as Gheorghe Marinescu and five of his relatives crept into the graveyard in the small Romanian village of Marotinul de Sus. They knew which plot they were looking for – a simple earth grave with a wooden cross bearing the name Petre Toma – and quickly, but quietly, set about digging. When they had dragged the body out, they waited. Then, at the stroke of 12, Marinescu began the ritual that they had been planning for weeks, one that had passed from generation to generation in their family. They drove a pitchfork through Petre Toma's chest, opened it, drew out his heart and then put stakes through the rest of his body. They sprinkled garlic over the mutilated corpse and then, carefully, laid it back in its grave.

They left the cemetery with the heart impaled on the end of the pitchfork and went to a crossroads where Marinescu's wife, son and daughter-in-law were waiting. There the group burnt it, dissolved the ashes and then drank the solution.

The scene last July would fit readily into any number of films about vampires and the Dracula legend but Gheorghe Marinescu is real. Last week he and his five relatives – Mitrica Mircea, Popa Stelica, Constantin Florea, Ionescu Ion and Pascu Oprea – were sentenced to six months in jail for the unlawful exhumation of the body of Toma, 76, a former teacher and a man they believed had risen from the dead to drink their blood while they slept.

News of what the Marinescu family did made headlines in Romania, but in a country where a large minority of the population admit to openly believing in the "undead", football bosses employ witches to cast spells on foreign teams and a couple recently named their newborn son Dracula after premonitions of impending danger to him, many were unsurprised by what they read.

Mihai Fifor, an ethnologist at the Centre for Studies in Traditional Cultures and Societies in Craiova, said, "This particular ritual is quite unique but there have been many cases of people claiming that they are being hunted by the dead and vampires. There are a number of other rituals that exist for this type of situation where people believe they need to kill vampires."

Romania has been associated with vampires in the minds of many Westerners ever since Bram Stoker wrote his classic horror story, Dracula, in 1897. But in Romania the belief in vampires and the threat of the undead stretches as far back as the 15th century leader of Wallachia – modern-day Transylvania and other parts of Romania – Count Vlad Tepes Dracula, who was the inspiration for Stoker's novel. Stoker merged the Middle Ages belief in vampires, which had become entrenched in Romania and many other parts of central and eastern Europe at the time, with the historically documented bloodthirstiness of Tepes's rule. In doing so, he created the story of Count Dracula who rose from the dead to haunt the deep, dark forests and castles of Transylvania, preying on young victims and drinking their blood.

The entire article is well-worth a read. In addition, the ever-excellent Soj of Flogging the Simian, an American who lives in Romania and one of the best bloggers on the planet, commented on Vampires in one of my posts on another blog:

I remember years ago, maybe 2002, and I was on a trip to Romania (where I now live), specifically to Transylvania. Everyone here probably knows that Transylvania was the setting for Bram Stoker's novel Dracula but few people probably know that Romanians in the countryside still believe in "vampires".

Not the "vampires" of movies, wherein a well-dressed man with fangs turns into a bat and all that nonsense. The vampires here are called strigoi and are believed to be unclean spirits (duhuri necurati) of people who are dead but not finished with this realm, who sap energy and health from the living. The only way to stop the strigoi is to dig up the corpse and burn it to ashes. Sometimes they also eat the heart of the body first. And yes this still happens even in 2005 although the police try to stop it...

I thought all this was amusing local folklore until the time I was staying in a small town adjacent to one of Vlad Tepes (Vlad "The Impaler") old castles. We visited the castle by day and it was interesting but not particularly noteworthy.

It was later that night when darkness fell and a silence came over the valley that I began to feel "something" that badly frightened me. What, I don't exactly know, but I could see out of my window the castle and the ramparts leading up to it. I imagined the horrific violence that must've occurred there, with Vlad's troops battling the Turks, capturing thousands of prisoners. Vlad's technique of "dissuasion" was to take captured prisoners and impale them on a wooden stake, which was inserted upwards through the anus. A most horrific and painful way to die...

Transylvania is a very old and very powerful land and I tell you I can feel the energy here like nowhere else. I'm not a "psychic" person or sensitive to these kind of things, but I've had too many strange incidents to discount them.

Are the peasants who believe in strigoi just ignorant country folk? Or do they recognize something that exists?

Pax