Some Romanian folklorists today contend that Romanians never attributed blood drinking to what has been interpreted by Westerners as Romanian vampires (the revenants given such names as strigoi, moroi, pricolici, and varcolac and who often match Slavic vampires in many ways).
All of the citing on this to the contrary given by the French scholar Adrien Cremene in his Mythologie du Vampire en Roumanie are from articles written by Romanians in Romanian academic journals or trace ultimately back to such a source.
And here below are three English translations from such Romanian writings.
In the Romanian journal of folklore and ethnology, Ion Creanga, vol. 4, p. 202, a folktale recorded in the town of Botosani in the Romania province of Moldavia begins with:
“There once was a time when vampires were as common as leaves of grass, or berries in a pail, and they never kept still, but wandered around at night and mingled with the people. They walked about and joined the evening gatherings in a villages, and, when there were many young people together, the vampires could carry out their habit of inspiring fear, and sucking blood like leaches.”
(This last English translation is given in Agnes Murgoci’s article, “The Vampire in Roumania”, Folk-Lore, vol 37, no. 4, Dec. 1926, p. 341. But it can also be found in some American university libraries which have the original English editions of Ion Creanga.)
In the article "The Romanian Folkloric Vampire" by Jan Perkowski, published in the September 1982 issue of the journal, East Europe Quarterly, there is the following tale recorded by the eminent Romanian linguist, Professor Emil Petrovici, in the Romanian town of Ohaba, in southwestern Transylvania, on June 21, 1936:
"Once a strigoi turned into a handsome young man and a young girl fell in love with him. They were married, but the girl also wanted a religious wedding. He rejected this idea. Her parents insisted, so he agreed to go to the church, but when they emerged from the church he looked at his wife in a strange way, baring his teeth. She became afraid and told her mother about it. Her mother said, 'Don't be afraid. He loves you. So that's why he bared his teeth.' When their parents came to visit them, they couldn't find them. They had locked themselves in, but the people could see them through the window. He was sucking her blood. When the people saw it, they shot him through the window."
In the same article, there is another anecdote involving eating the heart.. This one was recorded by Professor Petrovici on June 21, 1933 at the village of Bals in the Romanti district of the
Romanian province of Oltenia, in the eastern part of former Wallachia:
“They say that a corpse leaves his grave as a moroi and feeds on his relatives. He prefers their hearts. The solution is to exhume him and if he is ruddy in the face, you have to stab his heart with something sharp like a needle, a pin, or a nail.”.
(The two anecdotes, along with many others, were published in 1943 as a supplement to the linguistic atlas of Romania that Professor Petrovici had published earlier. Professor Jan Perkowski translated those about vampires into English with the help of Emil Vabrie, Professor of Romance and Slavic Linguistics at the University of Bucharest.)
Written by Patick Johnson
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