Strigoi

Region: Central & Southeastern Europe
Location:Romania (particularly Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia)

Strigoi are one of the oldest forms of Romanian undead lore — restless spirits or reanimated bodies that rise from the grave because of improper burial, unresolved grievances, or spiritual imbalance. Folklore distinguishes several types: **strigoi vii**, the living witches or shape-shifters who drain vitality, and **strigoi morți**, the undead revenants who walk after death. The undead strigoi can appear pale, gaunt, and shadowy, or fully solid and lifelike, depending on the tale. They are known to leave their graves at night to drink blood, steal life force, or torment relatives. Sometimes they shapeshift into animals — wolves, cats, birds, or insects — adding to their unsettling fluidity.
  The origin of the strigoi concept lies in deep ancestral beliefs about the soul’s departure from the body. If burial rituals were incomplete, if someone lived a morally fractured life, or if they died violently, the soul could return. Villages used protective rituals to keep strigoi from rising: sewing the corpse’s mouth shut, driving nails through clothing, laying thorns across the grave, or placing garlic under the tongue. In some regions, if livestock sickened, droughts struck, or children wasted away, villagers suspected a strigoi was active and performed exhumations to identify and “quiet” the revenant.
  Strigoi stories reflect fears of disease, famine, and the thin line between the living and the dead in rural communities. They are not refined aristocratic vampires; they are intimate, domestic horrors — a dead family member knocking on the window, a shadow sitting on the chest at night, a corpse found face-down in the grave from restless activity. The strigoi is the rootstock from which modern vampire mythology grew, but in Romania it remains a unique, deeply cultural being tied to family, ritual, and the dangers of liminal death.

World
Koina
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kaixabu
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The spark is human. The polish is digital.

 

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