How a Serbian village word became your vampire

Chapter 1

Rome’s word

strix – striga · Latin · Rome

In Rome, strix began as a sharp-screeching night bird. In Late Latin, striga becomes an evil night spirit, a hag, a being craving human flesh and blood, especially infants’.

From the same root come Italian strega and stregone, French stryge, Polish strzyga (perhaps borrowed from Romanian itself), Hungarian sztriga and Albanian shtriga — plus the Romanian verb a striga, “to scream”.

Chapter 2

The inheritance

strigă – strigoi · dialects · Dacia – Romania

Romanian keeps Rome’s word and dresses it at home: strigă takes the augmentative suffix -oi and becomes strigoi. DEX ’98 gives the morphology in short: “Strigă + suf. -oi.”

Meanwhile the medieval striga haunts the Western imagination as a flying witch, and the cognate forms spread from Italy to Poland and Albania.

Chapter 3

The hinge

vàmpīr – Vampir · 1725 – 1732 · Kisilova – Belgrade

Between 1718 and 1739, northern Serbia sits under direct Austrian rule, with military government from Vienna. In the border villages people die in waves, and the villages demand exhumations.

At Kisilova, 1725: Petar Blagojević dies, and within eight days nine people die after day-long illnesses; the dying say he strangles them at night. The Imperial Provisor Ernst Frombald sees the undecomposed body, blood in its mouth, and burns it after the stake draws “completely fresh” blood.

At Medveđa, winter 1731–1732: the second wave. Arnold Paole had died around 1726, fallen from a haywagon; the grave opened forty days on shows an undecomposed body, fresh blood run from eyes, nose, mouth and ears. The surgeons Glaser and Flückinger write reports; the latter, Visum et Repertum, is signed at Belgrade on 26 January 1732 and printed at Nuremberg the same year.

Chapter 4

The dispatch

Vampir – Vampyres – vampire · 1732 · Belgrade – London – Paris

The reports are translated West and North and feed the century’s vampire scare in Germany, France and England. The 1725 account is printed in the Wienerisches Diarium; Visum et Repertum is printed at Nuremberg in 1732.

The earliest known English print use comes from The London Journal, 20 May 1732: “…certain dead Bodies (call’d there Vampyres) had kill’d several Persons by sucking out all their Blood…” — the dead of “Medreyga” had killed several people, sucking out all their blood. The German form Vampir passes through French and becomes English vampire.

One link stays uncertain: the detour through Hungarian, mentioned by some dictionaries, is contested. On the map, the leg from Buda appears dashed.

Chapter 5

The homecoming

vampire – vampir · after 1732 – 1872 · Paris – Bucharest

Romanian borrows the traveller back — DEX ’98 gives “Din fr. vampire, germ. Vampir.” (“From French vampire, German Vampir.”) The first Romanian attestation is unknown; literary use is certain by 1872, when Negruzzi writes “Vampiri, stafii și balauri, strigoi” — both words in a single line.

Meanwhile strigoi stays the folk word, inherited from Rome. On what people did about strigoi, the dedicated atlas writes: strigoi-atlas: what people did about strigoi.