How a Serbian village word became your vampire

Chapter 1

Rome’s word

strix – striga · Latin · Rome

In Rome, strix is in Plautus a night bird devouring people still alive — an old word, from the second century BC. The popular form striga comes early too: Petronius puts it in the first century AD in Trimalchio’s mouth, and striga becomes an evil night spirit, a hag, a being craving human flesh and blood, especially infants’.

The same root lives on in Italian strega and stregone, French stryge, Polish strzyga (perhaps borrowed from Romanian itself), Hungarian sztriga and Albanian shtriga — and the verb a striga, “to scream”, is derived by DEX from Latin *strigare (< strix), though the cited dictionaries do not derive it directly from the noun strigă; we keep it apart.

Chapter 2

The inheritance

strigă – strigoi · dialects · Dacia – Romania

Romanian keeps Rome’s word and dresses it at home: strigă takes the 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

Vampyri – Vampir · 1725 – 1732 · Kisilova – Belgrade

Between 1718 and 1739, northern Serbia sits under Austrian rule, with a military-cameral administration based in Belgrade and supervised 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. Frombald attends the exhumation and reports; the stake and the pyre are the frightened villagers’ work, after their custom — his report keeps the administration apart from their deed.

At Medveđa, winter 1731–1732: the second wave. Arnold Paole had died about five years earlier, 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 · The Hague – London

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 of 21 July 1725; Visum et Repertum is printed at Nuremberg in 1732.

The earliest known English print use comes from the March 1732 London press — the Daily Post-Boy (10 March, a recent archival find), the London Journal (11 March) and, in May, the Craftsman (20 May) carry the story; the “Vampyres” quotation below we give after modern works — the newspaper page itself we have not seen in facsimile: “…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. And the chain is no simple Germany–France–England relay: the French-language Le Glaneur had printed “Vampires” at The Hague on 3 March, before the London examples — and the London Journal itself translated material from Le Glaneur: a European press network, not a courier chain.

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 · 1732 – 1845 · Paris – Negruzzi

Romanian borrows the traveller back — DEX ’98 gives “Din fr. vampire, germ. Vampir.” (“From French vampire, German Vampir.”) Negruzzi’s translation of Hugo’s ballad “La Ronde du Sabbat” begins appearing in Albina românească on 17 September 1839, and the edition apparatus (Leonte, after Petrea 2009) keeps two states of the line. In A (1839): “Stahii slute și balauri, strigoi răi și negre gnomuri” — “vampir” is missing, rendered as “strigoi”. In B (Balade, 1845): “Vampiri, stafii și balauri, strigoi, larve, negri gnomuri” — the neologism enters the line without pushing strigoi out (which in the French — “Les larves, les dragons, les vampires, les gnomes” — does not exist: it is the translator’s addition).

The 1872 in the dictionaries is the posthumous edition’s year: Negruzzi had died in 1868. Whether “vampir” appears anywhere else in the 1839 text we have not verified from facsimile — the secure landmark stays 1845. Then the two words walk together: the 1862 Noul dicționar portativ gives vampir = “strigoiu” — but also “numirea unui liliac foarte mare” (“the name of a very large bat”; after Iordan 1950); in 1867, Drăgescu too sets “vampir” and “strigoi” side by side in Nopțile carpatine, figuratively (after Martin 2023).

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.