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Strigoiul
22:06 Jan 18 2009
Times Read: 986

by Vasile Alecsandri

I have submitted this poem to the VR database. Although it was written in 1886, it turned to be appreciated by the VR readers.

If you like it you can give it a rate here.Thank you!





Near the cliff's sharp edge, on high

Standing out against the sky,

Dost thou see a ruined cross

Weatherstained, o'ergrown by moss,

Gloomy, desolate, forsaken,

By unnumbered tempests shaken?



Not a blade of grass grows nigh it,

Not a peasant lingers by it.

E'en the sombre bird of night

Shuns it in her darksome flight,

Startled by the piteous groan

That arises from the stone.



All around, on starless nights,

Myriad hosts of livid lights

Flicker fretfully, revealing

At its foot a phantom, kneeling

Whilst it jabbers dismal plaints,

Cursing God and all the saints.



Tardy traveller, beware

Of that spectre gibbering there;

Close your eyes, and urge your steed

To the utmost of his speed;--

For beneath that cross, I ween,

Lies a Vampyre's corpse obscene!



Though the night is black and cold

Love's found story, often told,

Floats in whispers through the air,

Stalwart youth and maiden fair

Seal sweet vows of ardent passion

With their lips, in lovers' fashion.



"Restless, pale, a shape I see

Hov'ring nigh; what may it be?

'Tis a charger, white as snow,

Pacing slowly to and fro

Like a sentry. As he turns

Haughtily the sward he spurns.



"Leave me not, beloved, tonight!

Stay with me till morning's light!'

Weeping, thus besought the maid;

'Love, my soul is sore afraid!

Brave not the dread Vampyre's power,

Mightiest at this mystic hour!'



Not a word he spake, but prest

The sobbing maiden to his breast;

Kissed her lips and cheeks and eyes

Heedless of her tears and sighs;

Waved his hand, with gesture gay,

Mounted--smiled--and rode away.



We rides across the dusky plain

Tearing along with might and main

Like some wild storm-fiend, in his flight

Nursed on the ebony breast of Night?

'Tis he, who left her in her need--

Her lover, on his milk-white steed!



The blast in all its savage force

Strives to o'erthrow the gallant horse

That snorts defiance to his foe

And struggles onward. See! below

The causeway, 'long the river-side

A thousand flutt'ring flamelets glide!



Now they approach, and now recede,

Still followed by the panting steed;

He nears the ruined cross! A crash,

A piteous cry, a heavy splash,

And in the rocky river-bed

Rider and horse lie crushed and dead.

Then from those dismal depths arise

Blaspheming yells and strident cries

Re-echoing through the murky air

And, like a serpent from its lair,

Brandishing high a blood-stained glaive

The Vampyre rises from his grave!





***





Vasile Alecsandri, (21 July 1821–22 August 1890) was a Romanian poet, playwright, politician, and diplomat. He collected Romanian folk songs and was one of the principal animators of the 19th century movement for Romanian cultural identity and union of Moldavia and Wallachia.

Vampire case in Romania: January 2004
02:02 Jan 17 2009
Times Read: 994


THE REAL VAMPIRE SLAYERS







In 2004, Romanian police were called to investigate the desecration of a grave in a remote village just south of Transylvania. What they discovered there could have come straight from a Hammer Horror film. Here, renowned cannibalism expert Dr Timothy Taylor revisits the scene of the crime.



Sunday, 28 October 2007







My first trip to the Romanian province of Transylvania in 1981 was a subject of wonder to many of my friends. They assumed it to be as fictional as Anthony Hope's Ruritania, made up by Hammer Horror as a pastiche of the dark heart of Europe and shot, day-for-night, in a Forestry Commission plantation near Elstree. The reality, with Ceausescu in power and an oppressed peasantry, cocksure secret police force, rampant criminality, simmering ethnic problems, little or no food, bears, wild boar, wolves, truly vicious dogs with spiked collars of medieval design, and unspoilt mountain meadows of breathtaking beauty was... well, quite clearly another reality. I was captivated, and returned several times up until 1988, making friends, getting in fixes, and attempting to steep myself in the language and culture.



I mention this as a preamble to an account of something that happened in a country cemetery in 2004, and my experiences interviewing those involved, because it might be easy to think that I have some mission to depict primitivism and reveal barbaric practices. In fact, what I will describe is deeply cultural and appears rough and brutal only to our insulated and sometimes rather vacuous sensibilities.



As an archaeologist specialising in things visceral, such as human sacrifice and cannibalism, I was travelling with my anthropological colleague, Professor Kathryn Denning, and a film crew, making a documentary about the sources of Bram Stoker's iconic vampire, Count Dracula. This meant encounters with haematologists, the lawyers of convicted blood-drinking psychopaths, London Zoo's dentist (a world expert on fangs), cultists in a New York S&M club and vampire bats in Brazil. The Romanian leg of our investigation was, in part, to reveal the true "Dracula", the 15th-century warlord, Vlad the Impaler, whose name Stoker stole for his anti-hero, and partly to visit a sleepy village in the Romanian plains which had briefly been, unwillingly, in the media spotlight.



Before telling the tale of the Toma family, from the village of Marotinu de Sus, and what was done to the corpse of Petre Toma, the head of the clan, it is worth noting a few things about vampires – what they are and are not; what vampire specialists argue about, and the universal fears and behaviours embodied in the myth and the reality.



Folklorists agree that there was an outbreak of vampirism in Eastern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Individuals committing strange and/or aggressive behaviours, from earth-eating to rape, terrorised communities. Some people later claimed to have seen the perpetrators as living corpses, continuing the same activities after their recorded deaths. The Spanish neurologist Juan Gomez-Alonso believes that a rabies outbreak caused the panic, as the disease increases sexual aggression as well as causing hydrophobia and sensitivity to light; a more esoteric theory points to the rare blood disease porphyria, which restricts sufferers to solely nocturnal activities. In any case, the scares became a mass hysteria which the church authorities, compromised by their need not to undermine belief in the possibility of actual physical resurrection, were ill-equipped to counter. At times, indeed, they joined in the disinterment and staking of the " problematic" dead.



Fear of the dead, and of people who cannot die properly because they were not born – or did not live – is found in ' many places around the world, as are beliefs that blood is an animating force. And corpses – as every forensic pathologist knows – are not always tractable outside a climate-controlled morgue. They swell and bloat and bleed and change colour; mouths gape; teeth bare themselves; the skin recedes from fingernails and sinks in around stubble giving a semblance of continued vitality; the dead may clench their fists and, by degrees, sit up. Sometimes they even explode, a feature that requires a degree of circumspection from any stake-wielding wannabe Buffy. Perhaps because of this, there is more than one way to deal with a vampire.



There is no agreement on the etymology of the word vampire. It may come from an old Tartar word, umpyr, meaning a witch or demon, or it may be a Slavic word meaning a nocturnal flying spirit. In any case, the Romanians prefer not to have vampires: they have enough to be getting on with with the local strigoi and moroi (two forms of undead), and the varcolak (essentially a ravening lycanthropist).



Petre Toma died just before Christmas 2003. Often there are reasons to believe that a man, and less often a woman, is in danger of becoming a strigoi. As a child, they may have cut their upper teeth before the lower ones; or a cat may have leapt over, or a bat flown over the newly dead corpse as it was left out, under vigil, in the family kitchen. In Toma's case there were no prior signs, though neighbours' and family accounts of his life vary: a good family man, but also (hardly unusual in the rural depths) a heavy drinker with a temper. After his death, his niece suffered nightmares and appeared seriously ill. She claimed that her uncle was visiting her at night and feeding from her heart; that he was a strigoi. Toma's brother determined to act. The sequence of events was normal for Marotinu de Sus but, through a constellation of circumstances to do with urbanisation and Romania's imminent acceptance into the EU, became rapidly notorious.



There were many newspaper reports, all equally lurid, and each with plausible features, but their information was often contradictory. So Kathryn and I were lucky to arrive in Marotinu de Sus with the Romanian social anthropologist Mihai Fifor. We were also lucky, as it turned out, that the local constabulary had instructed Petre Toma's brother not to talk to us (local TV footage, which we viewed later, depicted a very intemperate-looking man). This left us in the cemetery at the edge of the village nearly, but not quite, alone.



Fifor proved a good guide, and we wandered through the graves, taking care not to fall into them. This was not always easy, as the form of the cemetery allows easy access to corpses. Wide cracks and gaps in concrete capstones reveal skulls and long bones spilling from broken coffins. Most graves are for couples, and some are preparatory, with the names engraved but the dead absent. The filled graves are marked by sometimes elaborate stone crosses (modelled on the posh cemeteries in town), but only ever in addition to the wooden ones, recalling Christ's, the sine qua non of proper burial. I asked Fifor why many of the graves had little hearths in front of them, with the remains of cooked food and sometimes a wine glass. "Well," he replied, "this is where the village women light fires on the three nights from Maundy Thursday – it's to give the dead some light. The dead are cold and afraid of the dark, and they are often hungry and thirsty." The dead of this cemetery are diligently cared for during the first seven years. After that, the skeleton is washed in wine and returned to become increasingly disarticulated; the soul is presumed to be in heaven, nourished by prayer.



Even more critical than the first seven years are the first 40 days. During this period, a corpse may be an unquiet strigoi, moving in its grave and travelling at night in a not quite re-embodied form, to feed off the blood of the living. After 40 days it will morph into moroi – the actual, incarnate, walking dead, able to appear during the day and mount vicious attacks. As Fifor explained the theoretical background, we were challenged by an old fellow brandishing a very large scythe.



There is nothing like fear and anxiety for prompting the recall of useful foreign phrases, and my rather rusty Romanian began to creak into action. My greeting allayed the swearing about foreigners and the demand that we get out of the cemetery. Ten minutes later there was a handshake, and then a long and increasingly engaged conversation. I had good malt in my pocket which, produced at an appropriate moment, extended the cultural meeting further than I had reckoned. It ended in a very wet, full-on-the-lips, kiss.



If I had known in advance that I'd have to snog an old man in a cemetery, I probably could not have imagined a more decent partner than Niculae Pedescu – at 76 or 78 years old (he's not sure) he had the steady eye of a man who has learnt enough to not care about anything other than the truth. He had been present at more than one event where strigoi were dealt with. He had not been at Toma's grave in 2003, but the proceedings had apparently gone to form, at least at first.



After the niece became ill, he said, Petre's brother had had to wait, because he could not act within the 12 days of Christmas. On 8 January, the corpse was checked and deemed to be a strigoi. At midnight the next day, six men disinterred it and cut open the chest. I asked Niculae what they used for this and he looked at me as if I was mad, before brandishing his scythe again. Apparently, the chest was cut crosswise with a scythe tip, and the heart removed through the ribcage. Again, I asked what tools had been used. This time we needed help to interpret the words and gestures. It was with a growing image of James Whale's 1931 classic Frankenstein that I understood Fifor to say, as neutrally as possible, "He says it was with a pitchfork. Yes." The subsequent description failed utterly to dispel my horror-film image. The men took the heart, spiked aloft, to the crossroads outside the village. There they roasted it over a brazier and, as far as I could understand, stuffed glowing coals into the ventricles. Held up in the night sky, the heart shed charred flakes that were caught in a tea towel. These were taken to the niece's house, ground up and mixed in a glass of water. "The niece drank it," Fifor confirmed, "and in the morning she said she felt better... in this way she was cured."



None of this would have come to public attention had it not been for a family rift. One of Toma's daughters, who had married an urbanite, was outraged. She alerted the police who dug Toma up again in full view of the public and media. His body was examined in a procedure one would be hard-pushed to call forensic. Although in village terms, this was desecration, that was what the court found Toma's brother guilty of, and he received a prison sentence. It was only through the intervention of Fifor, who was able to articulate the logic of peasant traditions, that this was commuted, although not quashed.



After Niculae left with his trophy from Scotland, Kathryn and I wandered in the cemetery while the crew took pictures. We met two women, one quite old, and one so old that she was blind and scared of us. She seemed to think that Kathryn was some kind of visiting angel. She and Kathryn drifted off leaving me with the other woman, who told me about how her husband had himself been in danger of becoming a strigoi. Tending his grave with drink and flowers, she chatted to him in a three-way conversation, deferring to him on particular facts. As a child, he had suckled his mother while she slept, and the mother had therefore told her daughter-in-law, my collocutor, to be sure to put a silver needle through his heart when he died. He had made her promise to do this to allow him peaceful rest, and she confirmed to me that she had done so. Her matter-of-factness no longer surprised me, but I was taken aback when she asked me whether I would like to go with her and " make pee-pee" behind the graves. The twinkle in her eye and a taunting laugh at the dead man interred under a few inches of mould beneath us left me in no doubt that this was a come-on.



In England, before we set out, I'd had a T-shirt made for Kathryn which I thought might be a fun thing to use when we were filming; in the end, the sentiment did not suit the breezy format of the Real Vampires show. The slogan read: Iar umbra fetei stravezii/ E alba ca de ceara-/ Un mort frumos cu ochii vii/ Ce scînteie-n afara. The words are from "Lucifer", one of the greatest poems of Mihai Eminescu, and mean something like: " His shadowed and translucent gaze/ Is white as candle wax/ A handsome corpse with living eyes/ Flickering like hot embers". The events in Marotinu de Sus, and the things that were said to me in the cemetery, were unforgettably lively and vital. There was no denial of death in the eyes of the old people tending the dead. But sadness was leavened with wit and gallows-humour. And above and behind all that, there was a sure sense of the art of living as souls within wayward bodies. *



Dr Timothy Taylor is reader in archaeology at the University of Bradford.



http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-real-vampire-slayers-397874.html

The Vampyre
23:05 Jan 13 2009
Times Read: 1,015






Compylt into Meeter

By James Clerk Maxwell

1845

















Thair is a knichte rydis through the wood,

And a douchty knichte is hee,

And sure hee is on a message sent,

He rydis sae hastilie.

Hee passit the aik, and hee passit the birk,

And hee passit monie a tre,

Bot plesant to him was the saugh sae slim,

For beneath it hee did see





The boniest ladye that ever he saw,

Scho was sae schyn and fair.

And there scho sat, beneath the saugh,

Kaiming hir gowden hair.

And then the knichte - "Oh ladye brichte,

What chance hes broucht you here,

But say the word, and ye schall gang

Back to your kindred dear."

Then up and spok the Ladye fair -

"I have nae friends or kin,

Bot in a littel boat I live,

Amidst the waves' loud din."

Then answered thus the douchty knichte -

"I'll follow you through all,

For gin ye bee in a littel boat,

The world to it seemis small."

They gaed through the wood, and through the wood

To the end of the wood they came:

And when they came to the end of the wood

They saw the salt sea faem.

And they they saw the wee, wee boat,

That daunced on the top of the wave,

And first got in the ladye fair,

And then the knichte sae brave;





They got into the wee, wee boat,

And rowed wi' a' their micht;

When the knichte sae brave, he turnit about,

And lookit at the ladye bricht;

He lookit at her bonie cheik,

And hee lookit at hir twa bricht eyne,

Bot hir rosie cheik growe ghaistly pale,

And scho seymit as scho deid had been.

The fause fause knichte growe pale wi frichte,

And his hair rose up on end,

For gane-by days cam to his mynde,

And his former luve he kenned.

Then spake the ladye, - "Thou, fause knichte,

Hast done to mee much ill,

Thou didst forsake me long ago,

Bot I am constant still;

For though I ligg in the woods sae cald,

At rest I canna bee

Until I sucke the gude lyfe blude

Of the man that gart me dee."

Hee saw hir lipps were wet wi' blude,

And hee saw hir lyfelesse eyne,

And loud hee cry'd, "Get frae my syde,

Thou vampyr corps uncleane!"





Bot no, hee is in hir magic boat,

And on the wyde wyde sea;

And the vampyr suckis his gude lyfe blude,

Sho suckis hym till hee dee.

So now beware, whoe're you are,

That walkis in this lone wood;

Beware of that deceitfull spright,

The ghaist that suckis the blude.



***



This is one of the most ancient vampire poems.

If you want to rate it in the VR database, please click here.

Thank you!

About the Romanian vampires
21:59 Jan 13 2009
Times Read: 1,019

"Tales of vampiric entities were also found among the ancient Romans and the Romanized inhabitants of eastern Europe, Romanians (known as Vlachs in historical context). Romania is surrounded by Slavic countries, so it is not surprising that Romanian and Slavic vampires are similar.

In Romanian lore, the names for an undead vampire include:



* Strigoi (plural: Strigoi)

* Moroi (plural: Moroii)

* Varcolac (plural: Varcolaci)

* Pricolic (plural: Pricolici)



All six of these names can be used to mean an undead vampire who periodically leaves his grave to prey upon the living and returns to his grave to rest. But each term also has a special meaning.



A person born with a caul, extra nipple, extra hair, born too early, black cat crossed the mother's path, born with a tail, born out of wedlock, one who died an unnatural death, or died before baptism, was doomed to become a vampire, as was the seventh child of the same sex in a family, the child of a pregnant woman who did not eat salt or who was looked at by a vampire or a witch. Moreover, being bitten by vampire meant certain condemnation to a vampiric existence after death.



The vampire was usually first noticed when it attacked family and livestock, or threw things around in the house. Vampires, along with witches, were believed to be most active on the Eve of St George's Day (April 22 Julian, May 4 Gregorian calendar), the night when all forms of evil were supposed to be abroad. St George's Day is still celebrated in Europe.



A vampire in the grave could be discerned by holes in the earth, an undecomposed corpse with a red face, or having one foot in the corner of the coffin. Living vampires were identified by distributing garlic in church and seeing who did not eat it.



Graves were often opened three years after the death of a child, five years after the death of a young person, or seven years after the death of an adult to check for vampirism.



Measures to prevent a person from becoming a vampire included removing the caul from a newborn and destroying it before the baby could eat any of it, careful preparation of dead bodies, including preventing animals from passing over the corpse, placing a thorny branch of wild rose in the grave, and placing garlic on windows and rubbing it on cattle, especially on St George's and St Andrew's day.



To destroy a vampire, a stake was driven through the body, followed by decapitation and placing garlic in the mouth. By the 19th century, one would also shoot a bullet through the coffin.



When a vampire was believed to be the cause of a plague or a disease which slowly infected its living former family or relatives, the heart, and occasionally also the liver, of the exhumed corpse were sometimes burned and the ashes of these were mixed with water. This mixture was then drunk as a medicine by those who were suffering from the disease inflicted by the vampire and others who feared that they were also victims of the vampire. Also, the people might fumigate themselves by standing in the smoke of the burning heart.



Examples of this can be found in The Vampire in Europe by Montague Summers, mostly in the form of excerpts from the old Romanian journal of folklore, Ion Creanga. Quite the same practice occurred also in Poland and, rather oddly, New England."



source:

http://vampires.monstrous.com/romanian_vampires.htm