The Strzygoń: A Vampire-Peasant
The most popular of Polish ghouls is the opposite of the pale vampire-aristocrat established in pop culture. The strzygoń is a lover of sausages and vodka, a hard-working farmer and a virile husband who begets children even after his death.
He was the undisputed king of Polish folk demonology, ruling the world of the peasant imagination. A terrifying ghoul, the progenitor of the vampire, the dead rising from the grave, sucking blood, suffocating people and spreading the plague. The creature varied locally; each type was adapted to local conditions. The ghoul proper predominated in the Borderlands, on the Polish-Ruthenian border, the Lublin region and the eastern part of Mazovia. Further west, he was second only to the strzyga (a female counterpart of the strzygoń); in Silesia, Podhale and Lesser Poland to the strzygoń; and in Greater Poland and Pomerania to the wieszczy or wieszcz. Although all these restless dead were variously named, stories about them converged and all depicted an equally terrifying character.
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Frame from animated short ‘The Strzygoń & How to Deal with Him’ by Kajetan Obarski, photo: AMI
The classics of Polish folklore have fully documented the stories of strzygońs. The name is perhaps an attempt to make the word ‘strzyga’ masculine. Although in the 17th century it did not yet connote gender (although Wacław Potocki, in his epigram ‘Strzyga’, advises ‘cutting off the balls’ of such a restless corpse, which hardly leaves any doubt), with time it began to follow its grammatical femininum (Franciszek Morawski writes: ‘Strzyga is, as far as I know – a lady ghoul’). Strzygońs, which spread mainly in the vicinity of Kraków, were the most socialised of Polish ghouls, sometimes even being helpful to villagers in their own way. Nevertheless, each of them sooner or later became too much of a nuisance and eventually had to be neutralised.
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Frame from animated short ‘The Strzygoń & How to Deal with Him’ by Kajetan Obarski, photo: AMI
The works of Oskar Kolberg, Stanisław Ciszewski and Seweryn Udziela provide us with basic knowledge about the strzygoń and his habits, and the accounts collected by them are remarkably consistent. Above all, and this is characteristic of the entire ghoulish species, a strzygoń is a man with two souls; one leaves the body after death, while the other remains inside it and reanimates the corpse, which emerges from the grave, frightening and attacking people. Symptoms of this posthumous behaviour are evident while the creature is still alive: sleepwalking, talking to himself, a ruddy or pale countenance and, finally, a blue birthmark (especially in the shape of shears – which was probably meant to be associated with ‘haircutting’) or two rows of teeth (especially among children). Moreover, the body of the strzygoń does not decompose after death; it is ‘limp and flexible’, and, most importantly, one side of it is warm – for that’s where its second, evil soul lives. Confirmation was thought to be a reliable premortem prophylaxis against alleged strzygońs; country folk believed that this sacrament baptised the second soul, which could thus also leave the body after death. An additional safeguard, which according to country folk was recommended by the pope himself, was to give two names at baptism. However, as Kolberg reports, ‘not all people were confirmed, and there are some whom the devil will not allow to be confirmed’. Hence, the plague of strzygońs could not be avoided.
The strzygoń that emerges from the grave, unlike ghouls proper, does not begin to wreak death and terror among relatives and neighbours but is content at first to hang around churches, where he destroys and chews on candles, and sometimes ‘tempts the priests in the vicarage to do evil’ by taking the form of a ‘young wench’ – for the evil soul makes him a shape-shifter. He is mainly active around midnight and must return to the grave at dawn (otherwise, according to some, he will turn into a puddle of tar). It is also characteristic that the strzygoń does not immediately have to drink blood and strangle people but gets into fights with them, whereby if he manages to breathe into his opponent’s mouth, he can immediately deprive them of life. Ciszewski notes that ‘a strzygoń walking around after death has the same (physical) strength as he had when he was alive, so whoever “outfought” him when he was still a living being will also be able to deal with him after death if only they know how to do it correctly’. This ‘correctly’ is also given by Kolberg: ‘When a wise person meets a strzygoń haunting after death, they should immediately give him a slap from the left (with their left hand), and at that moment the bogeyman will disappear and will not appear again’. Immediately afterwards, the eminent folklorist cites a story from Tonie, near Kraków, where a peasant with the charming nickname Hadramacha had the displeasure of coming into contact with a strzygoń. When the attempt to breathe into the villager’s mouth failed, a brawl ensued. The opponents were evidently equally matched since the fight dragged on, so Hadramacha decided to give the strzygoń a piece of sausage – after all, with a sausage in his mouth, the strzygoń would not be able to deprive him of life by breathing into him. While he was eating the sausage, they arrived at the cottage, where the peasant ‘suddenly moved away and hit the strzygoń in the mouth from the left with such a swing that it had to bounce back to where it had come from’. However, sharing a sausage with the aggressive dead did not work out well for the peasant. Hadramacha ate his sausage the next day and ‘became so ill that he was forced to go to bed and only recovered after drinking two pots of whey for a cure’.
Hadramacha’s adventure ended happily, especially if we compare it to the accounts recorded by Ciszewski from the Olkusz area. There, a soldier found himself in a similar situation; attacked by a strzygoń and cut off his head with a broadsword. Undeterred by this development, the strzygoń ‘grabbed his head and kept throwing it at the soldier in an attempt to kill him with it’. The soldier managed to escape but died three days later. Another strzygoń carrying his own head was also seen by a peasant in the vicinity of Nowy Sącz. Karol Mátyás noted in 1889 that a villager managed to avoid a miserable fate thanks to a devotional scapular that scared the dead man away. In the ethnographic magazine Wisła (Vistula) of 1905, we can read that in Bronowice Wielkie, quite close to the cottage of the brave Hadramacha, a strzygoń was said to prowl about, holding a peasant’s head to his bosom. However, he would let himself be tamed with booze, so perhaps it was the same sausage lover that Kolberg described. However, strzygońs were sometimes merciless – in Ciszewski’s book, we can read about a revenant forester who demolished a hut and tore to pieces his own child that he had pulled out of its cradle. His wife and other child barely escaped a similar fate. This, however, is an unusual situation, since almost all the accounts collected by ethnologists prove that marital ties were very important to strzygońs.
Ubiquitous is the tale of the strzygoń-husband who, after his death, comes to his farm and visits his wife. However, this is not the subject of a romantic ballad but a real Polish peasant reality – the strzygoń Grzegorz G. from the village of Siołkowa, mentioned by Franciszek Gawełek in 1910, would go to visit his wife ‘for three months, cleaning everything around the house, chopping wood, carrying water, and even had seven children with her’. Although conceiving seven children in three months may seem arduous even for a living corpse, almost everyone writes about the strzygoń’s offspring. According to Kolberg, ‘a dead strzygoń’s child is miserable, thin, of pale complexion, grows up to a certain age and usually dies before reaching adolescence’, even though the deceased father took good care of the farm, as he ‘sets fences, threshes in the barn and works the chaff cutter’. Strzygońs are typically very jealous of their widows. Ciszewski writes of a peasant who ‘went to his wife’s place after he’d died, chopped chaff for the cattle, cut firewood and tidied up the yard but did not let her mention anything about it to anyone; otherwise, he would rip her head off’. In Kolberg’s notes from the Kielce region, on the other hand, we find a rather frightening tale of a farmhand who married a widow. However, the newlywed was not lucky because:
Sometimes, he had to flee, barely alive at night.
It crawled on all fours, and all naked it was;
it interfered and moaned; it thrashed and lifted the bed
until he’d crawled out of the room.
When he’d lay patiently, with sacred objects under its arm…
the widow would poke him, saying:
‘Go, you fool, to the pigsty at least; the dead man won’t put up with you’.
This jealous ‘dead man’ is eventually chased away thanks to the advice of a pilgrim beggar (which suggests that he might, in fact, have been the warm widow’s very much alive lover). A different way of dealing with the strzygoń-husband was described by Stefania Ulanowska in her ethnographic series Z Górskiego Zacisza (From a Mountain Retreat, 1886), published in the daily Czas (Time). The story begins in a fairly typical way: the deceased husband comes at night and works on the farm. The couple nonchalantly flaunt their posthumous relationship; the woman ‘no longer hid it and had two children with him during this time; the children grew up perfectly well; today, the older boy already herds cows and the girl watches over the geese’, but eventually she grew tired of her relationship with the deceased, and, in order to end it, she struck a blow to the most sensitive part of his dead heart:
In the evening, at the time when the strzygoń would usually arrive, the woman unbraided her hair – since married women in the highlands do not have their plaits cut as they do in the Kraków region – and began to comb her hair. The man came in and asked her what she was doing. And she said that she wanted to braid her hair in the evening because she was going to wed such and such a farmhand the following morning. The strzygoń roared in a terrible voice that made the windowpanes rattle; he angrily stormed out of the cottage and never appeared again.
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Frame from animated short ‘The Strzygoń & How to Deal with Him’ by Kajetan Obarski, photo: AMI
The strzygoń’s close ties with his family were firmly connected with the small, close-knit village community, for whom the dead neighbour emerging from the grave was not too much of a problem as long as he did not make a nuisance of himself. The villagers, however, dealt mercilessly with the dead man who ran wild and whose mischief crossed the boundaries of decency. Seweryn Udziela tells a story about such a strzygoń called Misiek:
Years ago, there lived a peasant in Sławkowice. His name was Misiek. When he died, they buried him in the new cemetery, whereas previously the dead were buried by the church. Immediately after the funeral, he would leave his grave every night and visit his relatives and friends. Some even saw him on the road. Occasionally, he would take a horse from the stables, ride it all night and then let it go in the morning. Sometimes, the horse was so overheated that it was covered in foam. He disturbed people terribly. When they were asleep in their huts, he would make the door creak, poke them with wood, smash the women’s pots, bang on the windows and throw wads of straw at them. People would see him and speak to him, but he wouldn’t answer anyone.
Misiek was eventually neutralised by the parish priest after the exasperated peasants pleaded with him.
There were several ways to deal with the strzygoń. We are already familiar with ‘slapping his face from the left’ in the event of a direct confrontation. Another method is to hide the dead man’s clothes, as some strzygońs, especially those making mischief in churches, used to strip naked after leaving the grave. Hiding the mortal shirt or socks of the boisterous deceased could effectively turn him to tar at the first crowing of a rooster in the morning. Most frequently, however, strzygońs were dealt with in daylight. The folk would dig up the grave and use classic anti-vampiric measures – both mild and harsh versions. That is how most of the dead husbands-farmhands were neutralised, the sympathetic Misiek included. A mild way is described by Ciszewski: ‘You have to put a piece of paper with Jesus’s name or the deceased’s name under their tongue; then turn the corpse face down and hit it on their backside with a shovel’. Kolberg adds putting flint in their mouth, writing ‘Jesus’ on their forehead and tying a scarf around the corpse’s eyes. The procedure looks like both a purely physical means of preventing the strzygoń from leaving the grave (turning the corpse around) and ‘making up’ for the sacrament of confirmation (name cards); the slap on the backside with a shovel can, in turn, be interpreted as a warning. For if the dead person is still restless, more radical measures should be applied. A village woman from near Kraków, quoted by Kolberg, advises:
A nail should then be driven into the strzygoń’s head, or scribbled on papers (that is, by a professor) should be put under his tongue, or finally, clerical help should be requested. The priest, after cutting off the demon’s head, puts it backwards at the neck, that is, with its face to the pillow.
Ciszewski notes a similar method for strzygońs if the mild method did not keep them in their grave: ‘you should cut off his head and, after putting a piece of paper with his name on it under his tongue, place the head at the feet of his overturned torso’. The ending of the adventures of Misiek from Sławkowice follows the pattern of these recommendations – ‘the parish priest went with the organist and gravedigger to the cemetery, had the grave dug up and his body exhumed. They cut off his head, turned his body so that its back was up, and buried him. Afterwards, Misiek never showed up again’, just as in the case of the helpful husband-dead man from Siołkowa: ‘The priest had the grave where Gregory G. was buried dug up, and when the coffin was uncovered, the dead man was lying as if alive. His head was cut off and placed by his legs; after that, the body was covered again with earth. From that moment on, the strzygoń never appeared again’.
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Frame from animated short ‘The Strzygoń & How to Deal with Him’ by Kajetan Obarski, photo AMI
Collected by the pioneers of Polish ethnology, the stories about strzygońs are not only captivating literature. They are also an outstanding mirror of forgotten neighbour and family relations of the old Polish countryside – relations in which the dead, even if mischievous and malicious like the peasant Misiek, could still participate. It is also an important theme of the Polish vampiric myth in which the main role is played by a peasant – a lover of sausages and vodka, a hard-working farmer and a virile spouse who begets children after his death, so different from the pale vampire-aristocrats who are firmly established in pop culture.
Written by Łukasz Kozak, translated by Agnieszka Mistur
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