Striga

Unlike vampires, strzygi, according to Silesian beliefs, a person was born immediately. During life, striga has two hearts, two souls and two rows of teeth, and the second row is not noticeable at first glance. This explains the second name strzig - double-twin or double-twin. There are known cases when babies born with developed teeth were taken for strig. It was believed that after the death of Strzygi, one soul left the body, and the other remained in it and continued to live in the body in the tomb in which it was buried. Strzigi was also sometimes depicted as owls living in dark forests and attacking lonely travelers, killing them, sucking their blood and eating their entrails ^[2] . It was believed that strzhig lead a nocturnal lifestyle and prey on people, killing them and drinking their blood, as well as spreading pestilence diseases.

It was believed in Silesia that deceased Strzygi dead could send death to the whole family and their neighbors. These beliefs were widespread during times of terrible epidemics, when people died one after another in various villages, and people did not understand why this was happening. It was believed that some deceased could get out of their graves and scare, kill and call people at night, make them different meannesses and slaughter cattle. It was believed that if people everywhere died in the district, then střiga lives nearby. In Lower Silesia, the monster was also called Nachzehrer or Wiedergänger, and in Upper - střiga if it was a woman, or střigun if it was a man. The legends also reported that you could steal the deceased whom she goes to devour from Strzhigi, and then lie in the coffin yourself, kicking her when she comes up; she could not immediately run away into her coffin, but would fight, but it was very, very dangerous, and the legends said that there were few who allowed themselves such a thing. It was sometimes said that a person who was bitten by striggee did not die, but gradually turned into the same stigma. Finally, it has been observed that from time to time strzygi can satisfy their hunger with the blood of animals.

Srzygas from Silesia are also known from Contra incubum, alias latalecaem , a historical document of the 15th century ^[3] . The martyrs who live in their own coffins, eat the dead or bite their own fingers, in this century wrote Martin Bom ^[4] and Joachim Kuraus ^[5] . Two well-known cases of allegedly Strziguns - suicidal shoemakers from Breslau and Johannes Kuntius from Bennis (Upper Benesov near Krnov) - were also described by a doctor from Breslau, Martin Weinrich, in an introduction to a book written by Giovanni Francesco Picho of the Mirandoli case12, which was published in 16 in 12 in Strasbourg ^[6] .

Joseph Lompa was one of those who collected many stories and stories about strigs. It is known that throughout Europe, Serbian vampires were not yet properly known, and in the book Sympathetisch- und Antipathetischer Misch Masch of 1715 ^{[7] it was} already mentioned about the archers from the vicinity of the Trnovsky Mountains. It described how they look, how they can fool people, and how to get lost because of them. There was also a description of the threat of being kidnapped by a strig. And only then, already publicly, it was announced that allegedly Serbian vampires were described.

These Serbian vampires were examined in 1732 by three Austrian doctors who served in the army - Fluckinger, Siegel and Baumgarten. These doctors described several stories from the Serbian Bear region in a report by Visum et repertum ^[8] . This report provoked a violent reaction throughout Europe (the so-called “Vampire Madness”), and the discussion about vampires continued until the 60s of the 18th century. Some of the debaters, for example, Augustine Calmet ^[9] , additionally recalled Silesian střigas. And in Silesia, meanwhile, they had not even heard of Serbian vampires. Even in the same 1732, the military doctor Paul ^[10] wrote about them, and then Christian Stiff in the “Silesian Historical Labyrinth” ^[11] , where he also remembered the strziguns that Weinrich had previously written about.

Only then, on this basis, various writers in the novels did not in any way allow a peasant from a provincial deaf-man to be present in the image of strigi, but made only counts and princes vampires.

In the 19th century, Joseph Lompa ^[12] collected a lot of testimonies about strzig, and subsequently there were a lot of them in the collection of Richard Kürnau and in Zarańu Ślůnskim ^[13] .

In Silesian folklore, there are several stories about střigi in which the deceased walked for three days until they paid attention to his coffin. In addition, there were stories about the Strziguns, which came from a royal or Ksentzovsky family.

In every corner of Poland in the 18th century, folklore about strzygs faded away or transformed into a cult of ghouls or vampires; even in Upper Silesia, they came up with new names. All that remained was the image of střigi, which was associated with epidemics - the origin of this image of strzhigi is due to the fact that during the times of the plague people were buried in very large numbers and sometimes buried someone who was still alive, but simply was greatly weakened. When they were exhumed, the bodies of those buried were often surprisingly unnaturally skewed, with scratched faces and blood on their lips. Therefore, people thought it was striga, and could bury the dead man a second time ^[14] . There are also assumptions that some buried alive could still independently get out of the coffins, but because of their terrible appearance, they were mistaken for shooting and killed.

• Strigoi - Romanian counterpart