Moroi

The grave was opened at the coldest hour, and by the light of a tallow candle the men saw what they had come dreading to see. The body had not sunk into itself the way the dead are supposed to. Its cheeks were full and faintly red, the belly rounded and tight under the shroud, and at the corner of the mouth sat a dark bead that could only be blood. The smell that rose was wet clay, not rot. In the villages of Wallachia and Oltenia this was proof enough. The man in the ground was a moroi, and he had been coming home at night to feed.

Romanian keeps two words for the vampire, and they shade into each other. Strigoi is the better travelled of the pair. Moroi is its close cousin, the name preferred across western Transylvania, Wallachia, and Oltenia for the same restless dead. The word carries a chill in its roots. It descends from an old Slavic mora, the pressing weight that settles on a sleeper’s chest in the dark, the nightmare given a body. To be visited by a moroi was, at bottom, to be smothered in your sleep by something that used to be a person.

Not every moroi waited for death to begin its work. The belief split the creature in two. There were living moroi, people walking about in daylight who had been marked from birth for the role and often did not know it, and there were dead moroi, corpses that would not lie still. A child born with a caul over its face, or with a soft tail of hair down its spine, or already showing a tooth, was watched uneasily. So was a seventh son or a seventh daughter. At night the spirit of such a person was said to slip loose from the sleeping body and go abroad to torment, and the sleeper might wake wrung out and never guess where the night had taken them.

The dead moroi came from bad ends and broken rites. An unbaptized child, a baby stillborn or smothered or buried in secret, a suicide, a man who died cursing God or died by violence with the matter unfinished, any of these might refuse the earth. So might someone over whose corpse a cat had leapt before burial, which the old people guarded against fiercely. The living and the dead sorts were not really separate creatures but two ends of one idea, that some people are wrong in a way death does not cure, and that the wrongness turns hungry once the body is in the ground.

Its hunger began at home. A moroi went first to the house it had lived in, to the wife or husband or children it had loved, and drew the strength out of them while they slept, so that a family would sicken and waste in the weeks after a funeral and know exactly whom to blame. From the household it reached outward to the byre and the fields. In the small hours a cow standing in its stall would stiffen and low, and by morning give thin bloody milk or none, and the herdsman would say the moroi had been at it in the night. Wells soured. Sheep dropped. The rain failed and the harvest with it.

The signs of a future moroi were read in the body, and red hair was among the worst of them. A red-haired corpse was buried with special care, because such a one was thought most likely to return, not only in its own shape but as a dog, a frog, a flea, a bedbug, creeping into houses after dark to reach the blood of sleeping girls. The idea that the returning dead could shrink to the size of an insect and pass under a door is one of the bleaker turns in the tradition. There is nowhere to lock it out.

The dead do not always stay dead here. When deaths ran through a family, when livestock failed and no ordinary cause could be found, the community acted. A suspected grave was opened, usually at night, and the corpse read like a page. If it was found undecayed and flushed, its hair or nails seeming to have grown, its shroud gnawed, or blood about the mouth, the verdict was settled. The remedies were physical and grim. A stake of aspen or iron was driven through the heart. The body might be turned face down, or the heart cut out and burned and the ashes given to the sick to drink. Tar or quicklime was smeared over the corpse, and in the worst cases the whole body was given to the fire. Then the earth was closed again, and the family waited to learn whether the dying stopped.

Prevention ran alongside the cure and was gentler. A proper baptism, a proper funeral, the right prayers and a steady watch kept over the body were the first defences. Garlic went into the mouth of the dead and over the doors and windows of the living. Thorns and iron and millet seed were set against the wandering corpse, the millet on the theory that a moroi must halt and count every grain and so lose the whole night to arithmetic. A child born with a caul had the membrane dried and, in some tellings, burned and fed back to the child so the omen could not ripen. None of it was certain, which is why the shovel stayed near the churchyard.

The moroi’s power was the power of the slow drain rather than the power of the sword. It took vitality quietly, almost at a distance, souring what lived around it, and it needed no strength of its own to ruin a household or a harvest. Against that patient hunger the living had only ritual and iron. The creature could be kept out by the rites of the church and the old charms at the threshold, and it could be ended only by finding the body and unmaking it with stake and lime and fire. Daylight and consecrated ground worked against it. A life properly closed with baptism and burial was the surest guard of all, for the moroi was in the end a failure of that closing, a person the ordinary machinery of death had let slip through.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a moroi?

A moroi is a type of vampire or revenant from Romanian folklore, closely related to the strigoi and known by that name mainly in Wallachia, Oltenia, and western Transylvania. It can be either a living person marked from birth for the role or the restless corpse of someone who died badly, and it feeds on the vitality of the living, their livestock, and their crops.

What is the difference between a moroi and a strigoi?

Moroi and strigoi are two Romanian words for much the same vampiric being, and folklore often uses them interchangeably. Where a distinction is drawn, the moroi is described as the more mortal kind of vampire and the strigoi as the more powerful, longer-lasting undead, but both rise from the grave, drain the living, and are destroyed in the same way.

Where does the word moroi come from?

The name moroi is usually traced to an old Slavic word, mora, meaning “nightmare,” the crushing weight felt on a sleeper’s chest in the dark. The link reflects the belief that a moroi could smother or drain people in their sleep.

How do you kill a moroi?

A suspected moroi is destroyed by opening its grave, and if the corpse is found undecayed or bloody, driving an aspen or iron stake through its heart, then often burning the heart or the whole body and covering it with tar or quicklime. Prevention relied on baptism, proper funeral rites, garlic, thorns, and iron to keep a body from rising in the first place.

What causes a person to become a moroi?

People thought likely to become moroi included those born with a caul, a tail of hair, or an early tooth, and seventh children, as well as the unbaptized, stillborn or secretly killed infants, suicides, and those who died violent or unfinished deaths. A corpse over which a cat had jumped before burial was also believed at risk of rising as a moroi.

Related Entries

Strigoi, Pricolici, Vârcolac, Solomonari, Muma Pădurii, Căpcăun, Balaur, Iele, Vampire, Dhampir, Strix, Topielec, Zmeu