Pricolici

Also Known As: also Priculici, Tricolici; a Romanian undead that rises in wolf form; etymology uncertain, sometimes traced to a Latin root for wolf
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Romanian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: An undead soul, usually that of a cruel and violent man, that returns from the grave in the shape of an oversized wolf to hunt the living.
Role in Mythos: The pricolici is Romania’s lupine revenant, set apart from the human-faced strigoi by rising always as a wolf or great dog.
Relation to Humans: It preys on people who travel or live alone, striking in silence and killing without warning. Villagers who suspected a dead man had turned would open his grave and destroy the corpse to stop the hunting.

A man walking alone at dusk on a Carpathian road hears nothing behind him, which is the first sign that something is wrong. Wolves announce themselves. They run in packs, they call to one another across the valleys, and a healthy wolf almost never troubles a grown man on a path. The thing that comes for the solitary traveler in Romanian belief comes without a sound, moves faster than it should, and goes for one person only. It is shaped like a wolf, and it was once a man. This is the pricolici.

The pricolici is a dead thing that will not stay dead. In the folklore of Romania and old Moldavia it belongs to the same restless family as the strigoi and the moroi, corpses that claw their way back out of the churchyard to feed on the living, but it is set apart by its shape. A strigoi rises looking much as it did in life, keeping a human face and a human grudge. The pricolici rises as a wolf, or as a great black dog, and keeps only the appetite. Men who were cruel and violent while they breathed were the ones most likely to come back this way, as though the body simply resumed in death the work it had liked best.

Descriptions settle on a beast larger than any natural wolf, dark and heavy through the shoulders, carrying a stillness that living animals lack. It does not pace or pant. It waits, and then it moves. Some accounts blur the line further and make the pricolici a werewolf in life and a vampire after death, a man who took wolf form while he lived and rose from his grave to drink blood once he did not. The two ideas were never kept tidily apart, and the people who feared the creature rarely tried to separate them.

Where the word comes from no one can say for certain. Some trace it to a Latin root for wolf and let the guess stand, since nothing better has come along. What is clearer is what the pricolici is not. It is often muddled with the vârcolac, another Romanian shape of dread, but the vârcolac is the creature that climbs into the sky to swallow the sun and the moon and bring on an eclipse, and its name is a Slavic loan meaning wolf’s pelt. The pricolici keeps its feet on the ground and its business among the living. The distinction mattered a great deal to the people who might meet one on a dark road; to the folklorists who came later, the terms slid together like water.

The first person to write the creature down was Dimitrie Cantemir, the scholar-prince of Moldavia, whose Descriptio Moldaviae laid out his country’s customs for the learned academies of Europe in the 1710s. He reached for the nearest thing his readers would recognize and called the priculici the Moldavian loup-garou, the French werewolf. Two centuries later the folklorist Agnes Murgoci walked through Romanian villages gathering vampire lore for the journal Folklore, and found the pricolici still fully alive in belief, tangled up with the strigoi, the moroi, and the vârcolac in a single dense knot of names that ordinary people used almost interchangeably.

When a village decided that one of its dead had turned, the remedy was grim and practical. The grave of the man suspected of becoming a pricolici would be opened, and if the corpse lay flushed and undecayed, its limbs loose, fresh blood at the mouth, that was taken as proof. What followed was the same violence dealt to any Romanian revenant: a stake driven through the body, the heart cut out and burned, the head struck off and laid between the feet, and the whole thing put back under the earth in a way meant to hold it there. The point was never mercy. It was to stop the dead man hunting.

The belief did not die out with the nineteenth century. In the Romanian countryside people still tell of being set upon by wolves too large and too bold to be ordinary, animals that come without warning, single out a person walking alone, and attack in a silence that healthy wolves never keep. The survivors give the thing a name. They call it a pricolici, and they mean it.

Its strength is the strength of the grave, tireless and unafraid, housed in a body built to run a victim down and kill. It hunts by stealth, takes the isolated, and cannot be reasoned with or bought off, because whatever was human in it is gone and only the hunger is left. Some hold that its bite carries the curse forward, so that the one it kills may rise in turn. But the pricolici is not beyond ending. It keeps to the dark and the lonely places, which makes company a kind of armor, for a man among other men is rarely taken. The wolf body can be wounded and killed like any other. And the true source of the thing, the corpse in its grave, can be found and destroyed, which cuts the creature loose from whatever binds it to the world. Kill the wolf and you stop a single night’s killing. Burn the body and you stop the pricolici.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a pricolici?

A pricolici is an undead creature of Romanian folklore, the risen corpse of a person, usually a cruel or violent man, that returns from the grave in the form of an oversized wolf or large dog to hunt the living. It is counted among Romania’s revenants alongside the strigoi and the moroi, but is defined by always taking a wolf shape.

What is the difference between a pricolici and a strigoi?

The key difference is shape. A strigoi rises from the grave still resembling the human it was in life, while a pricolici always returns in the form of a wolf or great dog. Both are undead that leave their graves to harm the living, and in Romanian villages the two names were often used loosely for one another.

Is the pricolici a werewolf or a vampire?

It is both, and Romanian folklore never fully separated the two. Some accounts describe the pricolici as a werewolf during life who rises as a blood-drinking revenant after death, blending the werewolf and vampire traditions into a single creature. This is why it is often called Romania’s werewolf-vampire.

How do you kill or stop a pricolici?

Because a pricolici hunts the solitary, staying in company offers protection, and the wolf body itself can be wounded and killed like any animal. To end the creature permanently, villagers opened the suspected grave and destroyed the corpse, driving a stake through it, burning the heart, and severing the head, which cut the revenant off from the body that sustained it.

Who becomes a pricolici?

Malicious and violent men were believed most likely to become pricolici after death, as though their cruelty carried over into the grave and drove them back out. The earliest written mention, in Dimitrie Cantemir’s Descriptio Moldaviae in the early eighteenth century, likened the creature to the French loup-garou, or werewolf.