Home · Legends & Customs · St Andrew's Night: when the strigoi are let loose
There is one night in the Carpathians when everything that is otherwise spread across the year happens at once: the dead walk, the wolves come closer, and in the house nobody spins, sweeps or lends anything out. It has a date — the 29th to the 30th of November.
The Romanian farming calendar does not begin winter on 21 December. It knows the cap de iarnă, the head of winter, and it falls on St Andrew's Day. From here the season is a different one: the nights are long enough that whatever is abroad in them no longer has to wait for morning.
For Romania, the Apostle Andrew is no ordinary saint. Tradition has him preaching in Dobruja; he counts as the apostle of the Romanians, and since 2012 his day has been a public holiday there. In folk belief, though, he took on duties no church assigned him — he keeps the boundary between the house and whatever is outside it.
The records agree here more than they usually do: on St Andrew's Eve the strigoi begin to walk. Not only the dead ones — the strigoi vii too, the living, whose souls leave the body at night without their knowing it. They meet at the field boundary, the hotar, and settle there whatever is to be settled.
Agnes Murgoci wrote down in 1926 how this was pictured: the female strigoi leave the house by the chimney, women who have just given birth among them, and come back worn out and in rags. In some districts their freedom ends at Epiphany, in others not until the Transfiguration in August.
For the creatures themselves, see Strigoi and Moroi. This page is about the date — and about what people did against it.
The defence was cheap, and that is the point. Garlic cost nothing and every house had some.
With a cut clove you drew a cross on the window panes. You rubbed the doorpost, the latch, the rim of the chimney. You rubbed yourself — shoulders and chest — and in the byre the udders of the cows, because the milk was held to be the first thing to go.
Murgoci lists the same actions for St Andrew's Eve and St George's Eve in spring: the two hinges the farming year hangs on. What holds on the night of 23 April holds again on 30 November, only in the other direction.
Beside all this stands a custom that is rarely told, because it is not eerie but sociable: the păzitul usturoiului, the guarding of the garlic.
The girls brought their bulbs together, marked with coloured thread, and laid them in one room. An older woman sat watch over them through the night. Next door there was eating — pumpkin, unleavened cakes, beetroot pies, forest mushrooms, wine — and later the young men came and there was dancing.
In the morning each took her own garlic home again. For the rest of the year it counted as medicine: against fever, against pain, against whatever could not be explained. The night it had been watched through had made it strong.
It is worth setting the two side by side. The same night the dead walk is the night half the village sits together and dances. Tell only the horror and you have told half of it.
In folk belief Andrew is the lord of the wolves. On 30 November, it was said, the wolf can turn its neck — an animal that otherwise looks stiffly ahead becomes supple on that day, and therefore dangerous.
So the name was not spoken. To say lup was to call it. If it had to be named, people said the one out there. The belief is recorded most densely in southern Moldavia and around Galați, where the turta lupului, the wolf's cake, was baked and put outside.
Then come the prohibitions indoors, and they are the same everywhere: no spinning, no sewing, no sweeping, nothing given out of the house. Whoever lent something that night lent the protection along with it.
The most effective precaution stands almost in passing in Murgoci's notes: one should not sleep at all, but tell stories until the cock crows. If you are telling stories, the strigoi cannot come near.
That is neither a formula nor an amulet. It is an instruction to stay awake and keep talking — and it is the one defence of the whole night that wards off nothing, and only sees to it that nobody is alone.
Like every threshold night, St Andrew's was also a night for oracles. A small flat cake of flour, water and a great deal of salt — the turtucă — was baked and eaten before sleep, and you waited to see who brought you water in the dream: that was the one.
Others set garlic cloves in a dish; as they sprouted by New Year, so the year would go. Wheat laid in damp earth that evening and green by Christmas was read as a report on the coming harvest.
In the Carpathian Chronicles the wolves are not a metaphor. “In hard winters they come down out of the mountain forests, following their hunger, up to the farmyards and into the gardens,” says “The Village of the Hanged” — first the howling carrying across the plain, then in the morning the tracks in the snow, big as the palm of a hand, in a straight, purposeful line that has none of a dog's playfulness.
The narrator saw one in his own garden in broad afternoon, and records that everything you know about the shyness of wolves helps you precisely nothing in that moment: something very old in the human being recognises something very old in the wolf, and both know exactly which of them is the guest.
That is the shortest explanation for why the wolf's name went unspoken on this day. In Corben Vale's Carpathian Chronicles, piety and superstition are not opposites but neighbours greeting each other across the same fence — and winter makes daily business of both.
The protective acts of St Andrew's Eve are recorded in Agnes Murgoci, The Vampire in Roumania (1926): the garlic cross on the windows, the strigoi setting out on this night, and the advice to tell stories until cockcrow. The calendar customs, the guarding of the garlic and the oracles are documented in Romanian ethnography, among others in Tudor Pamfile, Sărbătorile la români (1914), and in the work of Ion Ghinoiu.
That the night now travels through the press as “the Romanian Halloween” is a recent label. The customs are older than the comparison.
The night of 29 to 30 November. The 30th is St Andrew's Day; in Romania it has been a public holiday since 2012.
Because every house had it. The defence had to be within reach — a cross drawn on windows and doorpost, and a rubbing for shoulders, chest and the udders of the cows.
The guarding of the garlic: the girls laid their bulbs together for the night, an older woman watched over them until morning, and next door the village celebrated. Afterwards the garlic served as medicine for the rest of the year.
The comparison comes from the press, not from the tradition. What they share is a date at the edge of winter; everything else — garlic, the unspoken wolf, storytelling until cockcrow — has nothing to do with Halloween.
Because the name counted as a summons. Andrew is the lord of the wolves in folk belief, and 30 November was the day the wolf was held to be at its most agile.
The undead of the Carpathians — the root of the vampire myth.
Warding off the revenant: a sickle across the throat, a thorn in the mouth.
Why you had better stay in bed at 3 a.m.
Corben Vale's Carpathian Chronicles tell exactly these kinds of stories – based on true events. “The Village of the Hanged” and “Stafii” are out in seven languages.
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