Regular Episode
#179 – MONSTERS AND FOLKLORE OF THE BALKANS
The Balkans is not a single country but a patchwork of cultures, languages, religions, and writing systems squeezed between the Adriatic, the Black Sea, and the Carpathians — a region that has been fought over by the Roman Empire, the Byzantines, the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, and the Romanovs, and whose modern borders were largely drawn in the aftermath of the First World War. It is also, Christopher argues, a place whose tremendous ethnic and political fractures are held together, in part, by a shared folklore of vampires, witches, and spirits that crosses every linguistic and religious boundary in the region.
🗺️ What Even Are the Balkans?
Christopher walks through the geography: think of the peninsula south and east of Italy, stretching from Slovenia and Croatia in the northwest down through Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece. The name itself comes from the Balkan mountain range in Bulgaria and was popularized by 19th-century Western travelers like Lord Byron. Much of this area was known simply as “Turkey in Europe” until the Ottoman retreat of the later 1700s and 1800s.
The former Yugoslavia — born out of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires after World War I and Woodrow Wilson‘s Fourteen Points — didn’t even take that name until 1929, having started life as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo in 1914 — an act Christopher puts in its full nationalist context — set off the chain of events leading to WWI.
🧛 Vampires: The Balkans’ Most Contested Export
Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia each claim the “original” vampire tradition, and Christopher maps out the key differences. Romanian vampire lore centers on the strigoi — ugly, corporeal or spirit-like revenants bearing little resemblance to the romantic figures of later Western literature — as well as the muro (the Romani term) and the nosferatu, a word originating in the Wallachian region. The 1922 German film Nosferatu is, Christopher notes, not a bad depiction of how these creatures were actually imagined.
The case of Arnold Paole (c. 1726) — a Serbian hajduk (a bandit/irregular fighter, the word borrowed from Turkish) whose exhumation by Austrian imperial troops was meticulously documented — is identified as the pivotal moment when Balkan vampire folklore entered the Western literary imagination and sparked the chain leading through Byron, John Polidori‘s The Vampyre (written during the famous Villa Diodati ghost-story contest of 1816), and ultimately Bram Stoker‘s Dracula (1897).
Vampire-prevention practices discussed include burial facing east, keeping animals away from the coffin, face-down interment (harder for the revenant to dig out), staking, decapitation, boiling the heart, and ritual use of garlic and roses. Archaeological evidence supports how widespread these fears were: Christopher mentions a recently discovered late-Roman child burial with a stone stuffed in its mouth — strongly suspected to be an anti-vampire precaution. He also notes that Attila the Hun reportedly refused to sack certain areas of the region upon hearing tales of vampire plagues there.
On Vlad the Impaler (Vlad III, “Țepeș”): the Dracula-vampire connection is largely a Western confection. In Romania, the link wasn’t commercially exploited until 1975, when dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu declared a “Dracula year” to attract Western tourism currency — at which point Romanian-language editions of Stoker’s novel were printed for the first time, and Bran Castle (historically unrelated to Vlad) was rebranded as “Dracula’s Castle.” The historically relevant sites are Sighișoara, Târgoviște, and Hunedoara (Hunyad) Castle. Vlad is also, Christopher stresses, perhaps the 10th or 11th most important figure in Romanian history — the obsession is a Western projection.
A brief mention of Erzsébet Báthory (died in imprisonment, 1614) as another case where a powerful Protestant noblewoman’s legend was shaped more by political enemies seeking her land and title than by any verified blood-bathing. The hosts note they’ve been meaning to do a full episode on her for some time.
🧚 Fairies, the Zana, and Djinn in Albanian Tradition
Speaking from his time living in Dibra County (northeastern Albania), Christopher describes the Zana — mountain-dwelling fairy spirits who guard peaks, streams, and lakes. Unlike many fairy traditions, the Zana is benevolent: warriors going into battle would seek her blessing and receive magical armor in return. The name is still given to Albanian girls today as a protective charm.
The malevolent counterpart is the djinn (absorbed into Albanian folk belief via Ottoman Turkish and Arabic influence) — morally ambiguous spirit beings, neither inherently good nor evil, whose negative potential bleeds into witchcraft belief. In Islamic theology, the devil (Shaytan) is himself a djinn who refused to bow before Adam.
🔮 Witchcraft, the Kanun, and the Evil Eye
To become a striga (witch — Albanian and Slavic cognate; compare Romanian strigoi), a would-be witch must petition a djinn, sign a book, and complete 40 days and nights of increasingly extreme tasks, knowing they will be damned upon death. Signs of witchhood include blue eyes (a rare recessive trait in the region, therefore suspicious) and unexplained bad luck (sahir or namuna) befalling neighbors.
These beliefs are embedded in the Kanun — the ancient Albanian customary law code governing hospitality, family obligation, and blood feuds. Christopher traces a sharp uptick in active witchcraft accusations in rural northeastern Albania to the chaotic 1990s: as state authority collapsed, communities turned to extrajudicial Kanun-based frameworks to explain misfortune and assign blame. He recounts a specific case from 1998 in the village of Kloptist, near the North Macedonian border, in which a woman cursed at a funeral was blamed for a family’s repeated miscarriages; the hex was broken by the local imam reciting Surah Al-Baqarah 2:255.
The evil eye (nazar) amulets — the familiar blue glass discs — are hung throughout the region to ward off striga witches and malicious djinn. Christopher also notes an Albanian Orthodox tradition of trapping a suspected witch inside a church using a cross fashioned from pig bones placed above the doorway.
Rabbits (and hares) are forbidden inside traditionally Muslim Albanian homes in some areas, being seen as conduits of evil — a belief Christopher notes has parallels with hare-as-witch-familiar traditions in Western Europe.
👻 Ghosts: Constantine and Doruntine
The most famous ghost story in Albanian tradition is the legend of Constantine and Doruntine (Kostandini dhe Doruntina), popularized internationally by novelist Ismail Kadare. In the story, a young woman is given in marriage to a distant land against her family’s wishes; her youngest brother Constantine swears on the bond of besa (sacred fidelity/word of honor) to bring her home once a year. He dies in battle without fulfilling the promise. Years later his ghost — arriving on a glowing white horse — keeps the vow, but the sight of him kills both his sister and his mother. The tale is read as a meditation on homeland loyalty, family obligation, and the cost of broken promises: a theme that was consciously weaponized by successive Albanian regimes, from King Zog I to the Stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha (under whose rule Albania became arguably the world’s most isolated state, sometimes compared to North Korea).
Christopher also describes lugat — vampire-adjacent revenants in Albanian Orthodox tradition whose spread was believed to be checked by the presence of old Eastern Roman churches.
🐦 Baba Yaga,
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
In this episode of MonsterTalk, we are joined by Christopher Klimovitz in a wide-ranging discussion of the history and monstrous folklore of the Balkans. From ghosts and vampires to fairies and Baba Yaga, this region has been fractured by war but bound together with stories.
Christopher’s Suggested Reading List
- The Highland Lute — The Albanian National Epic (This book appears to be rare and expensive; check your library!)
- Imagining the Balkans (Kindle Edition) by Maria Todorova
- Balkan Identities (also quite pricey) by Maria Todorova
- Books about the Balkan region by Tim Judah
- Romanian Furrow by Donald Hall
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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