A village still in thrall to Dracula

Romania's ancient fear of vampires lies behind a grim graveyard ritual

The fate of Petre Toma's corpse seemed to belie his reputation as an ordinary labourer in the fields that encircle the remote village of Marotinu de Sus in south-west Romania.

'They took out his heart, burnt it and drank the ashes in a glass of water,' says Elisabeta Marinescu, who was a neighbour of Toma's. After a life of sporadic illness, immoderate drinking and a final, decisive accident in the fields, Toma died in December 2003. But, so many here say, his spirit would not lie quiet.

'His own sister complained that her daughter-in-law had fallen ill and that Petre was to blame - she said he had become a strigoi and something must be done,' recalls Marinescu.

What six local men did was enact an ancient Romanian ritual for dealing with a strigoi - a restless spirit that returns to suck the lifeblood from his relatives. Just before midnight, they crept into the cemetery on the edge of the village and gathered around Toma's grave.

Then they dug him up, split his ribcage with a pitchfork, removed his heart, put stakes through the rest of his body and sprinkled it with garlic. Then they burnt the heart, put the embers in water and shared the grim cocktail with the sick woman. More than a year later, the effect of the macabre ritual still reverberates through the village: 'Well, the sick woman got better again, so they must have done something right,' says Anisoara Constantin, on what constitutes the village's main street.

There, cows and grubby geese sway and horses pull carts past old men who sit motionless in the shade of a few broad trees. The air seethes with birdsong and the noises of farm animals tethered in dung-strewn back yards. Time moves slowly and ritual and superstition shape the lives of peasants who gained little under communism and even less from the aristocracy that came before and the free market that followed it.

They fear curses and the evil eye and, though some claimed not to fear the undead, none would condemn the six men for doing what they believed was right to lay a restless strigoi .

Local police appeared to be less understanding. After Toma's daughter complained, they arrested the men and charged them with illegally exhuming his corpse. They were sentenced to six months in jail, but did not serve it. 'No one is bothered who did it, it's their own business,' declared 80-year-old Tudor Stoica, shading his face with a fraying hat. 'This ritual often takes place, but in secret, within the family. The problem comes when the police get involved.'

He said the strigoi had haunted Romanian nightmares for centuries, describing it as 'a fiendish thing, ungodly, that wants to do evil. It brings illness, makes inexplicable noises and is invisible.'

But, just as Bram Stoker blended age-old fears of the undead with the legend of 15th-century Transylvanian ruler Vlad 'Dracul' Tepes to create Dracula, so tales of the strigoi often carry a whiff of the vampire: the men who exhumed the corpse of Petre Toma, for instance, claimed to have seen fresh blood around its mouth.

In the village of Celaru, a few miles from Marotinu de Sus, Maria Dragomir, 76, recalls hearing about scores of similar events. A child born feet-first or with bits of placenta still attached carries a lifelong mark of a potential strigoi and, when he dies, knitting needles must be forced through his heart and navel to stop him haunting the living, she says.

Dragomir makes up little bags that locals put beneath the heads of the dead. They contain grain, small stones, a comb, a mirror and an apple, a combination that some believe capable of persuading a strigoi to lie quiet.

As EU leaders assured Romania on Friday that they still wanted it to join in 2007, people here were more interested in the latest story to excite their fascination with the occult - a nun had died after being tied to a cross and left without food in a freezing room for three days. The monk and nuns accused of killing her said they had been exorcising her of evil spirits.