When autumn arrives in Transylvania, the air grows sharp and metallic, and the forests shed their color until the bones of the mountains begin to show through. Smoke rises from the first hearth fires, curling above tiled roofs and lingering in the cold. The villages seem to draw inward. Gardens empty, wood is stacked, evenings come earlier, and the mountains that felt green and generous in summer become darker around their edges. I came to this season carrying Halloween with

Before Dracula made Transylvania synonymous with vampires, Romanian folklore already had its own restless dead. They were called strigoi, and they did not necessarily live in distant castles or belong to another world. They could be people you knew. That familiarity is what makes the strigoi so unsettling. The threat did not always come from somewhere beyond the village. It could come from the cemetery where your own family was buried, from someone who had recently died, or e

In Romania, as November dies and winter gathers on the hills, there comes a night when the old stories stir again. On the eve of Saint Andrew’s feast, November 29 into November 30, Romanian folk tradition imagines the ordinary boundaries of the world becoming less certain. Wolves gather and may be given the power of speech. Strigoi leave their graves and wander among the living. The future becomes briefly readable, and a house that has not been properly protected with garlic