“A blood-sucking witch who drains the life from sleeping children, then flutters off as a moth at dawn.”
By day she is an ordinary woman of the village — older, perhaps, with a hateful stare and pale eyes the tradition links to the evil eye. By night she is the shtriga, the vampiric witch of Albanian folklore, who slips from her skin of respectability, takes the form of a moth, a fly or a bee, and enters houses unnoticed to drink the blood of sleeping infants. The children she visits turn pale and sickly, and waste toward death with no wound anyone can find.
What makes the shtriga singular is the cruelty of her cure: only the witch herself can undo the harm, by spitting into the mouth of her victim, and those she does not cure inevitably sicken and die. A village that suspected a shtriga was therefore hunting not a monster in the woods but a neighbour at the well — which is why the lore around her is less about slaying and more about detection, entrapment, and charms.
The Legend
The shtriga feeds where sleep is deepest. In the dark she leaves her human form behind and flies as a small winged insect — moth, fly or bee, depending on the telling — into homes where infants lie, and draws off their blood and vitality little by little. There is no attack to witness, only the slow evidence of mornings: a child grown pale, listless, on the verge of death, while the household searches for a cause that will not show itself.
The affliction has exactly one remedy, and it belongs to the witch. If the shtriga can be found and compelled, she can restore her victim by spitting the stolen blood back into the child's mouth; otherwise the wasting runs its course. The tradition thus binds poison and antidote in one person, and turns every case of a fading infant into an interrogation of the village itself — someone nearby, someone known, holds the cure and will not give it.
The Record
The English traveller Edith Durham, who crossed the northern Albanian highlands in 1908 and recorded its customs in High Albania, set down the shtriga-lore she encountered in detail. She recorded the belief that a sated shtriga slips into the woods to regurgitate the blood she has taken — and that a silver coin soaked in that disgorged blood and wrapped in cloth became a permanent protective charm against her kind.
Durham also documented the great detection ritual: a cross made of pig bone fixed at the entrance of a church on Easter Sunday, when the congregation was inside. Any shtriga among the worshippers would find herself trapped, unable to pass the threshold against the charm, and could be seized at the door as she vainly tried to leave. The method is pure village forensics — the whole community filtered through a single charged doorway on the holiest day of the year.
The Lore
The everyday defences were humbler. Garlic — hudhër — was hung against her; a child's nose was touched with the words 't'rujt Zoti,' may God keep you safe. The tradition crossed confessional lines intact: Catholic households turned to holy water and the cross, Muslim households to the recitation of Ayatul Kursi, the throne-verse of the Qur'an. One witch, two liturgies — a neat portrait of highland Albania itself.
Her name is a Roman inheritance. Albanian shtrigë descends from the Latin strīga, the screech-owl witch of antiquity, making her close kin to the Italian strega, the Romanian strigă and the Polish strzyga — a whole family of night-witches raised from one word. The shtriga has since found a modern afterlife on screen, stalking children through episodes of Supernatural, Lost Girl and Legends of Tomorrow, still disguised, as ever, as someone the victims trust.
Field Notes
- ✦ Children she drains turn pale and sickly, and waste away toward death.
- ✦ Said to be unmasked by a pig-bone cross at the church door on Easter Sunday, which traps her inside.
- ✦ Kin to the Italian strega and Polish strzyga — all descended from the Latin strīga.
- ✦ Only the shtriga herself can cure her victim, by spitting the stolen blood back into the mouth.
- ✦ Durham recorded a lasting charm: a silver coin soaked in blood the witch disgorged, wrapped in cloth.
Case File
- Classification
- Witch / blood-drinker
- Category
- Shapeshifter
- Territory
- Rural Albania
- First Sighted
- Albanian folk tradition
- Habitat
- Villages; flies abroad at night as an insect
- Reported Size
- Human-sized
- Also Known As
- Shtrigë · Striga