Drekavac

The name comes from the Serbian verb drečati, to scream. That is the one thing every account agrees on. The drekavac screams. It screams near cemeteries, in fields, along riverbanks, outside villages after dark. The sound has been compared to a child’s wail, a goat’s bleat, a cat in pain, a bird’s screech. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić recorded the word in his Srpski rječnik in 1818, along with the related personal name Dreko, which Serbian parents gave to children as a protective charm. The Srpski mitološki rečnik, compiled by Kulišić, Petrović, and Pantelić in 1970, catalogued it among the core figures of Serbian folk demonology.

Appearance

The drekavac has no fixed form. This is its most striking feature as a folklore entity: the sound is consistent, but the body changes depending on who saw it and where.

Near Gruža in central Serbia, people described a dappled creature with an elongated body thin as a spindle and a disproportionately large head. In eastern Serbia, it appeared as a humanoid canine that walked on its hind legs. Villagers near Arilje in southwestern Serbia reported a long-necked, long-legged thing with a head like a cat. Near Kozarska Dubica in Bosnia, the drekavac was a dead man in a shroud who rose from his grave at night. Near Maglaj, also in Bosnia, it took the form of dead soldiers wandering the roads.

The child form is the most common across regions. A pale figure near a cemetery, small, calling out. In some accounts it asks to be baptized. In others it screams without words.

In 1992, villagers near Kruševac found a carcass they identified as a drekavac. The magazine Duga reported it was roughly 80 centimeters long, hairless, with a dog-like body and elongated neck. No scientific identification followed. The specimen disappeared into local legend, one more shape added to a creature that collects them.

Origins

The dominant explanation across Serbian folk belief is that the drekavac is the soul of an unbaptized child. A child who died before receiving the sacrament could not enter heaven and was condemned to wander. This placed the drekavac within the broader category of nekrštenci, the unbaptized ones, a class of restless dead that populated Serbian demonology.

The nekrštenci were active during the nekršteni dani, the twelve days of Christmas, when the boundary between the living and the dead was thinnest. During this period, the earth opened and the dead walked.

The connection runs deeper than Christian theology. Veselin Čajkanović, Serbia’s first historian of religion, traced beliefs about restless dead back to pre-Christian Slavic religion. The baptism anxiety was a later layer, grafted onto older ideas about souls that die before their time or without proper rites. The related concept of nav, the soul of a dead child that enters a bird and attacks pregnant women, shares the same root. The navi were depicted as black birds with infant heads, embodiments of death itself. The drekavac and the nav are siblings in the same belief system, different shapes for the same underlying terror: the dead child that will not stay dead.

A second, less common origin appears in Bosnian traditions. Near Kozarska Dubica, the drekavac was not a child but an adult who died in sin, a revenant closer to the vampire than to the ghost. Tihomir Đorđević, the ethnologist who spent decades cataloguing Serbian folk beliefs, documented this overlap between the drekavac and the vampire. The categories bled into each other at the edges.

Behavior

The scream is the defining act. When the drekavac appears in the form of a child, its cry foretells a human death in the community. When it appears in animal form, it predicts cattle disease. The distinction matters in a rural economy where livestock deaths could be as devastating as human ones.

Some accounts go further. The drekavac jumps on the backs of travelers at night, a motif it shares with other Slavic demons. Its shadow falling across a person causes illness. It attacks people returning from watermills after dark, leaping from whirlpools near rivers.

A report from near Lapovo, dating to 1928, describes a man returning home by horse cart at night. The horses began to panic. He spotted a small, black, hairy creature moving fast along the road. It attacked him and did not stop until the roosters crowed at dawn. The rooster’s crow banishing a night demon is one of the most persistent motifs in Slavic folklore: vampires, the karakondžula, and now the drekavac all flee when the cock announces morning.

Protection

Dogs are the primary defense. The drekavac avoids them, and keeping dogs nearby at night was considered sufficient protection across most of western Serbia. Fire and bright light repel it. Staying indoors during the nekršteni dani was standard advice.

The only permanent solution, if the creature appears in child form, is baptism. If someone manages to baptize the drekavac, its soul finds rest and it disappears. This is not destruction but redemption, and it distinguishes the drekavac from most other Balkan night creatures. A vampire must be staked or burned. The drekavac needs a priest.

There is no record of garlic, crosses, or holy water being used against it. Its protections are distinct from the vampire tradition, practical rather than ritual: animals, light, sunrise, staying inside.

Modern Survival

The drekavac never fully became a historical curiosity. It remains active in Serbian rural belief in a way that the Empusa or the Strix do not in their respective cultures.

In 2008, livestock killings near Sremska Mitrovica were attributed to a drekavac. In 2011, night cries near Svojnov prompted village discussions that used the word without irony. Villagers around Zlatibor mountain report encounters that follow the traditional pattern: sounds at night, shapes in the dark, livestock found dead or injured.

Branko Ćopić, one of the most popular Yugoslav children’s writers, wrote a story called “Hrabri Mita i drekavac iz močvare” (Brave Mita and the Drekavac from the Swamp). In the story, the drekavac turns out to be a great bittern (Botaurus stellaris), a marsh bird with a deep booming call that carries far at night. The rationalist explanation satisfied city readers. Village readers knew what they knew.

The creature persists because the conditions that created it persist. Rural Serbia still has cemeteries surrounded by fields, nights without streetlights, livestock that can die from causes a farmer cannot immediately identify, and a cultural memory long enough to keep old names in circulation. The drekavac is not a relic. It is a living category, updated with each new sound in the dark that no one can explain.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (1818, expanded 1852)
• Špiro Kulišić, Petar Ž. Petrović, Nikola Pantelić, Srpski mitološki rečnik (Nolit, Belgrade, 1970)
• Tihomir Đorđević, Vampir i druga bića u našem narodnom verovanju i predanju
• Slobodan Zečević, Srpska etnomitologija (Službeni glasnik, Belgrade, 2007)
• Veselin Čajkanović, Stara srpska religija i mitologija (collected works, 1994)