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# Posted 3:03 AM by Patrick Belton

CUTE LOCAL CUSTOMS WATCH: Under a picture with the sunny caption "Will there still be a place for ancient beliefs?", BBC runs the following:

Haunted by "strigoi" - the undead - villagers on the slopes of the Carpathian mountains exhume a corpse from the graveyard and drive a stake through its heart to banish the evil spirit.

They burn the remains of the heart, mix the ashes with water from the local well and drink it, to complete the macabre ritual.

...all this took place in February 2004 at a village in Dolj County, south-western Romania.

After noting this is after all rather weird, BBC goes on to say "the 'Strigoi Show', as the TV dubbed it light-heartedly, has prompted such a stir about local customs and culture." Not one to abandon such an admirable stride once it had hit it, the BBC finishes strong with the conclusion, "Romania's metropolitan press may argue that its ancestral customs are out of line with "modern European civilization", but the new Europe may be all the poorer for it if they disappear completely."

Cutting-edge political scientists quickly then appeared on the scene in south-west Romania, arguing that in a Transylvanian mountainside infested by Nosferatu, it is only rational to engage in collective actions to burn and drink the heart of grandma. They then quickly engaged in a bitter war over whether most of the village should then free ride, which resulted in someone's graduate student not getting tenure.

When asked by a local village bystander what they were doing, the political scientists replied, "It's our culture. Go away."

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