With this story I wrote, I fulfilled a dream from my childhood. In our childhood days, the term striga was very often pronounced under different imaginations. From an early age, our parents used to scare us with the striga that comes after naughty children and carries them away into the unknown. I was born in Czechoslovakia, as were most of my peers. The communist regime was very authoritarian, yet mysterious things happened in it that people often talked about among themselves. Maybe some of them were made up, but several had merit. As I grew older, I wondered quite often who came up with the striga invention and why. In my hypotheses, which only a small audience is willing to listen to, I still maintain that every legend, story, or tale has at least a partially real basis. As in the Greek myths or in various tales, creatures are mentioned that have long since passed away, but on the other hand, many of the buildings and places described in these stories still exist today. From my point of view, even the striga itself could have been a being of either extraterrestrial or terrestrial origin in the distant past, i.e. already in ancient and then in medieval Europe. If it was of terrestrial origin, it could have been a mass murderer of children who lived somewhere in a remote place or in the forests. She kidnapped young children and then massacred them. Just a psychopath. But if the creature was of extraterrestrial origin, then the encounter with it could have been as I've described in this story. As the saying goes, without the wind, not a leaf on the tree moves, or at least a grain of truth can be found everywhere. The striga, as we know it from fairy tales, comes at night and carries off the children. I am convinced that such things really happened in the past and people sometimes even saw such a creature and interpreted their encounter with it on the basis of their knowledge and education.
The term striga itself is of Latin or Greek origin (strix, strinx) and refers to a nocturnal bird, i.e. an owl or an owl. The emergence of a more recent meaning from the 17th century onwards - witch, witch doctor - is probably related to the fact that these creatures appear mainly at night in the form of night birds. We have taken it from Hungarian (boszorka, boszorkány). In our area, especially in eastern Slovakia, we used to know and use the term striga rather than the term bossorka or witch.
I've long pondered its reality. What she looks like, what she does, how she moves through the darkness of the night, and what a face-to-face encounter with such a beast that is the terror of all children would look like.
Based on my reflections and various experiences, today I finished my book work called Witch . From my point of view, it is a lifetime's work, because it took me a lifetime to process it into book form.