Man-eating wolves in interwar Romania
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74
Over the interwar period, a search through Romanian newspapers, and more particularly the Universul, a major daily, turned up for these two decades hundreds of neswpaper articles reporting attacks by man-eating wolves nationwide. Most often, what had happened was that a wolfpack caught by surprise a straggling peasant on a countryside road on a winter evening. Entering these narratives in a database, we show that in several regions of the country there emerged a pattern of sequential attacks concentrated over a few days and a few square miles. Such a synchronicity cannot possibly have been invented by the reporters, which means than we have to accept that most of these stories were indeed fact-based. This is confirmed by the production of an official report compiled by order of the Romanian Parliament at the beginning of the twentieth century. Following an inquiry, this report recorded nine people eaten in the year 1900, a figure which matches exactly that produced through a search in the major daily Universul for the same year. The story of Maria Berlovan, published here for the first time, confirms that these were actual cases of predation in the interwar period; she died eaten by wolves in February 1927, an incident reported at the time by newspapers and officially recorded in the archives, while the narrative of her tragic death was passed on through the generations down to today.
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