Cămașa ciumei (; dialectal ) is the Romanian name for an apotropaic textile made in a single day or night to avert epidemic disease and other dangers. The rite was recorded across Oltenia, Muntenia, Transylvania, Dobruja, Maramureș, Bukovina and the Banat, as well as among Romanian-speaking communities in the Timok Valley and other parts of eastern Serbia. Its central operation compressed the preparation of fibre, spinning, warping, weaving, cutting and sewing into one uninterrupted period, usually carried out by a specially constituted group of women.
Recorded objects included wearable shirts, miniature garments small enough for a baby or doll, and late twentieth-century examples from eastern Serbia made from an opened hemp sack through which a person crawled. Depending on the locality, the finished textile was offered at the village boundary, hung in a tree, buried, burned, cast into the wind, placed on an anthropomorphic effigy, worn by a sick person, or held open while inhabitants passed through it. Ethnographic records assign it protection against plague and cholera, illness in newborn children, infertility, nervous illness, threats to crops and livestock, and bullets or death in war.
The earliest known written notice from the Romanian lands appears in Anton-Maria del Chiaro's 1718 history of Wallachia, which records women producing a hemp shirt within twenty-four hours and then burning it. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century research documented both remembered performances and surviving garments, including wartime uses in eastern Serbia in 1991 and 1999. In the Oltenian villages studied by Natalia Golant, manufacture had ceased while commemorative feasts remained in use, and in the Timok villages she studied, some families retained shirts although no new ones were being made.
Names and geographical range The standard Romanian expression combines (“shirt”) with the genitive of (“plague”), and ethnographic publications also record (“the plague's blouse”) and the Oltenian name (“victory shirt” or “success shirt”). The dialectal form occurs in the Romanian speech of the Timok Valley and in the title of field research on communities north and south of the Danube.
Romanian ethnographic literature places the custom in Transylvania, Oltenia and Dobruja and also records it in Muntenia, Maramureș and Bukovina. Historical research on plague in Transylvania adds the Banat and treats the overnight shirt as a regional practice known in several western Romanian provinces. Museum documentation distinguishes a Transylvanian and Banat pattern commonly named from the names and reported in Oltenia and Muntenia.
In eastern Serbia, reports come from Bukovče, Kobišnica (), Jabukovac (), Mosna, Boljetin, Donji Milanovac, Gradskovo, Halovo, Mali Jasenovac and Šipikovo, with additional evidence from Romanian-speaking settlements in the Braničevo District area. Golant's field sites in the municipalities of Negotin () and Zaječar ( or ) were villages whose Romanian-speaking inhabitants used the Oltenian-derived local speech known in Serbia as “Tsaran”.
The plague shirt belongs to a wider Balkan and eastern European class of textiles completed within one day, but the names and uses of those objects were not identical. Serbian sources call a related garment (“one-day shirt”), while Bulgarian and Macedonian designate a one-night “plague cloth” or “plague canvas”. Romanian speech also preserved the comparison , applied to work done with exceptional speed, and an equivalent expression was recorded at Ponoarele.
Historical documentation and scholarship Del Chiaro served as secretary to the Wallachian prince Constantin Brâncoveanu, and his 1718 account is the earliest publication presently identified by researchers as mentioning the rite in the Romanian lands. His account states that women spun, wove and sewed a hemp shirt within twenty-four hours and burned it, establishing the defining time limit in the earliest written record.
Later collections established that the practice was geographically widespread and locally variable. Ion Aurel Candrea's synthesis of Romanian medical folklore, first published in 1944, assembled records from several regions and included both communal passage through the garment and the use of a dressed effigy. Ion Chelcea's 1936 field record from Feleac documented a complete Tuesday-night performance, while Milorad Dragić's 1969 study preserved information about a Bukovče shirt made in the late 1930s and the functions assigned to it in the 1960s.
Camelia Burghele published the dedicated monograph Cămașa ciumei: Note pentru o antropologie a sănătății in 2003 and returned to the subject in a 2020 study based on historical ethnography and field material from Sălaj. Valentin Arapu's 2021 study compared Romanian variants with Greek and South Slavic material and organized the rite around its participants, production, movement to the boundary and offerings. Golant's 2022 English-language study combined earlier literature with fieldwork conducted in 2011 in the Ponoarele area and in 2014, 2021 and 2022 in eastern Serbia.
Ritual procedure Selection of the makers Recorded groups usually contained three, seven or nine women, although individual local accounts give other numbers. The makers could be elderly women, widows, postmenopausal women, virgins or women sharing the same given name, and the applicable condition depended on the locality. Romanian sources called some elderly participants or “forgiven women”, a regional designation for women past menstruation whose ritual status permitted them to perform the work.
At Ocoliș, seven elderly women made the shirt, while the Boșorod record specifies nine elderly women. A Făgăraș tradition required seven women named Maria, and Mali Jasenovac required six widows named Stana. In Țara Lăpușului the makers were widows, whereas records from Țara Codrului and Țara Lăpușului also place young unmarried women under the supervision of a woman experienced in the procedure.
Participation could extend beyond the makers themselves. At Didic, representatives of several villages gathered at a road junction and produced the garment for the communities collectively, while in variants centred on passage through the shirt, the entire village assembled after the sewing was finished.
Time, material and work The production period began after sunset or on a Tuesday evening in many Romanian records and ended before sunrise or the first cockcrow. Other accounts specify one calendar day or simply one night, so the compressed duration was more consistent than the precise weekday. Hemp was the usual raw material, and the group had to transform it into a wearable or symbolically complete object without using cloth prepared in advance.
The women divided the successive tasks of processing the fibre, spinning the thread, preparing the warp, weaving the cloth, cutting the pieces and sewing the shirt. All stages of a domestic production cycle that ordinarily took much longer were completed before the deadline.
Several Transylvanian records impose silence, fasting and abstention from water during the work, and some require loose hair or nudity. The 1936 Feleac record places nine naked women at work by night and notes that distaffs, spindles, stools and other objects were turned upside down or used in an inverted position. These restrictions were not universal, because the Gradskovo procession included singing, shouting and the rattling of dishes after the shirt had been completed.
Movement to the boundary The finished shirt was commonly carried away from the household to a village edge, field boundary, crossroads, road junction, barren tree or other place separating inhabited land from the exterior. In one Boșorod version, the women carried it successively across seven boundaries before leaving it outside the protected space. The journey could require silence and a prohibition on looking back, as recorded at Feleac, Aghireș and Solona.
Food, drink or objects could accompany the textile. Records mention bread, cooked food, water, a hat placed above a shirt on a pole, or a table set at the boundary, and the assemblage was left for the personified Plague. In the Șpring account, nine widows placed the shirt on a wooden support at the village edge and added a hat; the disappearance of both objects by morning signified that the offering had been taken.
Disposal varied by region and by intended use. The shirt might be burned, buried at a crossroads, hung in a tree, thrown into the wind or left at the boundary, while a shirt retained for healing or wartime protection remained in a household. Some Romanian records pair the shirt with a female rag or straw figure that was dressed, carried out, buried and mourned as though a funeral had taken place.
Passage through the shirt Several records use the completed garment as an opening through which people passed. In an Oltenian account associated with the name , two or three people held the shirt in an open place or at the village edge while men and women crawled through it to avert cholera. A Dolj variant directed participants through the garment from collar to hem, and eastern Serbian records distinguish adults crawling through it from babies being pulled through.
Passage could be repeated three times for a person leaving for military service, after which the participant took a loose thread or fragment as a portable protective object. A small garment or an opening cut in a hemp sack was sufficient for this operation in the late examples from Šipikovo and Mali Jasenovac.
Recorded local variants