A — documented

Vrykolakas

Greece
Cyclades: the case documented at first hand took place on Míkonos; the belief is pan-Hellenic, with forms of its own in Crete

Vrykolakas — a dead man who does not decompose: swollen, reddish, the skin taut as a drum, «fresh and full of new blood».

In the square of a Cycladic island, at night and beneath the dome of the church, a coffin has been opened on the paving and a man with a kerchief on his head bends over the swollen, reddish corpse; around him the islanders hold the torches, and off to one side a European traveller in a wig takes notes in a notebook.

Variants and names: Greek βρυκόλακας, also βρικόλακας and βουρκόλακας; variants vourvoulakas, vourdoulakas; in Crete katakhanas. The earlier and native Greek ecclesiastical term is τυμπανιαίος, «drum-shaped». The current name is instead a Slavic loan — Bulgarian vǎrkolak, Serbian vukodlak, a compound of «wolf» and «hair» — which in the source language means werewolf
What is told: A dead man who does not decompose: swollen, reddish, the skin taut as a drum, «fresh and full of new blood». At night he knocks at doors, puts out the lamps, crushes and suffocates sleepers, and infects them. One becomes one through excommunication, through burial in unconsecrated ground, through violent death or death without burial, through a sacrilegious life, through having eaten the flesh of a sheep savaged by a wolf, or if an animal steps over the corpse. The decisive countermeasure is not the stake: it is the priest. Absolution loosens the bond and allows the body to dissolve; where that is not enough one proceeds to exhumation, to the extraction and burning of the heart, to dismemberment, and in Crete to cremation. It is done on a Saturday, the only day on which the vrykolakas rests in the grave.
What it was forthe author’s reading: The current readings are three, and all are interpretative: a device of social control that sanctions unresolved quarrels, excommunications and irregular burials; an instrument of ecclesiastical power, given that the priest's absolution is the only key; and a collective management of anomalous deaths and of epidemic fear.
Where it is attested: The first systematic Western treatment is Leone Allacci, De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus, Cologne 1645, which sets out the belief concerning the body of the excommunicate, drawing on the Nomocanon. Then comes François Richard, Relation… à Sant-Erini, Paris 1657, on the exhumations at Santorini. The documentary core, however, is Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, botanist to the king of France, who during the voyage of 1700-1702 witnessed the whole Míkonos affair in person and published it in the Relation d'un voyage du Levant, Paris, Imprimerie Royale, 1717 — posthumously, since he had died in 1708; the English translation is of 1718. The modern collections: N. Politis, Παραδόσεις, 1904, with forty-five texts; J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, Cambridge 1910, chapter IV.
Caution: Tournefort's account deserves to be read in full, because it is one of the very few first-hand descriptions of a case of European «vampirism» written by a scientist while it was happening — and by a sceptical scientist. A quarrelsome peasant is killed in the fields; nine days are allowed to pass; on the tenth, after mass, the body is opened, and the butcher, old and clumsy, opens the belly instead of the chest; the heart is burned on the shore; the incense, mixed with the vapours of the corpse, makes the stench worse instead of covering it. The disturbances continue, and the body is burned on 1 January 1701. Tournefort puts it all down to an «epidemic disease of the brain, as dangerous and contagious as the madness of dogs», and traces the heat and the redness back to putrefaction. To be corrected: the vrykolakas does not drink blood — he suffocates, and if anything devours organs — and has nothing of the literary vampire, neither canines nor cloak nor garlic; the etymology from «mud» and «pit» is popular false etymology; and Lawson's thesis of a direct descent from the ancient lamiae is now scaled down. On the Slavic loan, finally, one fine point should be made: the word is Slavic, but as early as the nineteenth century Robert Pashley observed that the Cretan katakhanas is not, and that the belief might therefore be Greek and only the name borrowed.

Reality checkestablished

What has been established today.

Everything the witnesses describe is ordinary taphonomy, and it is established in forensic medicine. Putrefaction produces gases that swell the abdomen and stretch the skin: this is the drum effect, which gives the condition its Greek ecclesiastical name. From the nose and the mouth comes a reddish fluid that is mistaken for fresh blood. The detachment of the epidermis exposes pink skin; the retraction of the skin makes the nails and the beard look as though they have grown; and the sudden escape of gas under pressure produces groans and movements, typically just when a stake is driven in. The ground and the season count for a great deal: cold, deep burial, clayey and damp soil slow decomposition and favour the formation of adipocere, and a man who dies in winter may appear intact months later. The prevailing hypothesis, but an inferential one, is that in epidemics the deaths cluster, and the first person buried is blamed and exhumed: plausible, not demonstrated case by case. What must be rejected instead are the single-cause clinical explanations — rabies, porphyria, catalepsy — that recur in popular accounts. There is, however, one fact that no taphonomy explains, and it is the most interesting: in Eastern Christianity the incorruptibility of the body is proof of sanctity, and intact relics make the saint. In Greek funerary practice, where at the exhumation in the third year one expects to find clean bones, a body that has not dissolved makes the damned instead. The vrykolakas is born exactly in that ambiguity, and the priest who opens the tomb has to decide which of the two things he is looking at.

J. P. de Tournefort, Relation d'un voyage du Levant, 1717; L. Allacci, 1645; J. C. Lawson, 1910; P. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death, Yale University Press, 1988; K. Hartnup, On the Beliefs of the Greeks, Brill 2004

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.

Entries that share the motif, the phenomenon behind it or the history of their collection — not the geography.

Vrykolakas

Related by theme