Vampireology

"MAY THE GROUND NOT RECEIVE THEE"
An Exploration of the Greek Vrykolakas and His Origins

In the field of vampirology, few cultures in the world
have a vampire folklore tradition as long-standing, as
rich and as carefully analyzed by scholars as Greece.
Although the most famous mass panics recorded in
seventeenth and eighteenth century annals occurred in
Eastern Europe, and although Slavic countries in
general and Romania in particular have a varied and
creative tradition of vampire folklore, the
persistence of the belief in Greece surpasses that of
any other nation. For a scholar taking a broad
perspective of the phenomenon, this raises an obvious
question: why? What is peculiar to the Greek culture
and society that has led to the maintenance of vampire
beliefs and reported incidents right up to the first
half of this century? Are there more reasonable
explanations than the claim of older writers that the
Greeks are overly superstitious, or the Occam's Razor
solution that perhaps Greece simply has a lot of
vampires? An examination of these beliefs, their
ancient origins and the way in which the Greek
Orthodox church has both encouraged and discouraged
them may shed some light on the issue.

Before diving into this question, it will be helpful
to explain just exactly what is meant by the term
"vampire" as applied by English speakers to anything
related to Greece.

The English word "vampire" is a Slavic borrowing and
is found in almost identical (certainly homophonic)
form in Russian, Polish, Serbian, Czechoslovakian and
Bulgarian, along with similar related words. Its
origin is uncertain, but the OED suggests that it may
be related to the Turkish uber, "witch". "Vampire"
entered the English language during the eighteenth
century panics in Eastern Europe and is first cited by
the OED in 1734. Modern vampirologists now sweep under
the aegis of this term a wide variety of ancient myth,
traditional folklore, "fairy-tales" and other crafted
oral tradition, unexplained phenomena, sociology, and
occult theory. Cogent to a discussion of Greek
vampires are two particular types of being to which
the term "vampire" is applied. The first, common to
ancient myth worldwide, is the wholly inhuman,
supernatural being that preys most especially upon
infants, children, women in all stages of pregnancy
and early motherhood, and young people on the cusp of
sexual maturity and marriage. "Child-killing demons"
often are included in this category, as well as
sexually alluring creatures such as the lamia. The
second type of being is a revenant, a human who has
died and returned from the grave in physical
form--whether literally in his own corpse or in some
sort of materialized second body is open to
interpretation--to perform actions that have physical
effects on the living and their environment, including
the begetting of children and the inflicting of death.
Whether such revenants necessarily drink blood, as we
will see, is not always clear. Blood-drinking per se
is not a requirement for a "vampire". However, beings
defined as "vampires" do, in some way or another, take
sustenance or vitality from living creatures.

In Greece, belief in the second type of vampire--the
corporeal revenant who preyed upon or plagued the
living--developed only after the arrival of Slavic
immigrants beginning in 587. But although the various
themes that coalesced into that most unquenchable of
all folk vampires, the vrykolakas, are heavily
influenced by foreign concepts, they found a rich soil
in the traditions of ancient Greece. Three such
traditions clearly play a role in developing later
beliefs. First, the belief in supernatural creatures
that drank blood and attacked human beings to obtain
it; second, the belief that under certain conditions,
bodily return from death was possible, although
greatly feared; and third, that blood itself contained
power sufficient to allow the dead to cross the gulf
that separated them from the world of the living.

The Mormo and the Empusas were child-killing demons
who attended upon the Goddess Hecate they have not
survived into contemporary tradition except, in the
case of the Mormo, as a "bogeyman" for threatening
unruly children. Similar to them were the Gelloudes
nd the Stringla, female monsters that were said to
specifically suck the blood of children and kill them
. Almost every human culture has
such a myth, a personification of the unknown (to this
day, in the form of SIDS) killer of children in their
cradles at night, or their mysterious "failure to
thrive" and wasting away. Yet the horror of these
monsters lay not in their inhumanity but in their
perversion of the human. Child-killing demons are
almost invariably female, the evil mother that kills
instead of nurtures, devours instead of feeds. These
demons often are also presented as seductresses,
preying on young men as well as children. In other
words, they are not only evil mothers, but evil
wives--wanton, promiscuous and devouring. Summers
cites the well-known story from Philostratus' Life of
Apollonius of Tyana, aboutMenippus, the eager
suitor who is barely prevented
from marrying an Empusa, or Lamia. She is forced to
confess that she was "fattening up" Menippus, "because
it was her pleasure to feed upon young and beautiful
bodies, because their blood is pure and strong"
. Stringles also were sometimes
equated with the seductive Lamiae .

But far more fearful than these exotica were the fates
that might befall oneself during the passage from the
state of life to the state of death. Lawson examines
at great length the theme found in Greek tragedy of
corporeal return to avenge blood-guilt--a hidden theme
due to the conventions of the Greek stage, but
nevertheless clearly discernable. A detailed look at
Lawson's arguments is beyond the scope of this paper.
However, Lawson reports that oaths are found in Greek
literature binding both the speaker and others to
being rejected by the earth, being turned out of Hades
by Tantalus, and of remaining incorruptible after
death. Euripides' Hippolytus, for example, says to his
father, "in death may neither sea nor earth receive my
flesh, if I have proved false" . Lawson
proposes that, for example, Aeschylus in Choephori

presents a true climax. As the victim is to be
excluded in his lifetime from all intercourse with the
living, so in his death, by the withholding of that
dissolution without which there is no entrance to the
lower world, he is to be cut off from communion with
the dead. He is to die with none to honor him with the
rites due to the dead, none to love him and shed the
tears that are their just meed, but even in that last
doom which consumes all others is damned to be
withheld from corruption.
Even a modern reader almost shudders. The importance
of proper burial rites in ancient Greece is
well-known, and the greatest shame of all was to leave
even one's enemies unburied, to "not even throw
handfuls of earth upon their dead bodies" as Pausanias
accused Lysander . Antigone suffered
capital punishment for fulfilling this obligation to
her kin against royal decree. But the precise
consequences of ignoring this obligation are less well
documented. Few ghosts or revenants haunt surviving
Greek literature. Lawson argues at great length that
the conventions of Greek drama permitted such return
only to be hinted at. Outside of this sphere, the sole
extant story of a corporeal Greek revenant is so
famous that it is cited in nearly all of my books: the
return of Philinnion, a young woman, for nightly
liaisons with an unwitting guest of her bereaved
parents. Yet the
reason for Philinnion's restlessness is never
explained, she appears in no way horrific or demonic,
and in fact her poor lover is so besotted by her that
when she has been laid to final rest by cremation, he
commits suicide.

Lawson, however, argues that bodily return was tacitly
expected and feared in the case of blood-guilt and
vengence. He points out that in ancient times
murderers frequently mutilated their victims by
cutting off their hands and feet and tucking them
under the corpse's armpits, or binding them to its
chest with a band. One rationale for
this action that suggests itself is that such
mutilation prevents the murdered victim from returning
bodily to avenge itself on the murderer--who would, in
turn, become a revenant wandering cursed between life
and death. In this discussion, Lawson presents the
roots of two primary later vampire beliefs: that
vampires are fierce marauders, and that their victims
become vampires as well. He says,

the character of these Avengers approximates very
closely to that of the modern vrykolakes. True, there
is one fundamental difference; the ancient Avenger
directed his wrath solely against the author of his
sufferings...the modern vrykolakas is unreasoning in
his wrath and plagues indiscriminately all who fall in
his way.
Qualities that Avengers and vrykolakes share:
Modern stories there are in plenty, which tell how the
vrykolakas springs upon his victim and rends him and
drinks his blood; how sheer terror of his aspect has
driven men mad; how, in order to escape him, whole
families have been driven forth from their native
island to wander in exile; how death has often been
the issue of his assaults; and how those whom a
vrykolakas has slain become themselves vrykolakes.

Myth goes on to suggest that when Aeschylus makes
the Erinyes such horrific, bloodthirsty pursuers of
Orestes, when they should have been goddesses worthy
of worship, he is casting a proxy role upon them. They
are substitutes for the actual Avenger that could not
be properly shown in Greek drama. Their qualities of
blackness, ferocity, bloodthirstyness and horror are
those of the vrykolakes.

Some close comparison of the characteristics of
ancient Avengers and the Furies, or Erinyes, with the
characteristics of modern vrykolakes may not be as
revealing as he believes. Some claim that these common
themes indicate that both ancient writers and modern
folklore derive from the same older tradition, while
it might be argued that the modern folklore took its
imagery directly from ancient literature and not from
some common source.

Nevertheless, the modern Greek vampire gains a rather
respectable pedigree. Long before the Slavs and Greek
Orthodoxy, the ancient Greeks recognized that with
extraordinarily bad fortune, one might be trapped
indefinitely in a liminal state in which one's soul
could not become free from one's body, one's body
could not dissolve and free itself from earth, and one
was forever doomed to roam trapped, yearning or
ravening, between life and death. The only release was
the forced "dissolution" of cremation, as was done to
Philinnion. To be left unburied was to be flung upon
the surface of the cold earth, to be cursed as
"incorruptible" (however obvious it was that unburied
bodies rotted). To be left unmourned and without
proper rites was to invite the soul to linger around
its former home and possibly reanimate it. Lawson
concludes a discussion of terminology for such
restless dead,

Thus then the problem of ancient nomenclature of
revenants is solved, and the results are briefly
these: all revenants were originally called,
alastores, "Wanderers"; but subsequently that name was
restricted only to the vengeful class of revenants, to
which the names miastores and prostropaioi had always
belonged; and for the more harmless and purely
pitiable revenants no name remained, but men said of
such an one simply, "He wanders."
Finally, the most well-known ancient text describing
the power of fresh blood to revivify the dead occurs
in the Iliad, when Odysseus fills a pit with sheeps'
blood to feed the shade of the seer Tiresias. Once the
ghost has drunk the blood, he is able to speak. After
Odysseus has spoken with the seer, other ghosts also
drink the blood and converse with him, but when he
attempts to embrace one, the shade of his mother, she
disappears . For the non-corporeal,
even blood can only do so much. Nevertheless, the
results it effects in returning some powers of life to
the disembodied are profound.

The word vrykolakas itself is a borrowing from Slavic
and is derived from root words meaning "wolf" and hair
or pelt . It originally appears to have
meant "werewolf" or lycanthrope, and still carries
this meaning in isolated local regions of Greece. The
Greeks did not adopt the word "vampire" from the Slavs
to indicate a revenant, although oddly, vompiras is
occasionally found as a term of contempt. Lawson
concludes from this that the Greeks already had an
active tradition of a fierce type of revenant and
applied the new word to that. If they had borrowed the
entire concept of undead vampires from the Slavs, they
would have borrowed the name for them as well.
However, all the arguments in this area remain shakey.
It is unclear why the Greeks replaced their own words
for a fierce Avenger with a new word for werewolf, and
whether or not this represented the introduction of a
unique new folkloric tradition or the evolution of an
old one. The point made by several writers that the
transferral of the word occurred because of the
documented Slavic belief that werewolves became
vampires after death, also seems unsupported by any
evidence in Greek tradition specifically.
Occasionally, a child whose siblings died mysteriously
would be (rather cruelly) named a "vrykolakas" by its
mother , and there are a few
stories of "living vrykolakes" that behaved as
lycanthropes. But the etymological leap from werewolf
to vampire is obscure. Moreover, there is certainly a
broad gap in the evidential record between the ancient
texts cited above, and the first descriptions of the
Greek vrykolakas as a full-fledged and active belief.
The earliest mention of the vrykolakas is made by Leo
Allatius in 1645 (by coincidence, possibly, his work
was published just as all of Eastern Europe was about
to explode into a century of its own vampire panics).

I would like to summarize some well-known, and less
well-known, vrykolakas stories chronologically in
order to bring out some of their significant aspects.

Leo Allatius (Leone Allacci), De quorundam Graecorum
Opinationibus, 1645: According to Allatius, the word
vrykolakas derives from words meaning cesspool. The
vyrkolakas is an evil and wicked person who may have
been excommunicated by a bishop. Its body swells up so
that all its limbs are distended, it is hard, and when
tapped it thrums like a drum. For this reason it is
called tympaniaois, "drumlike". The devil animates
such bodies and causes them to roam about at any time
of day or night. On Chios, residents will not answer
until a caller has called their name twice, because
the vrykolakas is believed to only be able to call
once, and if it is answered, its victim will die
within twenty-four hours. If seen during the day, the
vrykolakas is so horrible that witnesses die of
fright--unless they speak to the monster, which
immediately disappears. If a village has an epidemic
of deaths or illness, the inhabitants open graves
searching for a body in the "drumlike" condition
described. If one is found, it is cremated. Allatius
claims to have witnessed the discovery of such a body
in a tomb while a boy in Chios, but he does not say
what was done with the body.

Father Francois Richard, Relation de l'Isle de
Sant-erini, 1657: Richard argues that the devil keeps
certain bodies incorrupt and animates them. Under his
command they are able to wander around, enter houses,
strike people mute with fear, and assault them, even
killing them. When a village is beset by such a
vrykolakas, Richard says, they huddle together all in
one house for protection, and apply to their Bishop
for permission to exhume the suspect. This is done on
a Saturday, the only day when a vrykolakas may rest in
its grave. If the body is found "fresh and gorged with
new blood", it is "exorcised" with prayer until it
dissolves before their eyes. If prayer is ineffective,
the body is cremated.

Richard tells the story of the gentle vrykolakas
Alexander, in the village of Pyrgos, who had been a
shoemaker. He returned from the grave to mend his
children's shoes, carry water for the family and chop
their firewood. Although his family's reaction to this
is not noted, his neighbors were finally frightened
enough to exhume and cremate his body, after which his
visits ceased. Other vrykolakes were reported on
Amorgos roaming fields in broad daylight, eating green
beans.

A much fiercer vrykolakas was Patino, a merchant from
Patmos who died on a buying trip to Natolia and
revived in his coffin while being shipped home. His
wife had him buried with full honors, and he then
began appearing in houses in the area, violently
assaulting people and causing damage. Prayers and
exorcisms were fruitless in stopping the haunting.
Patino's body was ordered sent back to Natolia, but
the thoroughly spooked sailors charged with its
transport stopped on the first island they passed and
burned it, which ended the phenomena. Richard notes
elsewhere that vrykolakes were commonly thought to be
unable to cross salt water, and they were often
dispatched on uninhabited islands.

Richard's final story is very similar to that of de
Tournefort [see below] in a number of interesting
respects. A "usurer" of Santorini named Ianettis
reformed in the last year of his life, and died asking
his wife to pay his remaining debts, which she did not
do. Ianettis began haunting his village with very
similar poltergeist-like activity as the Mycone
vrykolakas: yanking the bedclothes off of sleeping
people, waking up the priests for matins, emptying
wine kegs, and generally abusing and terrorizing
people. He visited the Mother Prioress of a Dominican
convent, awakened her by rolling her rosary on the
floor, jeered at her prayers and as a parting joke,
threw her shoes into the water cistern. His body was
finally exhumed, and Richard examined it and reported
that it displayed no signs of unusual incorruption,
but was badly decayed. The body was exorcised for a
full day and then dismembered and reinterred, but the
vrykolakas' activity did not stop until his wife made
good his debts.