'Vampire' burials that can change a research life

Anthropology PhD student and blogger, Katy Meyers, recently wrote of a symposium on The Odd, the Unusual, and the Strange: Human Deviant Burials and their Cultural Contexts arranged by the Canadian Association of Physical Anthropologists:

'[Sandra] Garvie-Lok discussed the finding of a potential ‘vampire’ burial in Byzantine and Ottoman Greece. This was interesting because she examined first the ethnographic and historical evidence for the belief in vampires and the behavior towards them. Next, she used this information to interpret a burial from Ottoman-era Mytilene that due to the presence of stakes through the skeleton may indicate that people believed the deceased individual was a ‘vampire’. [Lauren] Hosek discussed a similar topic, the fear of revenants- individuals who rise from the dead. She discussed historic legends of revenants and archaeological evidence from two fortified settlement sites in what is now the Czech Republic. Several of these graves are consistent with the descriptions of potential revenants.'

Sandra Garvie-Lok, an anthropologist from the University of Alberta, according to that university's web site was aided in her career by a 'vampire': 'It really did change my research life.'

'Garvie-Lok, an osteologist, was set to study North American sites until a fateful opportunity took her to the island of Lesbos in Greece, where she found herself with the skeleton of an alleged vampire from the Ottoman Empire. She became embroiled in ethnocultural history and vampire lore that would play a small part in her focusing on Greece and ancient civilizations. She says the vampire tales from that region and the pop-culture iterations of the undead bear little resemblance, especially when it comes to disposing of a vampire. And as for her own adventure as a vampire hunter, she says it’s an experience she’ll never forget.'

'She says the regional accounts of vampires are consistent from Greece all the way through to the Slavic states, and none of the stories had anything to do with bats, biting or blood loss. Instead, she says, the vampire was believed to be a demon-animated corpse who would chase and physically attack the living—much closer to current popular culture images of zombies. And unlike the Dracula lore, it was the vampire’s look—or even his breath—that could be deadly. Vampires were often blamed for weird noises and unexplained phenomena that would occur in towns.'

News story from the University of Alberta

Garvie-Lok has also told her story in the Huffington Post.

An Exile in Paradise

The entry on Edward Lear (1812-88) in my Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature - incidentally right below an entry on J. S. Le Fanu mentioning In a Glass Darkly, the collection including Carmilla - states:

'Lear was by profession a landscape painter, but his elaborate landscape paintings have much less distinction and interest than his drawings and sketches.'

Fortunately, there is more of interest in Lear's work as a landscape painter than the Guide will have us believe. He published his Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, &c in 1851, and a couple of years ago a television series followed in Lear's footsteps on his journey through Greece and Albania: An Exile in Paradise: The Adventures of Edward Lear is currently aired here in Denmark, so I just caught the episode in which Robert Horne - described as 'an adventurer, traveller and writer with a keen interest in art and science fiction' - guides the viewer through Albania, looking for the places where Lear stayed and tracing the history from Lear's time until today. Lear appears to have been something of an adventurer himself.

Detailed information on the production is available from Lear Productions, with the promo below. A DVD, unfortunately, is currently unavailable.

A Study in Survivals and Greek folklore a century ago

'Mr. Lawson informs us that in Thessaly he was actually told of a family in the neighbourhood of Domoko, who reckoned a vrykolakas among their ancestors of some two or three generations ago, and by virtue of such lineage they inherited a certain skill which enables them to deal most efficaciously with the vrykolakas who at intervals haunt the country-side, indeed so widely was their power esteemed that they had been on occasion summoned as specialists for consultation when quite remote districts were troubled in this manner.'

Yet two more recent reprints from Cambridge University Press are of some interest in connection with the subject of this blog, in both cases with Greek folklore and anthropology. These two books from the early twentieth century are among the works studied and referred to by Montague Summers (cf. the above passage from The Vampire: His Kith and Kin, p. 230), so they will no doubt be familiar to many people.

Macedonian Folklore by George Frederick Abbott, was originally published in 1903. Abbott, born 1874, 'spent two years at the turn of the twentieth century studying the cultural beliefs and folklore of Greek-speaking Macedonia. His results are formulated in this 1903 book and include accounts of such varying topics as the folk-calendar, funeral rites and bird legends among many other observations. Filled with anecdotes of his adventure and reports from local inhabitants, this work is a highly engaging travelogue with many ethnographic insights. Those interested in the development of anthropology will find Abbott's study a telling example of Victorian methods while the general reader will find his prose style warm and enjoyable.'

Abbott died in 1947, cf. Wikipedia.

Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Folklore by John Cuthbert Lawson was published in 1910, and 'analyses the customs and superstitions of modern Greece as a means of gaining a greater understanding of ancient Greek belief structures. Analogies and coincidences between ancient and modern Greece had been pointed out prior to the publication of this edition, but no large attempt had been made to trace the continuity of the life and thought of the Greek people, and to exhibit modern Greek folklore as an essential factor in the interpretation of ancient Greek religion. The text is highly accessible, and all quotations from ancient and modern Greek are translated into English. This is a fascinating book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in anthropology and the classical world.'

A recent assessment of Lawson's work - which is still frequently referred to in various books - can be found in 'On the Beliefs of the Greeks' by Karen Hartnup:

'His Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion is immensely learned, and his treatment of beliefs and practices in this work is often sensitive and perceptive, but the title of his work indicates his underlying concern. He argued that although Christianity altered the ethical standards and imposed a religiously sanctioned morality on ancient Greece, practically all ancient religious customs continued up to his own day. Christianity was merely grafted on to paganism and the conciliatory practices of the early church meant that the Christinaity of the masses became polytheistic. Lawson concluded that the inhabitants of modern Greece "with all this external Christianity ... are as pagan and as polytheistic in their hearts as were ever their ancestors." In fact, for him modern Greek Christianity was just a thin cover for the continuing system of paganism.

Although Lawson's work follows the prevailing methodology of his time, it typifies the archaeological and romantic folkloric approach to Greek popular religion, which until recently held sway in Greek studies. In such studies the aim was to strip away the modern 'accretions' in order to extract information on the classical period and to reveal a 'pristine Hellenic past'. No attempt was made to trace the practices through the intervening periods and the impact of such momentous events as the conversion to Christianity, the conquest of Constantinople, and the fall of the Ottoman Empire was ignored.' (p. 7-8)

The product of superstitious and false beliefs

What do we understand by superstition?

I suppose that we all have some kind of commonsensical idea of what ‘superstition’ means, when we use it on an everyday basis, but when you need to apply it to a specific historical context, you easily get into trouble. So when I took up the subject of vampires and posthumous magic some years ago, I quickly felt a pressing need to get some grasp of the term and its history. This, unfortunately, was not so easy, because the meaning of the term not only has changed over time and very much depends on a given context, but frequently there is ‘a certain elasticity about it’, as Keith Thomas pointed out in his Religion & The Decline of Magic (1971, p. 48-9). Similarly, in a more recent work, Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, & Religion, 1250-1750 (2010), Euan Cameron calls superstition ‘an elusive and slippery term’ (p. 4) that is ‘a flexible designation, and can be aimed at a range of targets at different times and by different people.’ (p. 5)

'In the era of confessional orthodoxy from the late sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, the rhetoric that had traditionally condemned superstition and magic in the eyes of the devout became a crucial part of the intellectual armour used to prosecute sorcerers, magicians, and witches. Then, in the early Enlightenment, ‘superstition’ took centre stage in religious discussions to an even greater extent than before. ‘Superstition’ and ‘reason’ became the poles around which the religious and ethical theorists of the early Enlightenment debated the proper claims of religion on the human mind.' (p. 6)

Superstition and reason are also frequently seen as the poles in the vampire debate of the 1730’s. Stefan Hock did so in 1901, dividing the authors of vampire books into two groups: those explaining vampires in terms of demonic influences, and those seeking a rational and natural explanation. However, if you actually read the books and articles from the period, you find that the texts do not easily fit into such a simple scheme. Likewise, on a more general scale, Cameron stresses the complexity of the debates concerning superstition:

'The eighteenth century did not discard the heritage of previous centuries wholesale, whatever the statements of propagandists for the ‘Enlightenment’ might at times imply. Some ‘superstition-treatises’ emerged from the movement known as ‘baroque Catholicism’ that embodied a firm belief in the continuity of traditional metaphysics and traditional pastoral theology. In Protestant Europe, the seventeenth-century debate over the reality of spirits continued into the era of the Enlightenment with no clearly discernible winners or losers.’ (p. 286-7)

In a lengthy paper from 2010, “… da sie in den närrischen Wahn gestanden, daß es Vampyren gebe”. Dimensionen des Aberglaubenbegriffs und Strategien der Aberglaubenskritik in gelehrten Beiträgen zur Vampirdebatte der 1730er Jahre, Benjamin Durst notes that the view of a vampire debate between obscurantism and Enlightenment has survived well into our time and can be found even in modern works on the subject.

Durst points out that the dichotomy between mystical obscurantism and rational Enlightenment that many historians superimpose on the eighteenth century is rather a result of the Enlightenment process than a condition of the period itself. This dichotomy is a construct of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not of the eighteenth, so Durst sets out to critically scrutinize the vampire debate in terms of the knowledge and views of its own time. Limiting himself to what he calls the first phase of the vampire debate: the debate during the 1730’s between authors whose native tongue is German, Durst divides the debate into three groups according to the arguments employed: 1) theological, 2) sympathetic (Aristotelian or Paracelsian), and 3) medical.

Their different points of view notwithstanding, all authors tend to agree that the Serbian vampire belief is superstitious. Frequently, they consider the superstitious Irrglaube and Altweibermärchen to be the surviving remains of pre-Christian, pagan beliefs. Harenberg in his Vernünftige und Christliche Gedancken über die Vampirs oder Bluhtsaugende Todten stresses the antiquity of the belief in harmful revenants, saying that it existed at the time of Moses and can be found in the works of Vergil and Homer. Michael Ranft writes of the poison of superstition from old times and thinks that it may still work in the hearts of Christians.

As the Serbians typically were Orthodox Christians, the authors participating in the debate, most of whom were Protestants, find that this Church plays a role in the vampire belief. Protestants were of the opinion that both the Catholic and Orthodox Church had introduced superstitiones superstructae, false and superstitious constructions on top of the pure Christian belief, in order to maintain and gain power and money. Polemical books about the Orthodox Church, such as Thomas Smith’s Epistola de Graecae Ecclesiae hodierno statu (1698) and Johann Michael Heineccii Eigentliche und wahrhafftige Abbildung der alten und neuen Griechischen Kirche (1711), were not only sources of contemporary views of this Church, but also contained information on the Greek popular beliefs in revenants like the Brucolaccas.

from Salomon Schweigger: Ein newe Reiss Beschreibung auss Teutschland nach Constantinopel (1639)

The participants in the debate were quick to equate the Serbian vampire belief with the Greek revenants, and generally link the Orthodox belief in the effects of excommunication with the Serbian vampire belief. They criticize the clergy for not eradicating the superstitious belief, but instead accepting or promoting it for their own purposes. Consequently Durst notes that the criticism of vampire superstitions turns into a critique of the Orthodox Church.

There were, of course, exceptions. Johann Conrad Dippel accepts the Orthodox belief in the preservation of holy people and of the excommunicated as the work of God, but refutes a connection between excommunication and vampire beliefs. The Catholic W.S.G.E. finds that the vampire belief is the product of the uneducated and superstitious Serbians’ reception of true Christian tenets. From a theological point of view, the more superstition and the less education there is in a place, the easier it is for the devil to carry out his schemes in that area.

The Serbians themselves are also the subject of various explanations. They are stereotypically considered barbarous and under the influence of opium which is thought to have influenced both the deaths of suspected vampires as well as the belief itself. Their moral deficits and lack of education make them susceptible to superstition or even demonic influence. Egidius Günther Hellmund in his book on divine judgment, Iudicia Dei Incognita, oder unerkannte Gerichte Gottes über Böße und Gute in der Welt (1737), goes so far as to consider the revenants as God’s punishment of a sinful and ungodly Serbian populace in need of repentance.

The authors, and not just those those writing from a medical perspective, find that there is a close connection between the superstitious belief and the disease that the supposed victims of vampires suffer from. In some cases an analogy between these is stated, blurring the division between disease and superstition.

The superstition leads to fear and fancy, perhaps even creating visions of nightly revenant visitations, making the villagers more prone to diseases. So itself a product of pagan doctrine, false religious beliefs and the inability of uneducated people to comprehend natural phenomena, the vampire belief is inseparable from the suffering – and ultimately the death - of the Serbian villagers.

Durst carefully describes the individual arguments behind these general views of the role of superstition in the Serbian vampire belief. He does, however, emphasize that more work on the subject will yield more facts and dimensions to our understanding of what superstition was according to the learned authors involved in the debate.

I plan to write about some other recent papers on the seventeenth and eighteenth century writings about vampires and related topics. For now, I will recommend a reading of Durst’s work which not only provides an interesting reading of the vampire debate, but also points to a handful of works that I don't recall seeing mentioned elsewhere.

Illustration in Leithäuser: Das neue Buch vom Aberglauben (1964)

Isle of the Dead

Boris Karloff Blogathon: Like Fuseli’s Nightmare has become an iconic image, so the famous Die Toteninsel (Isle of the Dead) painting by Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901) has inspired music, literature and popular culture, most notably in the symphonic work by Rachmaninov. Itself inspired by the images of Hades from classical mythology, it clearly lends itself perfectly to imagery of an otherworld of the dead.

American film producer Val Lewton minutely recreated Böcklin’s island in his 1945 movie Isle of the Dead. Set in Greece in 1912 during the First Balkan War, the Greeks have just conquered the Ottomans in a battle, but also have to work hard to avoid suffering plague and typhus. Boston journalist Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer) follows the Greek general Pherides (Boris Karloff) on a visit to a cemetery on an island just off the coast. The general, a tough and rational patriot with the nickname The Watchdog, wishes to visit the grave of his wife, but finds that her grave as well as all other graves are empty. Although guarded by a statue of Cerberus, the island is apparently not a peaceful resting place for the dead.

Pherides and Davis are greeted by a Swiss archaeologist who has settled on the island at the house of a Greek lady, Madame Kyra. The archaeologist tells them that his archaeological excavations on the island had inspired locals to rob the graves, and that is why the graves are now empty. Kyra on the other hand informs the general that one of the corpses was an ‘evil one’, a vorvolaka, and she suggests that evil is still going on. At the house a handful of foreigners have sought refuge from the war, and one of them, Mrs. St. Aubyn, is ill and grows paler and weaker, while the young Thea is ‘rosy and red and full of blood’. The general tells her that it is nonsense, but when one of the people in the company dies from septicemic plague and they have to quarantine the island, fear and superstition begins nagging even the general Pherides.

Isle of the Dead then pits science and medicine against religion and superstition. As the plague takes it toll on doctor Drossor and even on the general himself, they accept that there may be higher powers at large, and the old Watchdog finds himself begins to believe that Thea is indeed a vorvolaka. He almost succeeds in convincing Thea herself that she may be the cause of the plague and illness.


When Mrs. St. Aubyn suffers a cataleptic trance, everybody assumes that she is dead, and she is placed in one of the burial rooms of the cemetery. She, however, awakens and finds herself prematurely buried, screams and scratches at the coffin, and eventually succeeds in getting out and avenging herself - almost like a vorvolaka. Kyra and the general both are certain that she has indeed become a vorvolaka: 'Who dies by a Vorvolaka, becomes a Vorvolaka.'

Ancient mythological images of Hades, Charon and Cerberus mix with the Greek folk belief in the vorvolaka and plague, catalepsy, premature burial as well as what some term ‘psychic vampirism’. All of that told within just 71 minutes: They certainly knew that ‘less is more’ back then. The acting, not least by Karloff himself, is impeccable and as always in Lewton’s movies, the horrors are done rather by suggestion than by effect, and they work very well.


‘Vorvolaka’ is one of the variants of what is usually called ‘vrykolakas’. Karen Hartnup in On the Beliefs of the Greeks: Leo Allatios and Popular Orthodoxy (Brill, 2004), mentions it in the form ‘vourvourlakas’:

‘It may be misleading to use the term vampire in the context of the Greek revenant. The vampire with which we in the West are most familiar is the Dracula of Bram Stoker and ‘B’ movie fame, with his long flowing cape, fangs, and thirst for blood. Although both the Greek vampire and its so-called Transylvanian cousin are revenants, that is, resurrected dead bodies, they differ greatly in style and in their relationships with members of society. It is not helpful to call this creature a vampire as the word carries with it connotations alien to the phenomenon. What should be used in its stead? A plethora of terms for the revenant existed, with each area having its own variation of the species. It was called among other things, vrykolakas, vourvoulakas and katachtonios. Vrykolakas, however, is the most common Greek word for the creature and so seems to most suitable.

Although the vrykolakas exhibited non of the traditional behaviour of the ‘Transylvanian’ vampire, nonetheless it had the ability to cause great terror within a community. The creature was so frightening that could drive whole villages to decamp. Tournefort described the reaction of a village in Mykonos which discovered a vrykolakas in its midst:

Whole families quitted their Hourses, and brought their Tent-Beds from the farthest parts of the Town into the publick Place, there to spend the night. They were every instant complaining of some new Insult; nothing was to be heard but Sighs and Groans at the approach of Night: the better Sort of People retired into the Country.’ (p. 173-4)

Some of the most famous sources on the vrykolakas are the De quorundam Graecorum Opinationibus by Allatios (1645), Relation de l’isle de Santerini (1657) by father Francois Richard and the Relation d'une voyage du Levant by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), all of them well-known in the literature on vampires. A careful analysis of Allatios with the evidence on vrykolakas found in Greek texts of ecclesiastical law, nomokanones, in comparison to popular beliefs, is found in Hartnup’s book, which is highly recommended.

This blog post is part of the so-called Boris Karloff Blogathon, commemorating Karloff's 122nd birthday on November 23 2009!

On the Beliefs of the Greeks

At the conference in Vienna I was made aware of a few books that I did not know. One of them is On the Beliefs of the Greeks: Leo Allatios and Popular Orthodoxy by Karen Hartnup published by Brill in 2004. It is unfortunately pretty expensive (£119.70 on amazon), and there is no copy in any Danish library, so I have yet to take a closer look at it. There is, however, a lengthy excerpt on Google Books to whet your appetite.

'This book deals with popular Orthodoxy during the Byzantine and Ottoman periods, approaching the material from a historical and anthropological perspective. The discussion takes as its starting point a letter of Leo Allatios, the seventeenth-century author and scriptor of the Vatican Library. The early chapters of the book focus on Allatios and the western intellectual background in which the work was written, while later chapters consider popular beliefs and practices surrounding childstealing demons, revenants, spirits of place and popular healing.
This book provides the first detailed treatment of a major source for post Byzantine popular Orthodoxy, offering valuable insights into the relationships between laity and clergy, Orthodoxy and Catholicism, religion and natural philosophy during the seventeenth century.'

The letter is the De Graecorum hodie quorandorum opinationibus by Leo Allatios (Leone Allacci) mentioned in several books on vampires and Greek revenants.

Greek and Roman "restless" dead

Anyone interested in ancient Greek and Roman source material concerning revenants and apparitions should consider getting hold of Daniel Ogden's Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook published by Oxford Univ. Press in 2002.


It's a pretty comprehensive compilation of source material translated into English, including a chapter on Ghosts. Here the "restless" dead are divided into four overlapping categories which will more or less be familiar from the folklore of revenants from later eras:

Aoroi (from αωροσ, untimely). Ogden: "Those cheated of their full stint of life bitterly stayed back to haunt the land of the living of which they had been deprived. In theory anyone who died of anything other than of natural causes in old age could generate a ghost restless quo aoros, although as a class aoroi tended to be conceptualized primarily as the ghosts of children or babies."

Bi(ai)othanatoi (from βιαιος and θανατος, violent and death). Ogden: "These included the battle-dead and executed criminals, although murder victims and suicides provided the bitterest ghosts in this class."

Agamoi (from αγαμος, unmarried). Ogden: "Both male and female ghosts could be assigned this category, although the female ones were regarded as particularly bitter, insofar as marriage and the motherhood consequent upon it were a woman's defining rights in antiquity."

Ataphoi (from αταφος, unburied). Ogden: "Whatever the circumstances of death, a ghost could not achieve rest without the due funeral rights. These were importantly distinct from the mere insertion of the corpse into a hole in the ground, and indeed the concealment of a dead body in precisely this way is often presented as the chief obstacle to the peace of its soul."