In Search of Peter Plogojowitz’s Grave

James Lyon, author of the excellent novel Kiss of the Butterfly, has kindly sent me this report from his recent visits to Kisiljevo. Click on the photos to see them in greater detail.

On 9 December 2012, and again on 17 January 2013, I visited the village of Kisiljevo, Serbia, the site of the first known recorded use of the word “vampire” in history, the famous case of Peter Plogojowitz from 1725. Given that Niels has already written a number of excellent posts on the topic, I write on the assumption that the reader is familiar with the case.

The purpose of the visit was two-fold: to discuss local legends of the Peter Plogojowitz case with residents, and to see if it was possible to identify the site of Peter Plogojowitz’s grave. Due to heavy snowfall on 9 December that restricted access to the graveyard, that visit was limited to interviews only. On 17 January, I returned to the graveyard after the snows had melted.

The village president, Mirko Bogičić, and author James Lyon

Although I spoke with a number of very friendly Kisiljevo residents, most were hesitant to discuss Peter Plogojowitz, and all referred me to the village (mesna zajednica) president, Mirko Bogičić, a man in his mid-50s who is also the custodian of records for the nearby municipality of Veliko Gradište, which is located further east along the Danube. Mr. Bogičić turned out to be a very warm and intelligent gentleman, who was well-versed in local history and folklore, and who is in the final phase of publishing a book on the history of Kisiljevo. He lives in a household with four generations under the same roof, a common practice in the region.

Kisiljevo used to be a river port on an arm of the Danube, but is today located on the banks of a 14-kilometer long artificial lake (Srebreno Jezero) that was dammed off in 1971 to prevent flooding along the southern banks of the river. Today the lake is a popular summer tourist resort in Serbia. Kisiljevo itself, however, has not profited from this tourism, the town’s population continues to decline, and a number of homes are abandoned and falling apart, due to lack of upkeep. Although the 2002 census listed the town as having 704 residents, that number appears optimistically high.

An abandoned home in the town centre, 

with death notices on the telephone pole 

in the foreground

Mr. Bogičić took great pride in his hometown and noted that it was first mentioned in the 14th century during the time of Serbian Prince Lazar (who lost his head at the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389), and again in the Ottoman census of the Branicevo district (Braničevski Defter 1467). At that time, Kisiljevo was a large and economically powerful town, with more than double the number of households of nearby Požarevac (Passarowitz). He also recounted the local legend of the origins of the town’s name, which dated to the time of the Great Plague.

In Kisiljevo, there is no surname of Plogojowitz, and no such surname exists among the South Slavs. The locals all refer to him as Petar Blagojević, and until recently there was still a Blagojević family in the village, so one must assume that Imperial Provisor Frombald used a Germanized spelling of the name in his report. The following material is transcribed from a recording I made on 9 December.

Mr. Bogičić said that “Petar Blagojević isn’t the only vampire. Here among us in Serbia, vampires are frequently spoken of. The Vlahs say ‘Drakulj’… Vojvoda Tsepes was a legendary figure, the way Kraljević Marko is with us, as a man who was dangerous in battle against the Turks. But he didn’t have vampire characteristics, such as were seen in Petar Blagojević.”

Bogičić mentioned that two women visited him from Berlin [?! sic] with photocopies of Frombald’s original report, which he could not read, as they were in a language which he assumed was German. He noted that under the Treaty of Passarowitz (Požarevac) the north of Serbia belonged to Austria and the seat of regional administration was in Veliko Gradište. But when it came to details about the Petar Blagojević case, neither he nor the other local residents appeared to have passed on much in the way of folklore about the events of 1725. Rather, it appeared as though much of the information regarding the Blagojević case was of relatively recent origin.

The Other Kisiljevo Vampire: Ruža Žapunjica

Bogičić, however, did raise an interesting point of local folklore regarding an entirely different vampire. “People also speak about an old woman who became a vampire, at least 100 years after Petar Blagojević. The old people say that an old woman, whose name was Ruža [Rose], turned into a vampire. She had the nickname of Žapunjica… The old folks called her Ruža Žapunjica, no one knows what the nickname means. She became a vampire. My great-grandmother remembered those times. She [Ruža] would make incidents in the middle of the day. She would bang around houses, climb up into the attic and begin to make noise in the middle of the day. She would throw things around in the attic of the house, and people could hear sounds, but when they went up to the attic, they couldn’t see anyone. But this was quite some time after Petar Blagojević, because my great-grandmother as a child had seen this and heard it from her parents. Those houses no longer exist; they were torn down.”

Bogičić continued: “One person – and this is very important -- saw her after she died in the early evening on the steps in front of one of the houses, even though she had long since died. That old man who saw her, died a few years ago at the age of 93. He said that he had seen Ruža Žapunjica, even though she had died over 100 years earlier, and he repeated this on television, that he had seen her figure and silhouette on the steps. This was in the 1930s, when he was a young man in his 20s, before the war. So Petar wasn’t the only one.”

The village church

“People usually don’t like to talk about that. As children we grew up on the stories of the older people about those unbelievable, unusual nighttime events, but the only incident that was actually written down was the one of Petar Blagojević. You know we have this church in our village that was built in 1825. Those people in the village who are close to the Church, who are Orthodox Christians, don’t like it when people speak about Petar. They don’t want it glorified and say that we’re speaking against Christianity. But this is something that has nothing to do with Christianity, or belief in God, or attending church, or our Orthodox customs now.” Bogičić mentioned some famous Serbian historical figures who were born in Kisiljevo, noting regretfully: “But these things are much less known, because it is truly the vampire that jumps out from Kisiljevo. Not a single church council has ever questioned or denied the vampirism that was then around”.

Death Rituals

Bogičić shared with me a number of local customs surrounding death. When a person dies, they keep a lit candle next to the body from the moment of death until the body is placed in the casket. The body is kept in the home, and someone is next to it 24 hours a day. In olden times, gold coins were placed over the eyes of the deceased, but today they use regular coins. This is so the deceased will have money for the next life. Prior to placing the body in the coffin, they conduct several ceremonies against evil spirits. These include burning incense and then igniting a small amount of gunpowder in the bottom of the coffin. The graveyard is always in a better location than the village, because they don’t want anything to disturb the dead. The Danube used to flood Kisiljevo before they built the dams, and the village graveyard is up on a high bluff overlooking the Danube.

Searching for Petar’s Grave

On 17 January 2013 I visited the Kisiljevo graveyard with Mr. Bogičić. The graveyard is located on a bluff high above the banks of Srebreno Jezero and offers a panormaic view over the lake and the island between the lake and the Danube.

Bogičić explained that that graveyard was divided into three parts. The first part consisted of the oldest graves, which predated the late 18th century. This section was entirely overgrown and the grave markers were not easily recognizable as such. The stones consist of roughly-hewn thin stone slabs made of greenish rock from a quarry further west along the Danube near Ram. None of these slabs appeared to have any trace of engravings on them, and Bogičić said that prior to the late 18th century the gravestones were not engraven with names. This is the portion of the graveyard where Petar Blagojević would have been buried. As a result, it is not possible to ascertain which grave is his. I should add, that it is impossible to ascertain which grave belongs to which family, and as a result, no one has cared for the graves.

From the oldest part of the graveyard

The second part consists of graves from the latter half of the 18th century onward, when grave markers were carved into recognizable shapes, such as crosses, or tombstones with rounded edges and engravings. This portion of the graveyard is in better shape, as people are still able to identify a gravestone with a particular family, and members of that family will continue to care for it.

The third portion of the graveyard dates largely from the early 20th century and consists of modern – sometimes elaborate – gravestones and family burial plots, usually outlined by small concrete walls about ten centimeters high. In many cases, families have taken the old pre-20th century gravestones and fixed them in concrete in the modern family burial plot.

Modern gravestones with old gravestones embedded in concrete in front of the family burial plot

In the modern part of the graveyard, I came across two plots for the Blagojević family. Bogičić told me that there are no longer any Blagojevićs in Kisiljevo.

The Blagojevic family plot

As a parting gift, Mr. Bogičić kindly presented me with a bottle of his own home-made grape brandy, which he jokingly referred to as “vampire rakija”.

Conclusion

My overall impression is that local lore related to the Peter Plogojowitz incident of 1725 has been suppressed over time by the Serbian Orthodox Church; many people feel uncomfortable discussing the matter. It seemed that although everyone knew something had happened in the distant past regarding a vampire named Petar Blagojević, no one really knew the details outside of what has been uncovered by more modern scholarship. Unlike the village of Zarožje, where local inhabitants were well versed in the legend of Sava Savanović, Kisiljevo residents seemed more aware of Ruža Žapunjica and less of Petar Blagojević. Interestingly, the characteristics associated with some of Ruža's behavior – while similar to a poltergeist – are not at all unusual for vampires in South Slavic folklore. The state of the grave markers in the old part of the graveyard is such that it seems unlikely anyone will ever be able to identify with absolute certainty the actual grave site of Petar Blagojević.

James Lyon is currently working on a sequel to The Kiss of the Butterfly.

Text and photos © James Lyon.

Pietas Austriaca

'After the Habsburg lands had recovered to some extent from the consequences of the Thirty Years' War, the populace of this region was struck by yet another misfortune: the plague. It came from Hungary in 1678 and quickly spread to the west. It is thought to have claimed some fifty thousand victims in Vienna alone. In an effort to escape this epidemic, the royal household fled to Prague in 1679. Here too, however, the number of fatalities was not insignificant: some six thousand people met their death in the city by the Moldau.

The plague had barely been brought under control when disaster once again struck the still-suffering populace. This time it was the Turks. As is well known, they stood before the gates of Vienna in 1683 after having plundered and pillaged the surrounding countryside. Although the Turks could be repulsed by the relieving army under the command of King John III of Poland (John Siebiski), the running fights exhausted the resources of the strained populace. During subsequent years the invaders were increasingly driven back to the east and defeated in a series of battles by Prince Eugene of Savoy, the emperor's famous general. The final triumph over the Turks and over the Plague, with the latter returning, however, in a devastating epidemic in 1713, marked the "birth" of the Pietas Austriaca, the lived piety of the Habsburgs. In gratitude for having survied such extreme misfortune, people erected plague columns and similar monuments in many places and held pilgrimages and processions in honor of the saints who had protected them. The most magnificent testimony to this newly strengthened piety was certainly the Karlskirche (Church of St. Charles) in Vienna that Emperor Charles VI, fulfilling a vow, had built by Johann Bernhard Fischer in 1713. The spirit of the times also found expression in music, where court ceremony and lived piety met ...'

From the liner notes to CPO's 2006 2CD Vienna 1700: Baroque Music from Austria, one of a number of interesting albums exploring the music of the 17th and 18th centuries.

A terrible incident ...

The fourth annual edition of Austria, an Austrian universal calendar or almanac for the year 1843, contains a wealth of information for erudition and entertainment, including a short article on vampires by one J. P. Kaltenbaeck. The main part of this short article reproduces the text of a leaflet from 1725 entitled Entsetzliche Begebenheit, welche sich in dem Dorff Kisolova, ohnweit Belgrad in der Ober-Ungarn, von einigen Tagen zugetragen, published without a place of printing.

The text itself is not identical with, but overall very close to the version of Frombald's report from Kisiljevo reprinted in the Wienerisches Diarium on July 21 1725. As the Diarium was closely connected to the Viennese court, one would suppose that the report was first published in the Diarium and then made available as a flyer or leaflet, even though the title of the flyer claims that the incident happened only days before the printing.

Copies of such flyers are usually pretty scarce, as Kaltenbaech himself also notes: 'Der folgende Bericht ist einem fliegenden Blatte entnommen, das wohl jetzt zu den Seltenheiten gehören dürfte.' Personally, I cannot recall seeing any more recent writer dealing it with more than its title - until I was recently contacted by a reader of this blog, who kindly told me of an item that a Scottish dealer of antiquarian books had for sale a couple of years ago:

Kayserl Provisor in Gradicker District.: Entsetzliche Begebenheit, welche sich in dem Dorff Kisolova ohnweit Belgard in Ober-Ungarn vor einigen Tagen zugertragen. 1725. n.p., n.d. single sheet folded , pp.4, 20 x 16 cms., Gothic type , sl. worn at edges and with a few small marginal tears not affecting text, light age staining. Not noted in Caillet and not traced in any major search engine. Concerns the celebrated case of Peter Plogojowitz, an alleged vampire. See Paul Barber : Vampires, Burial, and Death. pp.5-9

And the price? £350.

I contacted the dealer who informed me that it had been bought by another dealer, and he was unable to tell me anything about its whereabouts. So either that other dealer has sold it on, probably at a price substantially higher than £350, or it awaits a buyer somewhere willing to part with a nice sum.

Apart from the leaflet, Frombald's report appears to have attracted only limited interest. It was reprinted in  the so-called Breslauische Sammlungen under the title 'Abentheuerliche Begebenheit mit einem vermeyntlich wieder gekommenen Todten' where it is noted that it is taken from the public gazettes in Holstein: 'in den öffentlichen Holsteinischen Gazetten', but no one seems to have identified these periodicals or perhaps flyers. Apart from discussing the substance of the report itself, Michael Ranft's De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis is dealt with. Ranft himself was himself inspired by the report from Kisiljevo to write his dissertation, as he read of it in a Leipzig journal, cf. e.g. Aribert Schroeder's Vampirismus from 1973.

Zarozje visited

The story about Zarožje and Sava Savanović made it into a relatively long newspaper article in a major Danish newspaper on December 26, partially based on Vampire Forensics by Mark Collins Jenkins. Author James Lyon who has commented on the story here, sent me some photos from a visit to Zarožje a couple of weeks ago, and now he has also written about it on The Vampirologist blog. Go there to read more about Zarožje and the legend of Sava Savanović as recounted to Lyon by the mill's owner, Slobodan Jagodić.

On the pleasure derived from objects of terror...

Viktoriapark in Berlin with neogothic memorial on Kreuzberg in the background

The medieval period and its remains were romanticised by the authors of the Gothic novel with Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto (1764), being so obsessed with Gothic architecture that he constructed his own 'castle', Strawberry Hill. The enthusiasm for medieval architecture, ruins and other remnants of the past was  taken up by German painters in the early nineteenth century as documented in a current exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin: Romantik & Mittelalter: Architektur und Natur in der Malerei nach Schinkel (Romanticism and the Middle Ages: Architecture and Nature in Paintings after Schinkel, Schinkel being the Prussian architect and painter Karl Friedrich Schinkel). This interest in buildings from the past clearly mixed realism with fantasy as both exponents of romanticism and nationalism. So some of the themes of these paintings look familiar to readers of  gothic fiction or even viewers of the more 'gothic' parts of horror and fantasy cinema. And entering the permanent parts of the Alte Nationalgalerie, one can trace the evolution of some of the themes to the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich.

Schinkel: Gotische Klosterruine und Baumgruppen (1809)

But what starts out as fascinating soon becomes too much, even for a visitor like me who is far from unaccustomed to gothic horror and medieval romance. The German poet Heinrich Heine is quoted for writing about how the German public became tired of knights and other medieval trappings: 'die ewige Rittertümelei missbehagte am Ende den bürgerlich Gebildeten im deutschen Publikum, [...] dieser beständige Singsang von Harnischen, Turniergenossen, Burgfrauen, ehrsamen Zanftmeistern, Zwergen, Knappen, Schlosskapellen, Minne und Glaube, und wie der mittelalterliche Trödel sonst heißt, wurde uns endlich lästig.'

There are, however, still today people who nourish an enthusiasm for a romanticised medievalism. At the main railway station in Berlin I recently noticed a number of issues of a German magazine called Miroque Lebendige Geschichte, a popular magazine that deals with e.g. everyday life in the middle ages and carries ads for medieval style paraphernalia like clothes and tournament tents! I purchased Edition nr. 5 - III/2012 subtitled Kabinett des Grauens vom Mittelalter zur Moderne, i.e. a cabinet of horrors from the middle ages to our modern day.

A free CD is included containing 13 pieces of 'Horror-Musik' for Halloween, and on page 2 there is an ad for a Jack the Ripper bag in leather, so readers are probably of the kind who also would enjoy a spine-tingling Gothic novel. The Cabinet of Horrors itself features witches, demons, dragons, zombies, werewolves, and even zombies. The six page article on the living dead, i.e. vampires, is written by Dr. Utz Anhalt and is simply a mix of fact and fiction about vampires. A very short interview with Mark Benecke concerns scientific explanations of cases of the masticating dead and vampires. The magazine also deals with horror films set in the past (or perhaps rather a fictional version of the past), 'dark' novels, and Jack the Ripper. Obviously, all this is more about making the reader shudder with a mix of horror and delight than about history.

The Schauerroman, the German equivalent or perhaps original form of the Gothic novel, is the subject of a recent anthology published first in German as Populäre Erscheinungen: Der deutsche Schauerroman um 1800 and subsequently in English as Popular Revenants: The German Gothic and Its International Reception, 1800-2000, edited by Andrew Cusack and Barry Murnane. Apparently, British literary critics in the 1790's attributed the roots of the Gothic novel to German Ritter-, Räuber- und Schauerromantik: 'Indeed, the labels "German" and "gothic" were competing terms for a species of popular fictions in the 1790s as evidenced by the frequent use of such designations as "A German Tale." For readers these labels indicated the thrillingly foreign; for organs of the conservative government such as the Anti-Jacobin they represented an indecent and politically suspect class of fictions that were dangerously popular.' (Cusack's introduction, p. 2) Although the Schauerroman had its heyday in the early 19th century, some of the essays in the book explore their profound influence and development on both literature and film.

Similarly, an exhibition at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, currently explores the darker aspects of romantic art from Goya to Max Ernst and their influences on opera, cinema and other art forms: Schwarze Romantik, Dark romanticism, a term inspired by Mario Praz's seminal study The Romantic Agony. It is the first German exhibition focusing on this aspect of Romanticism and its legacy, comprises more than 200 paintings, sculptures, graphic works, photographs and films, also including works by Johann Heinrich Fuseli, William Blake and Caspar David Friedrich. According to the museum's web site, the exhibition

'is conceived to stimulate interest in the sombre aspects of Romanticism and to expand understanding of this movement. Many of the artistic developments and positions presented here emerge from a shattered trust in enlightened and progressive thought, which took hold soon after the French Revolution – initially celebrated as the dawn of a new age – at the end of the 18th century. Bloodstained terror and war brought suffering and eventually caused the social order in large parts of Europe to break down. The disillusionment was as great as the original enthusiasm when the dark aspects of the Enlightenment were revealed in all their harshness. Young literary figures and artists turned to the reverse side of Reason. The horrific, the miraculous and the grotesque challenged the supremacy of the beautiful and the immaculate. The appeal of legends and fairy tales and the fascination with the Middle Ages competed with the ideal of Antiquity. The local countryside became increasingly attractive and was a favoured subject for artists. The bright light of day encountered the fog and mysterious darkness of the night.'

The exhibition travels to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris in March. A voluminous catalogue is available in both German and English from Hatje Cantz Verlag.

Vampires in Berlin

Arriving at Hauptbahnhof, the main railway station, in Berlin, one in instantly met by vampires in the form of huge adverts for the Tanz der Vampire musical, currently performed at Theater des Westens. The photos were taken earlier today after some days of vacation in that city. Unfortunately, I did not find time to go to see the musical. However, I must admit that I am a bit wary of that kind of thing, although I enjoyed Polanski's film.

Vampire Alert 2

James Lyon, author of Kiss of the Butterfly, has kindly reported more information on the subject of my previous post, cf. his comments to that post, while the story of the purported 'vampire alert' has spread to various media, including a tabloid in my own country, B.T.

The gist of the matter still seems elusive, but here is a video from the vicinity of Zarozje.


According to the Associated Press:

'Richard Sugg, a lecturer in Renaissance Studies at the UK's University of Durham and an expert on the vampire legends, said the fear could be very real. Stress can bring on nightmares, which makes people's feelings of dread even worse.

"The tourists think it is fun — and the Serbian locals think it's terrifying," he said.'

Sugg is the author of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: the History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians and is currently writing Faces of the Vampire: from Holy Terror to Sexual Taboo.

Vampire Alert

According to Austrian Times on 24 November,

'Council Issues Vampire Alert

Sales of garlic are booming in western Serbia after the local council issued a public health warning that a vampire was on the loose.

The warning came after an old ruined mill said to once have been the home of the country's most famous monster in the form of vampire Sava Savanovic collapsed.

Sava Savanovic was said to have lived in the old watermill on the Rogacica river, at Zarozje village in the municipality of Bajina Basta where he drank the blood of anybody that came to mill their grain.

Source: Srbija danas

The watermill was bought by the local Jagodic family, and they were too scared to use it as a mill – but discovered it was a goldmine when they started advertising for tourists to come and visit it – always during the day.

But the family were worried about carrying out building work on the mill because they were scared they might disturb the vampire or unleash his wrath if his home was messed around with – and now the property has collapsed through lack of repair.

But for locals it has sparked rumours that the vampire is now free once again.

Local mayor Miodrag Vujetic admitted: "People are worried, everybody knows the legend of this vampire and the thought that he is now homeless and looking for somewhere else and possibly other victims is terrifying people. We are all frightened."

He added that it was all very well for people who didn't live in the area to laugh at their fears but he said nobody in the region was in any doubt that vampires do exist.

He confirmed that the local council had advised all villagers to put garlic on their doors and windows to protect them from the vampire as it was well known they can't stand the smell.

He added: "We have also reminded them to put a Holy cross in every room in the house."

Villagers who cashed in catering to tourists fascinated by the legend of Sava Savanovic say they now wish they had left the place well alone.'

Local stories on the subject can be found on Srbija danac, 24sata, and Pravda.

A member of the Jagodic family, Slobodan Jagodic, is seen in an older video on the subject below, and at the bottom is a youtube video of the Yugoslav vampire film Leptirica which is based on a story about Sava Savanovic by Serbian author Milovan Glisic.





With thanks to Mort Amsel for informing me of the news story.

Horror Europa

A delightful and highly recommended follow up to Mark Gatiss's previous documentary on A History of Horror.

Vampire species

When I was a boy, I collected stamps. After initially just collecting any kind of stamps, I got interested in a specific group of Danish stamps and the numerous misprinting errors of those stamps. These errors could be both systematic, because of variations in the gravure, or it could be more incidental like when the watermarks in the paper had accidentally got inverted. Looking for these variations in the printing and paper made it possible to identify when an individual stamp had been printed and which place it had had in the original sheet of stamps.

Similarly one can ‘collect’ instances of vampire beliefs – or ‘vampire species’, if you will - but in my opinion this kind of collecting first becomes really interesting when you try to eliminate the purely accidental and try to recognize the patterns in these beliefs. Unfortunately, while compiling it may become difficult to see the wood for the trees, and the pattern gets lost.

Several ‘vampire encyclopedias’ have resulted from this kind of compiling. Unfortunately, quite a few of them are not too reliable, and their selection of material all too frequently reflects what can be found in various modern books on the subject. One recent example attempts to collects various ‘species’ of vampires, and I can not help being baffled by e.g. the great number of variations of the word ‘vampire’ that are presented as distinct and distinguishable terms. I am here considering Theresa Bane’s Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology, a rather expensive volume published a couple of years ago. Expensive, because although in hardcover it has a recommended retail price of £70.50, but only contains 199 pages.

The first variant of ‘vampire’ listed under V by Bane is:

‘Vampiir (Vam-PEER)
In northern Europe, in the Republic of Estonia, the concept of a blood-drinking vampire was imported from the neighboring countries of Latvia, Finland, Russia, Sweden, and Ukraine. Calling this vampire a vampiir, it entered silently into a person’s home, lay on top of someone, and smothered him to death while he slept. It had the ability to shape-shift into a bat and a wolf; however, a vampiir was only active a few hours each night and was susceptible to sunlight. Like many of the vampires that lived in neighbouring countries, the vampiir was killed either by burning it to ash, decapitation, or by hanging.
Source: Bunson, Vampire Encyclopedia, 87; Dundes, Vampire Casebook, 54’

The first reference is Matthew Bunson’s entry on Estonia:

‘Estonia A region situated along the Baltic Sea to the north of Latvia, historically part of Livonia. The Estonians had several species of vampires, largely the result of external influences, especially Russian. The rarest of the undead in Estonia was the vere-imeja (bloodsucker). The Estonian species, the veripard (blood beard), was essentially a manifestation of a nightmare, tormenting people during the night and pressing down upon them. Another type of Estonian undead, the vampiir, was probably another foreign tradition that found only limited acceptance in the region.’

And the second reference is in fact to a paper by Felix Oinas on East European Vampires originally published in 1982. Oinas is concerned with the roots and development of vampire beliefs in East Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, and for that reason he also considers Estonia and Latvia, noting that ‘In Estonia, beliefs in vampires are rather undeveloped. The term for vampire in Estonia is vampiir (vampire), vere-imeja (blood-sucker), or veripard (blood-beard). There are numerous stories about revenants who visit people in the night and press down upon them. However, the vampire as a bloodsucking and killing revenant is little known by the people, and the idea may have been taken from their neighbors.’

Oinas here refers to Grundzüge des Estnischen Volksglaubens by the Estonian folklorist Oskar Loorits published in Lund in Sweden in 1949. Loorits, at the time a refugee from Estonia who had found a haven during WWII in Sweden, deals extensively with e.g. revenant beliefs and burial customs in Estonia, so Oinas in fact only refers to a couple of passages of the book, while in fact several parts have some bearing on Estonian revenant beliefs.

Oskar Loorits. Source: Wikimedia

On page 100, Loorits mentions the quite rare ‘Blutbart’ (veri-pard), that probably derives from Finnish, and notes that a belief in vampires has remained undeveloped (‘die ganze Vampir-Vorstellung im estnischen Totengluaben unentwickelt geblieben und hat nur selten als fremdes und junges Gut gelegentlich Anklang gefunden’). Later, on page 563, he makes some comments on the use of terms in recent decades, but nowhere does he use the spelling ‘vampiir’ or claim that vampires in the sense of bloodsucking dead was a well-known belief in Estonia. In fact, ‘vampiir’ is simply the way of spelling the word ‘vampire’ in Estonian, cf. the entry on vampires in the Estonian Wikipedia.

Curiously, Theresa Bane does not include an entry on the ‘veri-pard’ or the ‘vere-imeja’, but lists Vampiir as a phenomenon by itself, ‘imported from neighbouring countries,’ whereas it is quite evident that Loorits says that a vampire belief per se remains undeveloped in Estonia! Still, considering the vampire to be one of several related kinds of revenants, there is no doubt that Loorits deals with living corpses that haunt the living. To gain more information on those, one would have to consult the work by Loorits (and possibly more recent colleagues in Estonia), but Bane rarely goes to the source.

Instead, she sometimes relies on the most curious books, like Nigel Suckling’s Vampires for this strange, but highly entertaining entry:

‘Vanpir (Van-PEER)
The word vanpir (“werewolf”) was said to have been created by an unnamed German officer. In 1726 there were thousands of reports filed that the plague that was running unchecked in the southeast Slavic regions was started by REVENANTs. In life these revenants had been werewolves, but after they died, they had come back as what the locals called VRYKOLAKA. The German officer changed the word vrykolaka for one he allegedly made up – vanpir. No reason has ever been given for his decision to have done this. German newspapers began to pick up on the story and it spread. Eventually it came to France where the odd and obviously foreign word was changed once again, this time to a more familiar and as terror-inspiring word – VAMPYRE. Again the story began to spread and managed to make its way over the channel into England. This time the word’s spelling was changed to suit its British audience and became vampire.
Source: Singh, The Sun, 276; Suckling, Vampires, 54; White, Notes and Queries, vol. 41, 522’

The copy of Frombald’s report that is in the archives in Vienna uses the form ‘vanpiri’, and perhaps – perhaps! – this is the factual basis of these strange speculations. But overall, this entry sounds more like the plot of a novel than a piece of vampire history.

In a number of other instances, Bane seems to confuse various ways of writing a term. She includes entries on ’Flygia’ and ‘Fyglia’, but I think both refer to the concept of a fylgja, and it also seems hard to make out the distinctions between the Chinese ‘Kuei’, ‘K’uei’, ‘K’uei, Revenant’ and ‘K’uei, Spirit’. Similarly when it comes to the entries on the Romanian ‘Priccolitsch’, ‘Pricolic, Undead’, ‘Pricolic, Wolf’, ‘Priculics’ and ‘Procolici’.

It is not that I take some particular pleasure in criticizing such things, and I am afraid there are numerous more examples. Rather it grieves me to see all sorts of books on ‘vampires’ taken verbatim in collecting ‘vampire species’. The notion of an encyclopedia of this kind is certainly not bad, but it requires a sound methodology in approaching sources and deciding on entries. Collecting stories and ‘species’ without a keen and eye on the underlying patterns, discarding of the accidental and unreliable, is like collecting stamps with little or no interest in e.g. history and printing techniques.

From Oskar Loorits: Grundzüge des Estnischen Volksglaubens (1949), p. 91

Loorits on the other hand systematically describes Estonian folk beliefs in Grundzüge. Beginning with the concept of life force (Lebenskraft) and how it is related to different parts of e.g. the body, including blood, he explores the notions concerning the difference between a live and a dead body, burial customs, the nourishment that the dead may require, the ‘afterlife’ of corpses, revenants etc. Revenant beliefs consequently are not considered as anomalies, but are simply yet another part of a world view or system of belief.

Detached from a system of belief or even detached from any kind of etymology, ‘vampire species’ become more or less accidental fragments risking to blur rather reveal than the underlying patterns.

A diagram from Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture by Charles Stewart (1991) of the places where Greek exotiká may typically be encountered. Vrykolakes are, as one would expect, found in graveyards.