After 135 years: Sava Savanovic in English

Although so many pieces of vampire fiction have been compiled and published over the past decades, Serb author Milovan Glišić’s Posle devedest godina (After 90 years), originally published in 1880, has remained elusive to readers outside of the Balkans. Until now that James Lyon, author of The Kiss of the Butterfly, has translated it into English.

Obviously, the story is from an era when authors took a particular interest in translating local folklore and etnography into fiction, and reading it reminds me vaguely of the local Danish variant of The Wise Men of Gotham, those humorous stories of foolish and incredulous people inhabiting some backwards countryside. Essentially, After 90 Years is a love story with one village stealing a bride from another village (you know, not dissimilar to Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but on a lesser scale), that mixes in a vampire story and a lot of etnographic detail.

The vampire, the well-known Sava Savanovic that made the headlines a few years ago, haunts a watermill in Zarozje, so it has become impossible to hire a miller, for no one survives a single night in the mill: 'At dusk he was hale and whole, and at daybreak dead, with a red bruise around his neck as though strangled with a cord.' Savanovic himself appears 'with a face as red as blood', carrying 'across his shoulders a linen shroud that dropped down his back all the way to his heels,' for as Lyon says in a footnote: 'In South Slav folklore, a vampire’s power resides in its burial shroud, which it typically wears draped around its neck and shoulders. If the vampire loses this shroud, then it loses any special powers.'

It is certainly nice to finally read the story, which as a vampire story benefits from the author's wish to rely on the actual folklore instead of employing literary conventions of the type familiar from other nineteenth century vampire stories like e.g. Aleksey Tolstoy's The Family of the Vourdalak.

Andrew M. Boylan, known for his quest to watch and review any film related to vampires, supplies a foreword that explores the relationship between the story and the film adaptation, Leptirica, and Lyon himself writes about the translation, Zarozje and vampires.

Available as both a paperback and an e-book at a reasonable price, After 90 Years is worth seeking out.

Speaking of James Lyon, I would also recommend a book that has nothing to do with vampires - although he does actually mention Vlad Tepes in it: Serbia and the Balkan Front, 1914: The Outbreak of the Great War, the history of the complex political and military events on the Balkan Front before and after the outbreak of the first World War.

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.

Fear and Servant

During the winter of 1736-37, the Devil travelled to Belgrade, Serbia, with his Serbian servant, Novak, to investigate rumours about vampires. At the same time, an Austrian commission was on their way to Belgrade to find out if vampires really exist.

However, the vampires they encounter - if they can in fact be considered vampires - are not exactly what one might expect, neither from the actual vampire cases of the period or from modern Western vampire fiction.

In fact, the whole story is as far from an attempt at recreating the period as it is a piece of ordinary vampire fiction. Rather, Mirjana Novakovic' Fear and Servant is a literary fantasy mixing history with literature, no doubt inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master & Margarita and Milovan Glisic's novel about the vampire Sava Savanovic, Posle devedeset godina from 1880. In the mix are numerous references to e.g. Melville, Shakespeare, Baum, and even the Rolling Stones (whose Sympathy for the Devil itself is perhaps inspired by Bulgakov's novel about the Devil visiting the Soviet Union).

The story is narrated by the Devil using the nom de plume Otto von Hausburg, and Princess Maria Augusta of Thurn and Taxis, the wife of Carl Alexander, Duke of Württemberg, who played his role in distributing the information about the investigation of purported vampirism in Medvedja in Serbia (cf. Hamberger, Mortuus non mordet, p. 111).

A reader in Nis in Serbia recently kindly mentioned that the novel, originally published in 2000, had been translated into English and published by Geopoetika in 2009 in a series of Serbian Prose in Translation. Obviously, Fear and Servant is not your typical vampire novel, nor is it a novel that provides much information of use for vampire research, but it is a very enjoyable and well-written novel, and as a literary experience certainly far more rewarding spending time on than Fred Vargas's Un lieu incertain.

The novel has been reprinted several times in Serbia, was awarded the Isidora Sekulic Award and a play based on it was performed in 2003 at the Kalemegdan Fortress in Belgrade where parts of the action takes place. As mentioned in an earlier post, the novel was translated into French in 2006.