A Transylvania Vampire Expert

'This book represents one Hungarian historian and traveler's sometimes elusive but ever conscientious filtering of numerous sources - sources including not only those books listed in the bibliography (some folkloric works available only in Hugarian) but also Hungarian-language and other archival materials and, indeed, stories heard during many journeys over many years in Transylvania and elsewhere.'

Hungarian historian István Pivárcsi has written a number of books on vampires and other subjects in Hungarian, while so far only the book quoted from above has been translated into English: Just A Bite: A Transylvania Vampire Expert's Short History of the Undead (paperback, 292 pages, $14.95). 'For more than twenty years he has led vampire tours in neighboring Transylvania,' the publishers write, making the reader expect that the book will contain a lot of information on vampires related specifically to Transylvania. Most of the book, however, covers ground familiar from numerous other books: Vlad Tepes, Elizabeth Bathory, Gilles de Rais, werewolves, zombies, the Golem, beliefs related to blood, vampire bats, porphyria, and the vampire of popular culture, and quite a lot of what is said about Romanian vampire beliefs is very brief.

Pivárcsi writes that, 'although research has found that vampire myths are rooted most firmly in Serbian, Croatian, Ukrainian, Romanian, and Ruthenian folklore,' Transylvania is of particular importance in 'vampirology', as he names the field:

'Largely because the vampire that was to become best known by name, Count Dracula, was linked in the popular imagination to that region,' even though he actually ruled south of Transylvania, but also because 'Romanian folklore in particular came to be permeated by vampires, thanks in no small part to a certain tenet of the Eastern Orthodox Church - name, that those people who died after being excommunicated returned as the walking dead - moroi in Romanian. Indeed, such souls were condemned to remain in this most unfortunate state of limbo until the Church saw fit to relieve them of the curse.' According to Pivárcsi, it was, however, the merging with the strigoi, 'a nocturnal death-bird with supernatural powers that flew about at night, hunting human flesh and blood,' 'that yielded the characteristic Romanian vampire figure whose modern permutations we have come to know. Linked as they were to the Christian religious tradition that pervaded nearly every aspect of society, vampires became seen as agents of Satan, as instruments of evil bent on violating and annihilating humanity - and it was thought that a whole army of them were out there in the night maneuvering for final victory. They fed on human blood, and their bite infected their victims with vampirism. Blood and darkness alone sustained them.'

Pivárcsi, unfortunately, does not evolve this theme much, but in a short chapter he relates some accounts related to the Transylvanian belief that 'were adapted by your humble guide from my archival research in Transylvania coupled with material in the works of the noted twentieth-century Hungarian folklorists Enikö Csögör and Tekla Dömötör.' There are in fact only five accounts, or 'possibly true tales', a couple of which are rather schematic, while the rest include other, and more interesting aspects of local folk beliefs that unfortunately are not dealt with in the book.

The book also includes a glossary, and a chronology in which it is claimed that Philip Rohr's De masticatione mortuorum 'is the first work to be published in German language about vampires,' while under 1710 it says: 'Vampire hysteria sweeps across Eastern Prussia. Numerous cemeteries are dug up, and a mob sets the houses of suspected vampires on fire.' This sounds like a Hammer film!  Equally apocryphal, yet still fascinating is the entry for 1725-1732: 'In the southern territories ruled by the Austrians, inhabited mainly by Serbians, several people are sentenced to death on charges of vampirism.'

The only part of the book that presents something truly Hungarian that is probably not available elsewhere, concerns the Hungarian silent Dracula film, Drakula halála, from 1921, so if you are looking for information on that one, Pivárcsi's book may be worth getting hold of. Otherwise, well, maybe this book is simply intended for younger readers looking for a popular introduction to the subject, and in that respect it is probably not worse than so many other books. But if you are looking for something on Hungarian or Transylvanian folk beliefs, I'd rather go for e.g. Tekla Dömötör's Hungarian Folk Beliefs.

The original title of the book is not mentioned, but I think this is a translation of Pivárcsi's Drakula gróf és társai originally published in 2003.

The publisher, New Europe Books, specializes in books from and about the former East Bloc, 'a literary landscape shrouded for all too many in mystery': 'We seek to introduce new and classic-yet-undiscovered authors and books whose stories will resonate with readers far afield. Our authors include not only those born and raised in this part of the world (whether or not they happen to write about their own societies) but also expatriate writers from elsewhere and those who may have lived abroad for a short or long time but whose ancestry is rooted firmly somewhere in Eastern Europe—in short, all those whose lives are bound up in some manner with the region, and who share startling new perspectives on the human condition that will appeal to readers from far reaches of the globe.'

Happy New Year!

With only a few hours left of 2010, it is quite obvious that I have not been very active on this blog during the past year. I must confess that other activities have taken up most of my attention, and there is no reason to expect that this will change in 2011. This blog suffers from it, not only because of lack of time on my part, but also because my everyday activities leave me little time and energy for reading and absorbing myself in the subject of this blog. That is also why I have been so slow at reviewing some of the recent books, not least those by Florian Kührer and Nicolaus Equiamicus.

Looking back on 2010, however, there is no doubt that the most important new book is Vampire: Von damals bis(s) heute by Euqiamicus because of its accessible and comprehensive history of vampire cases from the famous ones of the early 18th century and into the 21st century. I will shortly be writing more on the book, but this is really the one single recent book to get hold of, if you are interested in vampire history.

Other noteworthy books from 2010 are Kührer's that I did get to write about, and Erik Butler's Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film.

For me personally, the 'vampire' highlight of 2010 was travelling to Bucharest to see the exhibition on Dracula and vampires at the National Museum of Art of Romania.

Apropos of Romania, I also got to watch the movie Strigoi at a one off screening here in Denmark. It is very unusual and quite entertaining, so worth seeking out. It will be available on DVD here shortly.

No plans are yet set for 2011, but no doubt something will come up.

I wish everyone a happy new year!

Across the Forest

People become as stupid as a box of rocks from watching television in stead of listening to other people, a man in Transylvania informs us. You learn from talking to other people, but only watching television makes you die stupid. So young people are not interested in what the elder Transylvanians have to say about strigoi and varcolaci, what we might call vampires and werewolves.

The frustration must have been the same when folklorists interviewed people in many Western countries earlier in the 20th century: Mass media replacing local traditions and the art of learning from other people’s experiences by listening to their stories. Today we are required to be flexible and willing to leave behind the knowledge of yesterday to replace it with the knowledge of tomorrow, as some say.

All the more refreshing it is then to get a glimpse of a world of traditions and experiences that is in retreat, in this case the rural traditions concerning strigoi and other extraordinary phenomena, as documented in Justin Blair and Matthew Vincent’s labour of love, Across the Forest. This 79 minute documentary contains no background information or commentary, just the spoken word of a score Transylvanian men and women. Some of them are telling stories that are like fairy tales, while quite a number of them claim to communicate their first hand experiences with e.g. being visited by a strigoi and having to put a nail into the heart of a dead woman to stop the strigoi from harming animals.

The documentary style of the two filmmakers resembles that of folklorists interviewing people, so the movie is a compilation of fragments of traditions and experiences that have been part of the local communities, and they do not force any particular interpretation onto the spoken word. That makes it a bit confusing, but at the same time we are free to judge for ourselves and to relate their tales to what other information we have on such beliefs.

So although we have probably become more stupid from spending too much time in front of our television sets, we now have a chance of spending it more cleverly by watching this pretty unique documentary from across the forest. It is available on DVD for $9.99 plus shipping from the web site, which contains more information. I recommend supporting the project by purchasing the DVD.

Across the Forest

Rob Brautigam has kindly informed me of a new documentary on Romanian strigoi, varcolaci and forest spirits called Across the Forest. More information on the documentary, a trailer is available at this web site. Here you can also order the DVD for $9.99 plus shipping. I have myself just ordered it, so I am unable to comment on the contents, but you can read Brautigam's review, and listen to a radio interview with one of the film makers.

Strigoi

On another blog I noticed a vampire movie set in Romania that may prove interesting. The movie has its own page on facebook where you can see one of the actors talking briefly about strigoi, moroi and the movie.

Another kind of heart eater

'Step into the world of your grandparents,' a Danish travel agency promises when advertising trips to Romania. Eating the heart of a dead man probably wasn't practised in the days of my grandparents, but that's another example of heart eating mentioned by Christa Tuczay in her book. I have actually posted about the incident she refers to, because it's the case of a suspected vampire in Marotinu de Sus in late 2003, but in my post I wrote that 'they cut up the corpse and removed the heart which they burnt at the cross roads.'

A later report on the incident was published in The Independent in October 2007, when Dr. Timothy Taylor recounted what happened when he visited the village and talked to an elderly villager who claimed to have witnessed the exhumation of other presumed vampires (strigoi). He told Taylor that 'The men took the heart, spiked aloft, to the crossroads outside the village. There they roasted it over a brazier and, as far as I could understand, stuffed glowing coals into the ventricles. Held up in the night sky, the heart shed charred flakes that were caught in a tea towel. These were taken to the niece's house [supposedly a victim of the vampire], ground up and mixed in a glass of water. "The niece drank it," Fifor [an anthropologist] confirmed, "and in the morning she said she felt better... in this way she was cured."'

Tuczay comments that according to Fifor the eating of the heart of a vampire is neither a well-known nor old Romanian remedy against strigoi.

Taylor, unfortunately, seems to subscribe to the improbable theory of Juan Gomez-Alonso that the vampire cases of the 17th and 18th centuries might have been caused by rabies. To quote Peter Mario Kreuter: 'Doch alle diese Versuche erwiesen sich als Fehlschläge, denn die Mediziner bedienten sich des Vampirglaubens als eine Art Steinbruch und pickten sich nur diejenigen Elemente des Volkglaubens heraus, die ihre Theorie zu stützen schienen, wobei sie oft noch nicht einmal zwischen Elementen des Volksglaubens und erfundenen Details der Belletristik sauber unterscheiden konnten.' (Der Vampirglaube in Südosteuropa, p. 12-13)

Below is the last part of the True Blood episode about vampires including footage from Marotinu de Sus as found on youtube. As mentioned in my old post, the series is available on DVD.

True Horror

The highlight of Discovery Channel's Vampires episode in the True Horror series starring Anthony Head of Buffy fame is the material concerning an episode in a small Romanian village where a 'vampire' was exhumed and destroyed in 2003.

The corpse claimed to be a vampire (strigoi) was that of 76 year old Toma Petre who had died on December 26th 2003. After a few days some of his relatives claimed that he came to them while they slept and sucked their blood. Believing that people would die if they didn't destroy the strigoi, the relatives (of whom two, Gheorghe and Floarea Marinescu, are interviewed) exhumed the body and found blood all around its mouth. They cut up the corpse and removed the heart which they burnt at the cross roads. The ashes were mixed with water, and those who were ill drank the mixture to protect themselves against the strigoi. However, the sister of the deceased called upon the authorities, and six people were prosecuted.

This all happened in a village called Marotinu de Sus which is located close to Celaru about 40 km south east of Craiova. According to this Romanian web site the village has 760 citizens.

The picture shown here is from a local newspaper, the Banateanul, that covered the story, but extensive live footage is shown in the True Horror documentary.

Apart from the footage from Marotinu de Sus, the documentary is a mixture of various aspects of 'vampirism', including an interview with Sean Manchester on the so-called 'Highgate Vampire' and a walk in the company of Nicolae Paduraru of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula to Vlad Tepes' fortress overlooking the river Arges. Mark Benecke from the same society demonstrates what happens to a human corpse after its death.

Some fake documents are shown in order to dramatize the tale of Peter Plogojowitz. The documents look like something from a horror film, and for some reason Anthony Head says that the exhumation of Plogojowitz occurred in 1738, i.e. 13 years later than it actually did, and he even claims that copies of the report were sent to every court in Europe. I find it pretty strange that the producers did not attempt to be more accurate in relating one of the most famous vampire cases.

The True Horror series is available on a double disc DVD, which includes the episodes on werewolves, witches and zombies.