Hortdan

The word arrived before the face did. Şemseddin Sami’s great Ottoman dictionary explains hortlamak first as calling out hort hort the way a wild animal does, and only then as what a sinful man does down in his grave while he serves out the punishment waiting for him there. Ahmet Vefik Paşa’s Lehce-i Osmânî of 1876 says almost exactly the same thing. Two lexicographers, working a generation apart, both reached for the noise. Nobody had yet agreed what he looked like coming up through the soil, but everyone knew what he sounded like.

Azerbaijani Turkish calls him Xortdan. Across the border in Anatolia he is hortlak, and in Tuvan he turns up welded to the word for devil as aza hortan. The being underneath the three names is the same: a dead person who does not stay dead. In the demonological beliefs of the Azerbaijani Turks he comes alive at night, leaves the grave, and does harm. The word travelled so well that it stopped being fussy about its referent, and in ordinary speech anything at all that frightens people can be called a hortlak.

What earns a man the condition is not sorcery but temperament. The people said to rise were the ones who had made everyone else’s life sour: the troublemakers, the gossips, the ones who could not get along with a neighbour, and the tellings are careful to say that it happened to women and men alike. Someone whose dying was slow and hard was thought a likely candidate too. The grave itself had a vote. Some of the dead had joined the bad spirits and still could not get out, held down by the wrong soil; where the ground and the pit allowed it, they found the strength to climb and could then go wherever they pleased. In Ottoman Rumelia the country around Edirne and Manastır was reckoned the best soil in the empire for it, and the two towns could not even agree on the word: what came out of the ground at Edirne was a hortlak, and the identical thing at Manastır was a vampir.

He comes up the night of the burial. He shakes the earth off, keeps the shroud, and walks into the village with a staff in his hand, and any dog that sees him loses its mind.

He is fast. The accounts insist on that before they insist on anything else, that he runs at a speed no living man matches, and after speed comes the unnerving competence of him: he rides horses, he handles weapons, he beats the people he had grudges against, he carries off the ones he loved, he breaks into houses and he stands in the road and stops travellers using it. He is also, in some districts, an animal, changing his shape as easily as he changed his address.

Then there is the blood, and here the record genuinely splits. One line of argument holds that apart from the bare fact of getting up again, the Turkic revenant has nothing to do with the vampire of the western imagination, and points out that blood-drinking has almost vanished from the hortlak stories still being told. Another holds the reverse, that the fullest European vampire material sits in the Balkans precisely because Turkic belief soaked into it. What is not in dispute is the direction of travel. Blood and resurrection are there in the early accounts and in the archival documents, and they thin out as you come forward, because the old local beings were quietly folded into the Islamic vocabulary of cin and peri and lost their particular teeth on the way. The oldest definitions still carry the traffic: Vefik Paşa glosses hortlak flatly as the ghoul that comes out of the grave, the karakoncolos, the vampire, the cadı, the sorcerer, five words for one hole in the ground.

Officials took it seriously enough to write it down. The kadı of Edirne, Mirzazade Mehmet Efendi, wrote to the Grand Vizier Hüseyin Paşa about an outbreak in the village of Maraş outside the city, where a man called Bıyıklı Ali was said to have risen, and then a woman called Cennet was said to be showing the marks of a cadı. A catechism written under Murad IV in the second quarter of the seventeenth century gives the remedy without flinching: stake the body through the navel with juniper, cut off the head and lay it at the feet, and burn what is left. Among the Gagauz, who call their version obur, the treatment is gentler by a degree and worse to picture, since the grave is opened and a nail is driven in to pin the occupant where he is.

The limits are the limits of a body. He cannot leave a grave that will not let him go, and the digging up and the juniper stake and the fire work because there is something solid down there to burn. A prayer said aloud at the graveyard wall keeps him off. So, people swore, does being too drunk to care.

Azerbaijan has never quite finished with him. Field collectors working the Göynük villages of Şəki for the Folklore Institute of the national academy came back with texts about Xortdan that were counted as new to the record, alongside a wild man and a personage named Süleysin nobody had written down before. And at the start of the twentieth century Əbdürrəhim bəy Haqverdiyev, one of the men who made the satirical magazine Molla Nəsrəddin what it was, simply borrowed him. He signed his letters from hell with the name Xortdan and let the character die in the body and go on living in the spirit, and when the book came out in 1930 he left instructions for reading it: hell is an imaginary place, but in this work the word hell should be understood to mean the society of the negative types. The dead man who climbs out of his grave to make trouble for the living turned out to be the perfect correspondent.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Hortdan?

A Hortdan is a revenant in Azerbaijani folklore, a buried corpse that comes back to life at night, leaves its grave and harms the living. The same being is called hortlak in Turkish and aza hortan in Tuvan. The name comes from the verb hortlamak, which older Ottoman dictionaries define both as making a wild-animal cry of hort hort and as suffering the torment of the grave.

Who turns into a Hortdan?

People who behaved badly in life. The tellings name troublemakers, gossips and quarrelsome neighbours, and specify that it happens to women as often as to men. A death that came slowly and hard was also thought to make it more likely, and the soil and condition of the grave were believed to decide whether the corpse could actually get out.

Is the Hortdan a vampire?

That is disputed. One view holds that apart from rising from the dead the Hortdan has little in common with the western vampire, and notes that blood-drinking has almost disappeared from modern hortlak stories. The other holds that Turkic belief fed directly into Balkan vampire lore. Ahmet Vefik Paşa’s 1876 Ottoman dictionary does gloss hortlak as, among other things, a vampire.

How do you stop a Hortdan?

By destroying the body. A seventeenth-century Ottoman catechism from the reign of Murad IV prescribes staking the corpse through the navel with a juniper stake, cutting off the head and laying it at the feet, and burning the remains. Prayer said while passing a graveyard at night was believed to keep the Hortdan away, and among the Gagauz a nail was driven into the grave to pin the dead in place.

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