Upiór

In the plague summer of 1770, in the Podilian towns of Zaleszczyki, Stanisławów and Tyśmienica, peasants went into the graveyards and pulled the teeth from infected corpses so they could suck the blood out of them. The last king of Poland heard about it and wrote a furious letter. A year later, in Białobożnica nearby, a nobleman named Krzywicki convinced the local people he was an upiór himself and led them out to the cemetery to drink from severed heads. A satirist of the period claimed upiór blood was going for a better price than caramelised vodka.

That is the first thing the record does to anyone arriving with a head full of Dracula. In the sources from Poland and the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the drinking mostly runs the other way. Whether any upiór ever drank human blood cannot be established. That people drank the blood of suspected upiórs is documented in court files, parish complaints and newspapers across four centuries.

The second surprise is that an upiór was a person. Church writers, obliged by doctrine, explained the walking dead as bodies hollowed out and driven by the Devil under a pact brokered by a witch-midwife, and plenty of modern studies have inherited that framing. The villagers meant something else entirely. An upiór was somebody endowed with a double life, somebody with two souls or two hearts. One soul died with the body. The other stayed, and it was that second tenant which got the corpse up and walking. The condition was congenital and it showed. A child born with a caul, or already toothed, or with two rows of teeth, was marked. So were people with hair growing in two whorls, or no hair in the armpits, or a chest that was hairy when it should not be, or scissor-shaped marks on the skin, or simply a face that ran too red. There was a Polish saying, as red as an upiór, which sounds backwards now that everyone expects a vampire to be pale.

Dying was not even compulsory. Ukraine, where most of the material comes from, is also the homeland of the living upiór. In 1840 the Ruthenian poet and ethnographer Ivan Vahylevych wrote the first critical study of the subject and concluded that upiórs and witches were the same sort of people: two-souled, able to send one soul out of the body while still breathing, able to take the shape of animals and plants, able to pull down storms and epidemics. Such a person was useful. A living upiór could recognise his own kind, alive or buried, and so could be hired to find the corpse that was killing the village. Stanisław Staszic, touring the Ukrainian lands at the height of the Enlightenment, sat through one of these hunts and wrote up the ritual in his diary. It did not go the way he had expected an ignorant superstition to go.

The dead ones worked mostly at night and mostly close to home. A strzygoń from the Kraków country, the mildest of the Polish living dead, would come back to his own farmstead, chop the wood, feed the animals, eat sausage, drink vodka and get into bed with his wife. Galician widows were generally content with the arrangement, and the neighbours agreed that any children born afterwards were his. Further east the same visits were resented. In the Boyko, Lemko and Hutsul highlands a woman who wanted her husband to stop coming would take advice from a witch and tell him she was off to a wedding where a brother was marrying his sister. He would say that such a thing was unthinkable. She would say that a dead husband in a living wife’s bed was unthinkable too, and that usually settled it. One account has a wife simply telling hers to kiss her backside. He left.

The Ukrainian upiór proper was the dangerous end of the family. It did not always need to leave the grave to work. It could turn into a white or red dog, a pig or a horse. It strangled people and cattle, which in the old phrasing meant anything from throttling to infecting with plague, and it could bring drought, flood and famine down on a district that had done nothing in particular to deserve it.

Then there is the case that got out. Franciszek Pobłocki, a minor Kashubian noble, died of consumption in May 1870 and was buried at Rozłazino, where he had been sexton. Thirteen days later his son Antoni died the same way. His wife and daughter sickened. The family concluded that Franciszek was a wieszczy and that Antoni was becoming one, and the surviving son Józef bribed the gravedigger to open a new grave right beside the father’s. The gravedigger lost his nerve and confessed to the priest, who posted watchmen; one of them fell asleep and the other saw nothing. What gave the family away was the publican across the road from the cemetery, woken in the small hours by the hollow knock of frozen sods dropping onto a coffin lid. When the priest had the grave opened the next morning, Franciszek’s head was lying at his feet with the face turned down, and there was no blood in the coffin at all. The family had collected every drop and mixed it into their drinks. All of them recovered except Józefina, who could not bring herself to swallow blood squeezed out of her husband and her son, and who died on 28 February. To the Pobłockis that was proof they had been right. The case ran through the Prussian courts as far as the supreme tribunal in Berlin.

An upiór was a body. That is the whole of it, and it is why every countermeasure was aimed at meat and bone rather than at any spirit. Aspen stakes, because aspen strips power from the dead, a logic that turns up again in Siberian burials of shamans. Decapitation with the gravedigger’s spade, the head set down at the feet where the corpse could not reach it. Failing that, softer measures: the body turned face down, the hands tied with blessed herbs, a sickle laid across the throat so it would behead itself if it sat up, a stone or a coin or a scrap of paper reading Jesus pushed into the mouth. Best of all were the delaying tactics. Poppy seed and sand were poured into coffins, mouths and eyes, because the dead are obliged to count every grain before they can get out. The Kashubians packed a fishing net in beside the corpse so it would have to pick apart every knot. Some used a page torn from a prayer book with the Amen cut away, leaving the occupant reciting the same prayer until Judgement Day. A parish priest at Osiek, preparing for a funeral in 1857, found a village woman laid out under a drift of poppy seed, in her eyes, in her mouth, across her whole face, and was told by her relatives that she had been very red since she died.

The limits were the ones the body imposed. Confirmation was held to baptise the second soul so that both could leave at death, and a child given two names at christening was thought safe. In a fight, an open-handed slap with the left hand would beat a strzygoń, apparently standing in for the bishop’s ceremonial slap at confirmation. Daylight sent them back underground, and one that lingered too long was said to dissolve into a puddle of tar. Everything else was down to the family, the spade and whoever in the village was willing to dig.

What eventually finished the upiór was not the Enlightenment, which spent the eighteenth century arguing with the wrong opponent, aiming its treatises and satires at the Church’s demon-driven corpse rather than at the two-souled neighbour the villagers actually believed in. Belief ran on through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Jan L. Perkowski found Kashubian settlers in Ontario in the late 1960s holding beliefs that matched Pomeranian accounts from a century earlier, and Jan Perszon was still recording them in Pomerania in the 1990s. The upiór died with the small farm. Once cattle were collectivised there was nobody’s cow left to bewitch, and the creature that had begun, on the best linguistic evidence, as something that sucked milk rather than blood had nothing left to do.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an upiór?

An upiór is a Slavic revenant from Poland, Ukraine and the wider Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, understood in folk belief as a person born with two souls or two hearts. One soul dies with the body and the other stays behind, animating the corpse so that it leaves the grave. Some upiórs were believed to be living people rather than dead ones.

Did upiórs drink blood?

Rarely, and most sources do not mention it at all. The better documented practice runs the opposite way: people drank the blood of suspected upiórs, collected from beheaded corpses and mixed into drinks, as protection against plague and death in the family. Ukrainian upiórs were sometimes said to drink the blood of people and cattle, but the milk of cows is the older target in the record.

How do you kill an upiór?

By damaging the corpse. The two standard methods were driving an aspen stake through the body and cutting off its head with a spade, then laying the head at the feet where the corpse could not reach it. Lesser measures included turning the body face down, laying a sickle across the neck, and burning it outright.

How could you tell someone would become an upiór?

The signs were visible from birth and afterwards. A child born with a caul or with teeth already through, hair growing in two whorls, missing body hair, scissor-shaped birthmarks, or an unusually red face all marked a person as two-souled. After death, a body that stayed supple, warm on one side and red in the face, or that had chewed its own shroud, confirmed it.

What is the difference between an upiór and a vampire?

The upiór is the older folk figure and the vampire is largely a literary construction built on top of it. Upiórs were peasants and neighbours rather than aristocrats, were not contagious, did not turn their victims, and were dealt with by relatives and gravediggers rather than by hunters. The modern vampire enters through John William Polidori’s The Vampyre in 1819 and reaches Polish literature through Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve.

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Strzyga, Topielec, Mavka, Rusalka, Bies, Witch, Strix, Vampire, Strigoi, Moroi, Nachzehrer, Vrykolakas, Mullo (Mulo), Draugr, Revenant