Vrykolakas

The frankincense made it worse. On a winter morning in 1701, in a chapel on Mykonos, the town butcher stood over a corpse ten days in the ground with his hands deep in its belly, hunting for the heart, and the smoke the islanders had lit to cover the smell mixed with what was already coming off the body until the whole crowd was reeling. Someone said the blood looked bright. The butcher swore the flesh was still warm. A French botanist who had pushed in close enough to see properly thought the man was extremely dead, said so, and was ignored. Outside in the churchyard the word went up and would not stop: vroucolacas.

The word is not Greek. It came from the South Slavic vǎrkolak and its cousin vukodlak, from a compound meaning roughly wolf-pelt, and everywhere the Slavs used it it meant a werewolf. Greek borrowed the sound and then handed it to something else entirely. In a few scattered pockets the older sense survived into living memory, on Mytilene and Cyprus, in the hills around Agrinion, through Thessaly and Epirus, where a living person could still be called a vrykolakas and where a mother who had lost several children might turn on the smallest survivor and accuse it of having eaten its brothers and sisters. Everywhere else, the word had moved into the graveyard and stayed there.

What it names there is not really a drinker of blood. One Arcadian villager, asked directly, said he had never heard of a vrykolakas drinking anything; these things kill people, and that is why people fear them. The vrykolakas is a body that failed to rot. Greek burial worked on a schedule: into the ground, and then, after about three years, out again, the bones lifted and washed with wine, prayed over by the priest, packed into a small box with the name and the date on the lid and shelved in the ossuary. Clean bone meant a soul at rest and an account settled. What everyone dreaded was the spade coming up against something that still had weight to it. A body brought out whole, or black and half-gone with the flesh still clinging, meant that the earth had refused it.

There were reasons a corpse might be refused, and they were all social. Excommunication was the oldest and the plainest, since an undissolved body was the visible receipt for a curse the Church itself had written, and a bishop’s letter of absolution read over the grave was supposed to reduce the thing to dust on the spot. A father’s curse would do it. So would marrying inside the forbidden degrees, or a crime unconfessed, or a violent death nobody had answered for. Plague victims shovelled into the ground without a priest were obvious candidates. So was anyone over whom a cat or a dog or a stray mule had passed while the body lay waiting, which is why the family sat up with their dead all night and why they still do.

Nobody could agree on what the result looked like. He looks like a man, one informant said, or like a dog, or like anything. Some accounts give a face swollen taut and blooming with colour, the skin stretched like a drumhead, which is where the canon lawyers got their second word for it, tympaniaios. Others insist on a detail so specific it is hard to invent: that the vrykolakas is a complete man down one side and entirely empty down the other, open like a shell, and that this is how you know him if he lets you close enough to look.

He comes back to the house. Not to a stranger’s house, to his own, or to his brother’s, and the family lying awake in the dark hears things being knocked over and the flour going everywhere and, under the noise, a voice they recognise. Village rule held that he would knock and call out a name, and that no harm came to a house where nobody answered the first knock, so people learned to lie still and let him ask twice.

The Mykonos man was a peasant, ill natured and quarrelsome by every account, murdered in the fields, and nobody knew by whom. Two days after they buried him he was seen walking about at night in a great hurry, tipping over people’s goods, putting out lamps, pinching them from behind. The priests said masses. The town waited out the nine days that custom demanded, then on the tenth pulled the heart from the body and burned it on the shore, and he came back angrier. He beat people in the dark, broke down doors, tore the roofs, ripped clothes, emptied every bottle and wine vessel in the town. Whole families dragged their beds into the public square to sleep in company. Someone stuck naked swords upright in the earth over the grave, and a passing Albanian told them they were fools, that the cross shape of a Christian sword hilt was exactly what was keeping the devil penned inside the body, and that they should be using Turkish sabres. The islanders started packing for Syros and Tinos. In the end the magistrates had what was left of the man carried out to the point of Saint George, where a pile of wood had been soaked with pitch and tar, and burned him entire on the first day of January. The botanist saw the flame from the water as he came back from Delos. After that there were no more complaints, and somebody wrote mocking songs about him.

His powers are all household-sized and all the worse for it. He can walk by day as readily as by night, and one account has a dead man strolling out to his brother’s pasture in the afternoon to stand in the shade and call his name. He can pass into an animal and go on working from inside it. He gets through doors that stay shut. He empties a larder, ruins a season’s flour, and hollows out a village’s nerve until the wisest people in it are sleeping in the square.

Against that, the weaknesses are oddly domestic too. He cannot leave the grave on a Saturday, which turned Saturday into the digging day, and there is a story about a charming shoemaker who courted a woman for weeks and vanished every Saturday without explanation, until the villagers walked up to the cemetery with torches, opened the ground, and found him lying there. He begged them not to burn him. He showed them the hollow side of his body as proof of what he was. They burned him anyway. Fire works, and so does lightning. Holy water and the priest’s chanting were the approved remedies. One village kept the outline of a wolf painted on the outside of its church, and when a vrykolakas turned up from somewhere else they would carry earth from beneath the painting and scatter it in a line all the way to his grave, and the wolf would go and eat him. Black hens in the house were said to keep him out altogether.

The Church loathed all of it. In the Pedalion, the great annotated collection of Greek canons published in 1800, Nikodemos the Hagiorite put vampires in the subject index under the heading that they do not exist and that people who burn them ought to be punished, and filed his note under the canon covering grave robbery. He called the belief childish and stupid, pointed out that the devil has no power to raise the dead, and remarked that in all his enquiries he had never met a man who had seen a vrykolakas, only men who had heard of somebody who had. If weak faith demanded something, a priest could chant over the grave and sprinkle it with holy water. Anyone who opened that grave to cut up or burn the body was to be punished twice over, as a robber of graves and as a murderer. The people of Mykonos understood the arithmetic exactly, which is why not one of their priests would stand on the point of Saint George and watch the fire.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a vrykolakas?

A vrykolakas is the undead revenant of Greek folk belief, a buried corpse that fails to decompose and is taken over by a devil. Unlike the vampire of later fiction, it is far more often a wrecker of houses and a killer than a drinker of blood. Villagers identified one by exhuming a grave and finding the body still whole.

Why is the vrykolakas called that if the word means werewolf?

The name was borrowed from the South Slavic vǎrkolak or vukodlak, a compound meaning something close to wolf-pelt, which in Slavic usage meant a werewolf. Greek took the word and attached it to the undissolved corpse instead. The older werewolf sense survived locally into the twentieth century on Mytilene and Cyprus and in parts of Thessaly, Epirus and Aetolia.

How does a person become a vrykolakas?

The commonest causes given are excommunication, a parent’s curse, a sacrilegious or criminal life, marriage within forbidden degrees, a violent or unavenged death, and burial without a priest. An animal such as a cat, dog or mule crossing the body before burial was also thought to do it, which is why Greek families kept an unbroken watch over their dead.

How do you get rid of a vrykolakas?

The traditional method was to dig up the grave on a Saturday, the one day the vrykolakas cannot leave it, and burn the body, sometimes after cutting out the heart. Fire and lightning were both believed to destroy it. The Orthodox Church rejected all of this and prescribed prayer and holy water at the graveside, ordering that anyone who opened a grave to burn a corpse be punished as a grave robber and a murderer.

What happened on Mykonos in 1701?

The islanders of Mykonos exhumed a murdered peasant, cut out and burned his heart, and when the disturbances continued they carried the body to the point of Saint George and burned it whole on the first of January 1701. A French botanist travelling through the Aegean witnessed the whole affair and wrote it up, and his account became one of the founding documents of European vampire literature. No priest attended the burning, for fear the bishop would fine them for it.

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