Upyr

The upyr is the dead that does not stay still in Eastern Slavic folklore, and its name matters as much as its figure: from the ancient Slavic form proceeds, via Bulgarian and Serbian, the word vampire that later all the languages of Europe would adopt. It appears documented very early, in a sermon against the pagan superstitions of the centuries XI to XIII that reproaches the Russians for rendering cult to the upyry. Becomes upyr he who dies outside the norm: the suicide, the excommunicated, the one who was buried without the rites or the one who in life practiced witchcraft. The community recognized its work when an entire house sickened, and the sign of the suspicion was a corpse that did not decompose.

He goes out at night, when the sepulcher leaves him, and first seeks his own: the family and the neighbors, not the strangers. He drinks the blood of the sleepers and with it takes away the health of the whole town, so that his passage is confused with that of an epidemic, which is exactly what explained. He is attributed sufficient strength to force doors, the capacity to take the form of wolf, of black dog or of nocturnal bird, and that of passing for any neighbor in broad daylight. In the stories collected in the nineteenth century he additionally drags a trait that distinguishes him from the subsequent literary vampire: he is not elegant nor seductive, but a swollen and clumsy corpse that acts by hunger and by rancor.

The remedies are described with a precision of manual because they were practiced in truth. The tomb is opened in full light, the heart is pierced with a stake of poplar or of hawthorn, the body is decapitated and it is burned to the ashes, which are thrown to the running water. If it was not reached to that much, it was enough with burying it again mouth down, so that when digging it sank in place of coming out, or scattering seeds over the sepulcher, because the dead is obliged to count them one by one and the dawn surprises him in the count. The garlic, the holy water and the cross keep it at bay. These practices are documented in real exhumations throughout Eastern Europe until the 19th century.

The upyr is the link that carries the Slavic peasant fear to European literature. It shares nature with the Romanian strigoi and with the Greek vrykolakas, with which it forms the Balkan and Slavic family of the dead that returns, and from that common root proceeds the vampire that the West believed to discover in the eighteenth century, when the epidemics of the Balkans reached the newspapers of Vienna and Paris. In Russian literature it is fixed by Alekséi Konstantínovich Tolstói, who in 1841 published the story Upyr and later La familia del vurdalak, the most celebrated vampire story written in Russian. Before him, Pushkin had already translated Slavic vampiric motifs in his Canciones de los eslavos occidentales.