Vrykolakas

The vrykolakas (βρυκόλακας) is the reanimated dead of Greek folklore, a revenant whose name, of Slavic origin, shares root with other vampiric terms of the Balkans. According to tradition, he who died in a state of impurity or under curse became vrykolakas: the excommunicated by the Church (to whom it was believed that the earth did not accept), those who died without being baptized or of violent death, the suicides, or those who had led a perverse life. A particular belief held that also could become vrykolakas he who had eaten the flesh of an animal dead by a wolf. The Orthodox Church, which considered the incorruption of the body an ambiguous sign, contributed to fix the belief that certain deceased did not find rest.

Unlike the pale and emaciated vampire of literature, the vrykolakas is described as a swollen and tense corpse, with darkened, reddish or purplish skin, with the body swollen by the gases of decomposition, an aspect that ethnography relates to the real observation of corpses. It is attributed a fully corporeal nature: it is not a ghost, but a tangible body endowed with superhuman strength, capable of forcing doors. It wanders at night and, in some traditions, knocks on the doors of houses and pronounces the name of its inhabitants; it was believed that answering the first call brought death, so it was recommended to always wait for the second. Its proximity brought illness, nightmares and misfortune to the community.

The vrykolakas spreads epidemics and deaths in the village, exhausts the living, attacks the livestock and is accused of sitting on the chest of the sleepers. It is attributed a strength much superior to the human and a growing virulence with the passage of time if it is not destroyed. Among its limits, tradition points out its inability to act during the day, when it must remain in the tomb, and the protective power of Christian symbols, holy water and the crowing of the rooster at dawn. Its activity was especially associated with the islands of the Aegean, where beliefs were particularly intense, as attested by accounts collected by European travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

To put an end to a vrykolakas the corpse was exhumed, often on Saturday, the day on which tradition held that the revenant had to remain in its tomb. The methods included driving a stake into the body, beheading it or, especially on the islands, incinerating it completely, something that clashed with Orthodox doctrine on bodily resurrection and caused tensions with the Church. The scholar León Allacio described these beliefs in his treatise De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus (1645), one of the oldest sources on the subject. The vrykolakas is counted among the folkloric antecedents of the modern vampire and constitutes the Greek variant of a figure common to all the Balkans, related to the Romanian strigoi and the Slavic upir.