Vukodlak

The vukodlak comes out of South Slavic folklore, and its name says everything: from vuk, wolf, and dlaka, hair. It is the same word that gives volkodlak in Slovene and vlkodlak in Slovak, and in those languages it means werewolf and nothing else. In Serbo-Croatian, by contrast, the word drifted. In Bosnia, Montenegro and western Serbia, vukodlak is the ordinary word for a vampire; in eastern Serbia and in Bulgaria they say vampir, and the wolfish term keeps its original sense.

Vuk Karadžić recorded both meanings in his Serbian dictionary of 1818, and he did not present them as phases of anything. He presented them as what they are: two different definitions depending on where you ask. In Serbia, he wrote, the vukodlak is the dead man who rises from the grave swollen with blood to throttle livestock and visit the living. In Dalmatia, a living man who turns into a wolf by night.

Hence the vukodlak's reputation as a double creature, and it is worth being precise about what that duality consists of, because it is not the one usually told. It is not an obligatory cycle by which every vukodlak is first a wolf and then a vampire. It is a single word naming two different things in two different regions: the Serb who fears the vukodlak fears a corpse, and the Dalmatian who fears the vukodlak fears a neighbour who runs at night. Neither passes through the other's phase.

Where both usages coexist, tradition threw a bridge between them, and from that comes the belief that is indeed attested: that whoever was a werewolf in life rises as a vampire in death. It is best read as what it is, a seam between two definitions rather than the nature of the creature. That seam explains why in the Balkans the superstitions against the one and the other share the same methods, and why the vukodlak sits at the exact point where Western Europe separated the werewolf from the vampire and the South Slavic language never did.

Remedies against the vukodlak coincide with those of the Balkan vampire: exhumation of the corpse, wooden stake and purifying fire. These practices are applied because lycanthropy in life prepares vampirism after death. The tales insist that only complete destruction of the body stops the nocturnal attacks. The symbolism of the open grave and the moon reinforces the need for these rites. Eighteenth-century reports on cases like Arnold Paole confirm the widespread use of these measures in Serbia and neighboring regions. This coincidence of remedies explains why in the Balkans werewolves and vampires share the same superstitions. Oral sources preserve these practices as community defense against the unified threat.