Long before capes, castles and fangs, the vampire was a village problem. In the folklore of Central and Eastern Europe it was a dead neighbour who would not stay in the grave: a corpse blamed for sickness, bad luck and the deaths of its own family. The elegant count came much later. This is how the village revenant became the vampire everyone knows.
The upír and the restless dead
Most Slavic languages have an old word for the restless dead: upír in Slovak and Czech, upiór in Polish, upyr in Russian and vampir in Serbian. The folklore vampire looked nothing like the film vampire. Reports describe corpses that were bloated and ruddy, purplish or dark, with blood seeping from the mouth and nose as they lay in their shrouds, as if they had just fed. There were no fangs and no evening dress.
A folklore vampire also chose its victims close to home. It was blamed when one death in a village was followed by more, when cattle sickened or when relatives complained of being pressed and choked in their sleep. The cure was practical and grim: open the grave, look for signs, and stop the corpse from rising again. You can read what villagers used in Vampire Weaknesses in Folklore.
Kisilova, 1725: the case of Petar Blagojević
The vampire reached the rest of Europe through official paperwork. In 1725, in the village of Kisilova, probably today's Kisiljevo, in the Habsburg-ruled part of Serbia, nine people died within eight days, each after an illness of about a day. Villagers blamed Petar Blagojević, who had died shortly before. In front of the imperial official Ernst Frombald they opened his grave and found, they said, a body that had not decayed, with new skin and nails and fresh blood in the mouth. They drove a stake through his heart and burned the body.
Frombald's report was printed by the Vienna newspaper Wienerisches Diarium, today's Wiener Zeitung, on 21 July 1725. It used the word Vampyri, the first time the word appeared in print.
Medveđa, 1732: Arnold Paole and the army surgeons
A few years later came the case that made vampires famous. Arnold Paole, a former soldier in the village of Medveđa, had often said that a vampire had plagued him near a place called Gossowa, and that he had cured himself by eating earth from the vampire's grave and smearing himself with its blood. Around 1725 or 1726 he broke his neck in a fall from a hay wagon. Soon four people complained that he was tormenting them, and all four died. About forty days after his burial the villagers dug him up, staked him, cut off his head and burned his body.
When new deaths followed in 1731, the Austrian army sent investigators. A commission led by the military surgeon Johann Flückinger opened 17 graves in January 1732 and reported that 12 of the bodies were "quite complete and undecayed". The report, signed in Belgrade on 26 January 1732, was reprinted in journals and treatises across Europe and turned a Balkan village belief into an international debate.
How the word vampire reached English
English borrowed the word that same year. It is first recorded in 1732, spelled vampyre, in a London newspaper account of the cases. Linguists trace it through German Vampir and French vampire to Serbian vampir, which belongs to the same old Slavic family as upír. When you say vampire, you are using a word that travelled west from the Danube.
Enlightenment detectives
The reports started a long argument between belief and reason. In 1746 the Benedictine scholar Antoine Augustin Calmet published a treatise on apparitions and vampires, collecting the accounts and weighing them with visible unease. In Vienna, Empress Maria Theresa sent her personal physician, Gerard van Swieten, to investigate new vampire reports in Moravia in 1755. He called the belief a "barbarism of ignorance" and explained the undecayed bodies by natural causes such as fermentation and a lack of air in the grave.
The same year an imperial decree made it punishable to desecrate graves in the name of fighting vampires, and the traditional remedies of staking, beheading and burning were banned. Van Swieten later set out his arguments in a short treatise, published in 1768.
From the village to the castle
Literature finished the transformation. John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) gave us the aristocratic seducer, Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) the vampire countess and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) the count in his castle. Even Dracula could walk by day, only with weaker powers. Death by sunlight arrived later still, in the 1922 film Nosferatu. The full story is in Before Dracula: The First Vampire Stories.
Which kind of vampire would you have been? The Feral Romantic is the closest heir of the wild village revenant, and The Night Scholar would have been taking notes at the investigation. Take the vampire quiz to find out.