A Vrykolakas Vampire in Sunny Mykonos

The Manic Panic of the Fear of the Vrykolakas

In 1701, a French botanist named Joseph Pitton de Tournefort arrived in Mykonos and witnessed something that he didn’t believe in himself, but swept the whole local community in a panic.

***Joseph Pitton de Tournefort:*** French botanist sent by Louis XIV to catalog plants in Greece and Asia Minor. He detailed his journey in, A Voyage Into the Levant, posthumously published in 1717 after he was run over by a carriage. It turned out to be one of the most detailed accounts of the belief in Vrykolakas and what the community did in face of a supposed haunting.

An annoying local resident was murdered and buried in a chapel in the remote countryside. It’s not specified what happened to his killer and if someone ever paid for his death. In life he had been ill natured and argumentative, and not many liked him alive. No one liked him in his afterlife.

A few days after his burial he was reported by the locals to be stalking the village as a vrykolakas, harassing people in their homes, emptying wine barrels, and causing much disturbance of a poltergeist nature. Doors rattled and the lights went out on their own.

Exorcising a Vrykolakas

The things and haunting the vrykolakas caused were said to be mostly harmless, but when he started harassing the wealthy people and when a donkey was found beaten up. The villagers gathered to call a priest to stop it all.

Locals insisted that the man be exhumed and exorcised to stop the haunting of the vrykolakas. The church allowed it, at least, the rituals went ahead anyway and they buried the man up to look at his corpse. The witnesses claimed that the body was not decaying as it should have and that it was unnatural how well preserved it was.

It’s worth noting that according to de Tournefort and his other foreign associates, it was well decayed. How it really was is unknown today, but as we have seen in other stories about the Vrykolakas, a decaying corpse in the ground doesn’t necessarily stop people from believing it needs to be exorcised.

***The Vrykolakas Vampires:*** In Greek folklore, they believed in the vampiric Vrykolaka. Traditionally believed that a person could become a vrykolakas after death due to a sacrilegious way of life, but also through other means, like A cat leaping across a fresh grave, Consuming meat from a sheep slain by a wolf or werewolf. Some believed that a werewolf itself could become a powerful vampire after being killed. This revenant wasn’t after just the blood, but also the flesh, some saying the liver was its favorite.

Burn the Heart of the Vrykolakas

As a final thing, they decided to remove the person’s heart to burn it, but there were no trained doctors there, and they brought a butcher to the chapel instead. The butcher had problems finding the heart however and ended up mutilating the body in search for it. It was a horrible stench, and although the priests burned incense to cover it up, fear spread through the crowd. The author things that the smell, sight and superstition caused people to hallucinate, and they started screaming “Vrykolakas” to his mutilated body, warm with what seemed like fresh blood.

The corpse’s heart was removed, taken to the seashore and burned. A detail of the ritual that also happened on the other side of the world in the New England Vampire Panic a century later. His body was reinterred, but then the haunting of the vrykolakas’ only increased. He was apparently entering their homes now, beating people up in their sleep. According to lore, knocking on people’s doors appears in many stories about the vrykolakas. They only knocked once, calling the names of those living there. If you opened for the vrykolakas, everyone inside could die. That’s why there still is a saying in Greece, you should only answer the door on the second knock.

They tried holding a chanting march of prayers through the village, but it didn’t work. They tried hammering nails into the body, but no luck. People fled their home, the streets were empty after dark.

Finally the body was taken to another island and cremated. Lore tells that the Vrykolakas can’t cross salt water on their own, so on the Greek islands, bodies of those suspected of being vampiric would be put on uninhabited islands. In this case, his body was transported in secret, since this was apparently against Orthodox canon and the local priest feared an official reprimand. According to Ortodox doctrin, it’s not compatible with the doctrine of bodily resurrection. On January 16th, 1701, they took the boat out, some believing it could be to the islet of Baos just off the coast of Mykonos. With that extreme measure, all phenomena ceased, according to de Tournefort’s account.

When the travel account was published in 1717, the timing coincided with the European vampire panic that would take hold of the continent, and the cases of vampires in Serbia and other places in eastern Europe would cement the lore of vampirism into modern folklore.

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