"Vampire Graves" are found throughout Europe. These can be burials with a severed head or a body crushed by stones, or they can simply be remains turned face down. Curiously, the initial interpretation of all such burials as "graves of vampires" was offered not even by professional scientists, but only by workers who worked at one of the excavations.
Interest in everything mysterious and the overturning of current ideas into the past have done their job: a far from indisputable version has become a common place in scientific works and in the mass media. Lenta.ru together with Polish historians decided to test this hypothesis for strength.
In the world press and even in serious scientific journals, publications regularly appear on how archaeologists find more and more vampire graves. In 2009, Italian criminologists declared a woman a vampire, whose skull with a brick in its teeth was found on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo (Venice) among those who died during a plague epidemic in the 16th century. In 2011, two men from the 9th century burials in Kilteshin (Ireland) were named vampires (and almost the oldest in Europe).
Stones in the mouth, according to archaeologists, should have prevented them from rising from their graves and harming living beings. But most often the graves of ghouls are found on the territory of Poland: from Western Pomerania to Subcarpathia and from Krakow to Gdansk. Perhaps the fact is that fear of vampires began to spread throughout Europe from Slavic folklore, and in Poland, ghouls persecuted people more often than in other places (at least, their victims believed so).
A new generation of Polish scientists has proposed a different, no less curious hypothesis: the numerous "graves of vampires" arose due to methodological errors and conjectures of archaeologists of the 20th century, who easily donated all the unusual burials to bloodsuckers. The authors of the article in the journal World Archeology created a typology of strange graves and considered a variety of options for their occurrence - from the ineptitude of gravediggers to demonstrative executions of criminals.
The living and the dead
Finding out the real status of sorcerers, witches, werewolves and ghouls remains one of the most intriguing questions of history and anthropology. It is still unclear whether they actually existed (at least as people who deliberately practice forbidden magical rites) or were just sick innocent people, victims of slander, phobias and psychosis of relatives and neighbors. Suffice it to recall the massive witch hunts that struck many countries, the victims of which became thousands of people.
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The same vampirism can be explained by a rare genetic blood disease (porphyria), the symptoms of which fit into the appearance of the classic ghoul. Sunlight is contraindicated for patients, the skin around the lips and gums dries out, which is why the incisors are exposed to the gums; porphyrin settles on the teeth, staining them red.
But, whoever the witches and vampires really were, their existence was an indisputable fact of the psychology and spiritual life of the people of the Middle Ages, which, in turn, influenced material life. Scientists have to reconstruct the true events of history and their psychological motives, including for such objects as burials.
In the Middle Ages, on the lands of the Slavs, as in other parts of Europe, the church fought with fierceness against pagan funeral rites. The Slavs and Germans continued to put valuable things in the grave that would be useful to the deceased in the afterlife. During the night vigils over the deceased, they performed chants-spells, accompanying them with ritual dances. The priests were extremely negative about this: after all, according to Christian teachings, the soul of a person went to heaven or hell, to God, and not to a special "world of the dead", where, in the opinion of ordinary people, it was necessary to ensure a safe passage with the help of magical rites, so that the deceased did not harm the living.
However, even with the spread of Christianity among the broad masses of Europeans (including the Slavs), the division of the dead into "clean", who died a natural death, and "unclean" was preserved - this category could include suicides, drowned, executed, gentiles, sorcerers and unbaptized babies. Such dead people were buried behind the fence of the church, at a crossroads or in some other unusual way - because they were afraid that they would return to harm the world of the living.
Unbearable lightness of interpretation
In 1957, the historian Bonifacy Zielonka published an article describing unusual burials in Kuyavia (northern Poland): a woman buried face down and a decapitated man (the skull was found between his legs). One of the workers at the excavation decided that in front of him was the grave of a witch (strzhigi) - and the scientist agreed with this version! With the light hand of an unknown shovel worker, such an interpretation entered scientific use.
Excavations at the ancient "vampire" cemetery in Gliwice, Poland
Photo: Anrzej Grygiel / EPA / ITAR-TASS
Photo: Anrzej Grygiel / EPA / ITAR-TASS
In the 1960s and 1990s, archaeologists described dozens of such burials, but did not seek to speculate about their causes. A short mention that the dangerous dead were buried in this way in order to prevent them from returning from the other world became dogma and wandered from one monograph to another. At the same time, historians have no evidence that the Western Slavs in the early Middle Ages believed in the "living dead". Since the 1970s, all strange burials have been called "anti-vampire".
Only in the 2000s, archaeologists, joining forces with medieval historians, began to pay due attention to the social and legal context of burials - the legal culture of the Middle Ages, the study of specific instruments of execution and, most importantly, texts (chronicles and stories about the courts and executions of criminals). The authors of the article in World Archeology do not give a final and indisputable interpretation of the strange burials of the X-XIII centuries, but invite colleagues and readers to think with them about who, how and why could have been buried in them.
Precautions, mistakes and crimes
The first known atypical burials in Poland date back to the 10th century. Prior to this, the Western Slavs burned the dead, and it is impossible to detect strangeness in the fate of the dead from the cremated remains. Archaeologists describe three main types of anomalous burials: the deceased lies prone, he is decapitated, and stones lie on the corpse.
Schemes of some anomalous burials: from Zlota Pinchovska, Stara Zamek, Tsedynia and Radom
Photo: Leszek Gardeła
Burials "face down" were found throughout early medieval Europe - among the Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians and Slavs. In Poland, the burial place of a young woman from Gwiazdowo (western Poland), discovered back in 1937, is well known. She was buried face down, head south, face turned west. The grave contained three temporal rings of lead, bronze and silver rings, and an iron knife in a leather sheath.
The abundance of values, combined with the unusual way of locating the deceased, has become a mystery to archaeologists. In folklore, the first indications of such treatment of the dead are found in the 16th century, and the most famous text ("Treatise on the Strzygs") tells how in 1674 a Silesian after his death turned into a strzygun (demon) drinking blood.
The local priest ordered to dig up the grave and put the deceased face down, but the next night he got up from the grave again and beat his son to death. Only when the head of the corpse was cut off did it stop disturbing the community.
However, archaeologists remind that behind such picturesque sources of modern times, one can forget that in the Middle Ages people were buried head downwards with whom something shameful happened in life and who, literally, could not look their neighbors in the eyes. For example, they buried the French king Pepin the Short.
They acted in an identical way in order to save themselves from the evil eye of the deceased. Finally, one cannot discount the mistakes of the gravediggers, who in haste buried the corpses. That is, the fear that the deceased will return from the afterlife to drink the blood of the living is not the most likely reason for burial face down.
Decapitated corpses were found very often on the territory of Poland: these are skulls without skeletons, and skeletons without skulls, and graves where the skull was reburied. For example, in Dembchino (Western Pomerania), the remains of a woman of about 50 years old were found without a head. Her skull was most likely dug out of the ground and reburied face down next door.
In Kaldus (Kuyavia), a double grave was found: a man who, judging by the scars on his vertebrae, was beheaded, and the woman next to him had broken collarbones. Of course, chopping off the head in folklore and even in written sources is described as one of the important measures that prevent the dangerous dead from rising from the grave.
However, scientists write, and there are more ordinary explanations: the heads were very often cut off to criminals. Many tombs on the turtles have characteristic holes made with a sharp instrument: most likely, the severed heads were first hung on stakes and poles.
Thus, in the Middle Ages, the criminal was simultaneously punished and those who could follow his example were intimidated. Even a wooden stake in the grave, according to stratigraphy, was not a tool for fighting vampires, but a means of intimidating the people - having planted a head on it, the pole was stuck into the ground at the top of the hill where the cemetery was located (burial in Wolin, Western Pomerania).
Burial from Tsedynia (artist's reconstruction)
Photo: Leszek Gardeła / Mirosław Kuźma
Finally, there are graves with stones - more than twenty of them were found in Poland, they date back to the X-XIII centuries. In such burials, the stone was usually found on the site of the skull (a grave from Tsedyn, in the illustration) or on different parts of the body of the deceased. Scandinavian sources write about stoning as a punishment for witchcraft, but Polish texts are silent about it.
It is possible that the stones were designed not to let the dead out of the graves, but there is a more prosaic version: the stone held the dead man's head turned to the side, forcing him to "look" to the east (as required by Christian funeral rites). Everything can be explained even more simply: stones could protect graves from robbers and wild animals (Radom burial, in the illustration).
Fears and myths
The history of the "graves of vampires", their popularity in the scientific world, and then in the mass media, speaks of how often people tend to "overturn" their own fears and favorite myths into the past. In the same row - a search for images of aliens in rock paintings and temple frescoes. The people of the Middle Ages lived a very difficult life, and they had many fears of their own: before hunger and disease, knights and robbers, the devil and hell, the evil eye and curse, witches and bloodsuckers.
The transition to another world was one of the points where these fears were focused, as well as the means of dealing with them. Only recently have scientists begun to understand that turning modern ideas into the past not only distorts history, but also gives a much poorer and faded picture of the past than it really was.
Artem Kosmarsky
