Bonn researcher Peter Kreuter argues that the legend of vampires is based on the fears and ignorance of the villagers, who looked for the cause of their troubles in the machinations of their fellow villagers.
There have long been clear and definite ideas about the appearance and behavior of vampires in Romanian villages. The vampire must be dressed or wrapped in a burial shroud. Slightly decayed skin wrinkled disgustingly on his cheeks, small holes gaped in his rotten nose. With such a repulsive appearance, it was easy to distinguish a vampire from a living person at first glance.
There were other vampires: ordinary villagers - a man from a neighboring house, a farm laborer, or an innkeeper. They were all known as flaky. The rural ghouls did not burn in the first rays of the morning sun and did not dig their fangs into the necks of their victims.
- In folk beliefs, as a rule, there are no picturesque, exotic bloodsuckers, - says the historian from the University of Bonn Peter Kreuter. They were invented by writers and filmmakers.
P. Kreuter researched numerous stories about vampires, to which ethnologists in former times rarely paid attention. The oldest message is dated 1382, and one of the most recent dates back to 1968.
These stories, recorded in Romania, Albania, Bulgaria and Macedonia, are replete with everyday details and are always precisely tied to a certain area. The ghouls in these village stories play the same role as in other places assigned to witches who were burned at the stake: they were the eternal scapegoats, guilty of all troubles and misfortunes. Some new disease appeared or hailed crops - whatever happened in the village, the ghoul was blamed for everything. If the vampire crawled out of the coffin, then there will be trouble: everyone who comes close to him will soon die from the same thing from which he died, and will also wander after death, like a restless person, and persecute his neighbors and relatives.
The ghouls tried to sneak around among the people. The deceased, crawling out of the grave, acquired the ability to turn into a toad, mouse, chicken or horse. The most skillful and cunning vampires could turn themselves into some kind of object, such as a pitchfork, a shovel, or a pot, so that people would not find them.
“Vampires were always close to people in order to seize the moment and attack the chosen victim,” says Peter Kreuter. - The peasant is having an afternoon snack, he will lie down on the border to take a nap after dinner, and the ghoul is right there!
Promotional video:
If garlic (the best remedy!), Holy water and charms did not help protect yourself from the vampire, the villagers carried out an investigation. An energetic search for the culprit began with sprinkling ash on the cemetery in order to find the intruder's footprints on an even layer. Sometimes they used another method: they let a black hen into the churchyard - a mystical creature that subtly senses the vibrations of the other world. Where the black hen nestles comfortably, there is a vampire underground!
For all the senselessness of these actions, they were not completely useless. “The fight against evil united the villagers, encouraged them and gave them confidence in victory,” Peter Kreuter concluded from the stories he heard about ghouls.
In the villages where they believed in vampires, all the dead were treated with great distrust. Especially suspicious seemed to fellow countrymen people who during their lifetime were distinguished by obvious oddities. One fell from a head of hay or was lying every day under the door of a tavern, another was marked with a birthmark or cursed by a midwife, someone died very young or, conversely, healed for a long time in the world - many fell under suspicion. They expected that the evil hidden in them would manifest after death, and they would wander among the living and harm them.
All suspicious deceased were dressed and prepared for burial especially carefully, with all possible precautions. To keep the "candidate for ghouls" quietly in his coffin, his Achilles and knee tendons were cut off. The body was pressed down with heavy stones, and sometimes even nailed to the boards of the coffin.
In Romania, only 20-25 years ago, there were people who injected cloves of garlic into the anus of the deceased and tied their legs with a rope. In some countries, quite recently, it was possible to observe special processions in the cemetery, organized to check the "suspicious" dead - whether they are decomposing or not. If the "public controllers" thought that the corpse was too fresh, they drove a stake of impressive size into the heart of a dead man - a universal way to calm the ghoul and finally send him to the next world.
The German historian notes that the vampire faith is especially deeply rooted in southeastern Europe. The ghouls rising from the graves, as it were, express a primitive answer to the question: what happens to people after death?
- Each vampire was proof of the reality of the other world, says Peter Kreuter. - After all, all the other dead who did not return to the village as ghouls, somewhere found eternal peace.
Many scientists believe that the emergence of legends about people from the afterlife who drink blood is quite simple to explain. People who fell ill with rabies (hydrophobia) sometimes rushed at people in a fit of inexplicable rage, and this could serve as the reason for fantastic ideas about bloodsuckers attacking people. Porphyria, a rare metabolic disorder in the body, produces very few red blood cells in the blood. The hypersensitive skin of patients with porphyria is "afraid" of sunlight, they are always deathly pale, and when talking, it is noticeable that their teeth are reddish.
Peter Kreuter disagrees with the theory that porphyria is a symptom of vampire stories:
- This is an extremely rare disease. For all centuries, only two hundred cases have been described. They could not have caused such a massive pervasive phenomenon as belief in ghouls.
In Romanian villages, they believed that a woman, whom a ghoul visits at night, would not die soon and would not leave the grave after death. Oddly enough, the village women were not particularly afraid of ghouls and secretly told their friends how hotly and passionately the "cold and slimy" people from the graves embraced them.
