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Vampire Stories in Greece and the

Reinforcement of Socio-Cultural Norms
Evangelos Avdikos
Published online: 27 Nov 2013.

To cite this article: Evangelos Avdikos (2013) Vampire Stories in Greece and the Reinforcement of Socio-
Cultural Norms, Folklore, 124:3, 307-326, DOI: 10.1080/0015587X.2013.829666

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 Folklore 124 (December 2013): 307–26
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2013.829666

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Vampire Stories in Greece and the Reinforcement

of Socio-Cultural Norms
Evangelos Avdikos
Abstract
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This paper investigates the relationship of humans with the supernatural and the
function of the latter as a normalizing factor in social organization. The focus is on
traditional Greek stories about vampires and the aim is to study the
relationship between vampires and the ‘cultural capital’ of the local community, on
the one hand, and, on the other, beliefs about the progress of the soul after its departure
from the body upon death. The Greek vampire (vrikolakas) is examined in relation to both
the concept of faith in Orthodox Christianity and traditional death rituals, some of them
pagan survivals.

Worldview and Religion: An Outline of the Context

‘The vampire is the most exciting and the most fearful of the creatures of folk culture’
(Dundes 1998, vii). When talking of vampires, most people feel revulsion towards them to
varying degrees. This may cover an unconscious fear, which is expressed by an
unwillingness to continue the conversation. Despite this, from the nineteenth century to
the early twentieth century, vampires were an object of increasing interest on the part
of both scholars and film directors, who created literary and cinematographic narratives
based on popular tales about vampires (Comstock 1891; Hollinger 1989; Bailie 2011).
The manner in which supernatural creatures are represented in people’s minds has
changed over recent decades, as modern culture spreads over an ever-widening group of
populations, affecting their relationship with their earlier system of beliefs. A Greek
informant quoted by Charles Stewart remarked on this recent change of attitudes
towards exotiká (literally, ‘things from outside’)—supernatural beings of various kinds,
including elves, fairies, ghosts, and vampires (vrikolakes):1
Earlier, when people were virtuous and had faith, they were often attacked by exotiká. Now people no
longer believe [in God]; they perform all sorts of horrible acts. They have gone to the Devil. There is no
need for the Devil to come in search of them. (Stewart 1991, 97)

The final words of Stewart’s informant suggest an oppositional schema of ‘traditional’

versus ‘modern’ society for perceiving the supernatural world, in which the first pole is
identified with belief in a supreme being, God, while the second refers to the Devil and
the decline of piety that has allowed supernatural powers to settle within populated
areas and become an element in social behaviour (Berger 1969, 14; Kligman 1988, 2). The
informant’s submerged fear and declaration that exotiká have disappeared indicates a
change in the perceived relationship between humanity and the supernatural world
q 2013 The Folklore Society
 308 Evangelos Avdikos

(Stewart 1989, 77 –104; Kapferer 1991, 17). As Hermann Bausinger says, people are more
troubled by supernatural forces when traditional measures to prevent or cure them
cease to be practised (Bausinger 1990, 47; Thomas 1971, 498).
A dichotomy between modern scepticism and traditional understandings of the
supernatural also informs the relationship between the collector and the informant, an
old shepherd named Yorgi, in the following story, collected on Evia Island, by Anastasios
D. Vlachos in 1953, and preserved in the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre Archive (KL)
in Athens:2
A very old shepherd told me the following story:
‘It was many years ago—over four hundred moons. I once had a very close friend. Together we had
sheepfolds and beehives. An epidemic once spread over the village and my friend died. Nobody
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happened to care for him and a dog strode over the corpse. All the people in the village whispered that
he had become a vampire, but I didn’t believe it. One pitch black night, blacker than the priest’s
cassock, I was sleeping in the sheepfold and not far from me, towards the beehives, my three dogs were
sleeping curled up and I cannot explain why I had a strange fear that night. The coals in the fire were
half-extinguished. Suddenly it seemed to me that somebody was calling me from the adjacent gully. I
listened and I recognized my dead friend’s voice. “Yorgi, hey! Yorgi”, he called me. I was in a cold
sweat. It made my knees knock. Of course I am not a coward—I have proved it—but it’s a very different
thing to be called by a dead man. “Don’t be afraid, Yorgi”, he says to me, “I am coming to talk a bit.
What you have to do is to cover your face with your clothes, so you will not be terrified”. Then he came
close to me and I felt that he was sitting down beside me. He started asking plenty of questions about
the sheep, the cheese and in turn I replied to him, covered, as I was, by the clothes. Later, the talk
turned to the beehives. The deceased was a good beekeeper, when he was alive. At one point, he told
me, “I want to eat some honey (you must know that the vampires like sweet things). I’ll go to the
beehives. Are the dogs there?”
“No”, I said, “the dogs are at the pools”. Certainly I lied to him, for he took just a few steps towards the
beehives and the dogs pounced on him. Pandemonium broke out in the dark and icy night. “Hey! Yorgi,
my friend Yorgi”, he started shouting to me. I didn’t say a word, for I knew that the dogs step back,
when they hear somebody’s voice. In a few minutes the dogs had stopped. They had eaten him. When I
went to the place in the morning, I saw just some blood stains. After that we got rid of the vampire’, he
said crossing himself.
‘Could be possible that you dreamt it, Uncle Yorgi?’ I asked him.
‘Teacher, my hair turned white, but I have never lied’, he said angrily. ‘Write this story, so that
all the educated who don’t believe learn of it’, he told me, emptying his glass of raki.
‘I’ll write it, Uncle Yorgi’, I said, swearing never to question his words. (KL MS 2042, 53 –54)

This example highlights the issue of ‘a traditional set of beliefs’ as a system of thought
and behaviour (Toelken 1996, 56), especially in an era that has marginalized these and
promoted reason as the exclusive means of analysis and comprehension. In Stewart’s
view, it is pointless to go in search of this kind of system where rationalism
predominates. The present paper deals with just such a belief system. It explores and
aims to illuminate the relationships between people and the exotiká, between the
supernatural world and the social and cultural systems, or ‘worldview’ (Howell 1989, 58;
Redfield 1968, 88).
The concept of worldview includes the totality of assumptions and views relating to
the structure of the whole world, including nature, society, human and non-human
beings, and all powers, visible or otherwise (Aswad 2002, 2). Roy Rappaport is of the view
 Vampire Stories and Reinforcement of Socio-cultural Norms 309

that principles informing worldviews function as axioms and as a contextual paradigm

defining how the entire world is constructed (Rappaport 1999, 264).
A worldview may also be regarded as a web of cultural meanings (Geertz 1973, 5), the
study of which can contribute to revealing and understanding social structure. In my
view, however, one captures the nature of a worldview more accurately if one adopts
Clifford Geertz’s approach of ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973, 26), so that the significance
of particular cultural practices becomes clear. A worldview is a fundamental factor and
context in constructing an identity, in transferring cultural materials, and in allowing
memory to function and human behaviour to orient and reorient itself. A worldview is
also an ideological complex that moulds the consciousness of peoples. It influences their
way of thinking, analysing, and understanding matters, and their view of themselves. For
example, the funerary rites discussed below are performed to ensure a ‘good death’ and
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their performance ensures the transmission of the worldview within the community. By
the same token, the worldview is also transmitted via the narratives about vampires that
are the focus of this article and which illustrate, by contrast, the dire consequences of
failure to observe accepted rites and norms of behaviour (Aswad 2002, 2).
A worldview is thus both a set of rules that organizes daily life and a mechanism for
comprehending the relationship between human beings, on the one hand, and divine
powers and the supernatural world, on the other. It is the means by which people make
sense of their environment and their cultural practices whereby social relations are
produced and reproduced. In this sense, the worldview is not a visible, structured
system; rather, it informs every human activity.
Religion is such a worldview, whatever the form in which it manifests itself. Scholars
of religion have remarked upon the fact that it consists of a totality of beliefs and
practices that, rather than being restricted to relations with divine power, in fact
saturate daily life and behaviour and shape ideas about what happens after death. Max
Weber, in the first years of the twentieth century, showed the decisive influence of
religion as an ethical system shaping human behaviour, both at an individual and a
general level (Weber 1950, 36). In 1912, Émile Durkheim saw in religion and ritual a
means of tightening social relations and of continuation of the community via the
initiation of its members into social values (Durkheim 1995, 9). Such a theoretical
approach concentrates upon the social function of religion (functionalism), in contrast
to that of Geertz, who studied ‘religion as a cultural system’ in the 1970s and defined it as
an organized system of symbols by means of which the members of a society
comprehend the world and its meaning (Geertz 1973, 87 –126). Irrespective of these
different scholars’ interpretations, religion is a worldview indissolubly linked to the
concepts of faith and of God or the supernatural. Thus, Durkheim’s definition is
extremely useful:
A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set
apart and forbidden beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a
Church, all those who adhere to them. (Durkheim 1995, 44)

The present article analyses a system of beliefs and practices in Greece in the context of
Orthodox Christianity. Focusing specifically on the vampire (vrikolakas), this essay
explores aspects of the traditional worldview in Greece up to the 1960s. The stories about
vampires are drawn from both archival and published sources, especially the archives of
 310 Evangelos Avdikos

the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre, and the Traditions of Nikolaos Politis (1852 –1921),
the founder of Greek folklore as a scholarly discipline (Politis n.d., 573– 609; Herzfeld
1986, 97 –122; Avdikos 2010, 160 – 61; all translations of Politis’s material are my own).
The stories form the reference point for an understanding of how Greek society
functions and of how the social and the supernatural worlds relate to each other. In
order to understand traditional Greek supernatural beings, one must consider them in
connection with the Orthodox faith in Greece and its ideas regarding human life and
one’s fate after death. In other words, vampires express the value system of a
community, while also raising more general questions regarding body and soul.
As with all religions, the Orthodox faith is not homogeneous: faiths consist of various
layers, old and new. Official Orthodox Christianity comprises principles that theologians
and Church Fathers formulated over many years. Their basic aim was, and is, to wipe out
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the traces of paganism that sprang from ancient Greece and that were grafted on to
Christianity during the first two centuries of the Byzantine empire (fourth to fifth
centuries CE ; Alexiou 1974, 24– 25). Death rituals are an area in which the presence of
ritual practices that date back to the most distant past is still very strong. One example is
the display of intense lamentation, involving tearing the hair and lacerating the face,
whereby the relatives of the dead express their pain during the laying out of the corpse,
the funeral procession, and burial. The official Orthodox Church regards these cultural
practices as inappropriate to Christian conceptions about death. Such views form a
continuum, from extreme positions, such as that of St John Chrysostom (c.344 – 407 CE ),
who rejected mourning and lamentation as expressions of lack of faith, to more modern
and tolerant theological views, which accept lamentation, but reject excessively great or
lengthy mourning (Faros 2006, 151).
While a knowledge of Orthodox faith and theology is essential for an understanding of
the vampire as an aspect of traditional Greek worldview and its relationship with faith,
death, life, and community values, this alone is not sufficient because Orthodoxy as a
cultural practice has absorbed many of the elements of the paganism of ancient Greece.
Stewart, in particular, having studied the place of the supernatural and of religion on the
Greek Cycladic island of Naxos, discovered that, despite opposition on the part of the
official Orthodox Church to the concept of exotiká, such entities form a component of
modern Greek culture (Stewart 1991, 9).
We must begin, then, from the position that modern Greek culture is not only made
up of beliefs drawn from the official Orthodox faith, but is also composed of powerful
survivals from ancient Greek culture that have withstood the denigration of the official
Church. Thus, popular religion, a mixture of Orthodox and pagan beliefs, is shaped by
folklore/popular culture (Watkins 2004, 140 – 50) and forms both a system for
comprehending the world and a set of rules for organizing cultural practices.

Greek Vampires: Definition and Appearance

Those who committed plenty of sins in their life do not rest after they die. Instead, they leave their grave
and return to the places where they used to spend their time, when they were alive. (Politis n.d., 573)

This extract from a vampire story collected on the island of Mykonos refers in general
terms to what causes the phenomenon: the commission of many sins in life. In addition,
 Vampire Stories and Reinforcement of Socio-cultural Norms 311

the narrator describes the basic feature of vampirism: the dead leave their graves. As
such, a vampire is evidently a type of ghost or revenant. There are no clear dividing lines
between genres of supernatural figures (Dégh 1996, 41); the different categories are all
interdependent (Dundes 2007, 194), and together they form the whole supernatural
world (Stewart 1991, 162 – 63). This definition presents the vampire as a kind of ‘undead’
or resurrected corpse (Murgoci 1998, 13), a phenomenon that appears to occur under
certain conditions and seems to arise independently in the traditions of many different
cultures. In Paul Barber’s words:
There are such creatures everywhere in the world, it seems, in a variety of disparate cultures: dead
people who, having died before their time, not only refuse to remain dead, but return to bring death to
their friends and neighbors. (Barber 1988, 2)
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The vampire’s malevolent disposition is exacerbated by its ugly and terrifying appearance,
evident in the following descriptions (all from Politis n.d., except where indicated):
People thought that vampires were like a skin consisting of a trunk, without feet. (Thrakiotis 1991, 301)
A skin that stands upright. (Politis n.d., 575)
He came out (of the grave) like a ferret. (Politis n.d., 577)
A dreadful black dog was seen to emerge from the grave of Hondros, an old man. (Politis n.d., 578)
Vampires look like a fire at night. (Politis n.d., 581)
A noise in the grave is heard. (Politis n.d., 546)
Vampires are horrifying, black, with big nails dyed in blood. Their hair is long and their beard is rough.
(Politis n.d., 587)
A vampire emerges from the grave, red, like a balloon and tumbles. (KL MS 2394, 12)
People imagine vampires to have a human body, with horns on their head, and big staring eyes and
large, sharp teeth, with long nails. (KL MS 2442, 145)

Vampires return from the dead and cause harm to the living: ‘The dead often leave their
grave shrouded. They walk up and down the roads at night, enter houses and break
whatever they find’ (Politis n.d., 574). Vampires disturb private and public places by
indulging in various types of antisocial behaviour, interrupting the rhythm of people’s
lives. They knock on doors, shout at, beat, and intimidate anyone they meet (Politis n.d.,
578 and 585; Summers 1961, 135). They enter the houses of their relatives, where they eat
whatever food they find, such as flour, butter, cheese, and meat, while also drinking water
from the pitcher and pouring wine from barrels (Politis n.d., 581). They drag beds from
their places and overturn furniture (Hufford 1982, 205). In one instance, a vampire enters
the bedroom of a Catholic nun. A poor woman gathering herbs in a field sees him and she
is so terrified by his appearance that she loses her voice (Politis n.d., 583). They suffocate
people in their beds, especially newly married couples and babies in their cradles, whose
blood they enjoy sucking (Politis n.d., 586; Mouzakis 1989, 24). Vampires also steal eggs,
hens, and goats, and suck nanny goats’ nipples until they squeal with pain (Politis n.d., 577
and 587). They destroy agricultural produce, suffocate and kill animals, and spread illness
(Mouzakis 1989, 22 and 27). They make women pregnant, and cause pregnant women to
miscarry (Politis n.d. 596 and 586). They drink oil from lamps in cemeteries, cause villages
 312 Evangelos Avdikos

to be abandoned, and generally frighten everyone (Politis n.d., 596; Mouzakis 1989, 22;
Summers 1961, 135). Naturally, all the villagers in question are upset, as they cannot
discover what sort of being is causing the damage (KL MS 2394, 12 –13).
To sum up: vampires are often represented as monstrous, with large feet, nails, and
lips, swollen belly, red nails, and long red hair (Mouzakis 1989, 17 –18). They are animal-
like in appearance and endowed with an extraordinary transformative ability (Barber
1988, 39 –45), and when they do assume a human appearance it is grossly exaggerated. In
this next story, the vampire at first appears in normal human form, but at the critical
point of exposure he is so exaggerated that he becomes merely a balloon full of air
(hence tymbanieos ‘swollen’ as a term for a vampire):
A soldier killed in a war became a vampire. His sergeant, who buried him, sent a letter to his wife about
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her husband’s death. The vampirized soldier succeeded in avoiding being eaten by dogs (if a vampire
can avoid dogs, it regains human form). So the soldier went back to his wife. They lived together except
on Thursday and Saturday nights, which he spent outside his house. He returned at dawn holding
pieces of liver. His wife fried them, but she did not eat them, for the liver smelled of soil (this shows
that he took the liver from the dead). Each Sunday her husband went to church, but some people
observed that he left at the point when the priest was preparing to take the sacred objects out of the
sanctuary. He had two children whom he fed with livers. Such behaviour alerted and upset the
villagers, who started suspecting him. Their suspicion turned to certainty when the sergeant who had
buried him happened to come to the village. He went to the vampire’s wife and told her to press the
skin of her husband to see whether he had bones or not. Indeed she did as the sergeant told her and she
discovered that her husband was just skin, swollen and boneless. Next Sunday all the villagers agreed
to lock the doors and the windows in the church at the point when the vampire decided to leave. In
fact, when the sacred objects were brought out they shut the doors and windows. The vampire and his
children ran to leave the church, but they found the doors closed. At this moment, the priest came out
of the sanctuary with the holy objects and a loud crack was heard. The vampire and his children
exploded and they scattered like smoke, without leaving a trace. (KL MS 2042, 52 – 53)

Causes of Vampirism
Paul Barber identified four loose groups of causes of vampirism (Barber 1988, 29– 37):
(1) Predisposition: notable delinquents, or, worse, alcoholics or suicides (Campbell
1964, 337; Hufford 1982, 229); robbers or highwaymen; witches and werewolves
(Barber 1988, 29– 30 and 71); sorcerers (Cremene 1981, 85).
(2) Predestination: some ‘become revenants through no fault of their own:
illegitimate children, a trait that can also be passed on for seven generations’
(Cremene 1981, 38; see also Murgoci 1998, 20); babies born with certain defects or
unusual signs, such as teeth, or a caul (Barber 1988, 30 – 31).
(3) Events: being bitten by a vampire, a very common motif in literature and films
(Barber 1988, 32– 37); a creature passing over the corpse (Cremene 1981, 84;
Weigand 1894, 122); or a candle being passed over it (Blum and Blum 1970, 73).
(4) Things left undone: especially ‘funerary and burial practices’ (Barber 1988, 37):
thus, those who die alone and unattended, or ‘unseen’, risk becoming vampires
(Barber 1988, 71).
The circumstances and traits predisposing certain deceased to vampirism are as varied
in Greece as elsewhere in the Balkans. Many were listed by J. C. Lawson and other early
 Vampire Stories and Reinforcement of Socio-cultural Norms 313

scholars, and archive sources provide further examples, most falling into Barber’s four
categories.
In the first category fall sinful people: money-lenders (Campbell 1964, 337); anyone
who is responsible for the death of a good man (Politis n.d., 576), or who eats the flesh of
a sheep slain by a wolf (Lawson 1910, 375 –76), or who wishes to eat a child (Politis n.d.,
590); Gypsy women and other strangers (Loukopoulos 1914, 450); individuals who do not
go to church regularly (Mouzakis 1989, 23); people of different faiths, apostates, and
Greeks who ‘become Turks’ (i.e. become Muslims) (Politis n.d., 579).3
In Barber’s second category are also babies conceived during a holy period (Lawson
1910, 375 – 76; Megas 1979, 37), or who died unbaptized (Mouzakis 1989, 13):
The baby was sinful from the minute it opened his/her eyes. If the baby died unbaptized, it was
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regarded as a great sin. Each night the baby came to the house to bother his/her parents when they
slept. It wanted his/her Christian name and it became a vampire. A baby with a reddened face was
seen. It went up and down the house ladder for forty days. (Sarandi-Stamouli 1952, 186)

In my day, there was a light at Agios Athanasios, which then moved to Agios Visarionas and all the way
over there, for in here illegitimate children and unbaptized babies are buried. They become vampires
and come back. (KL MS 2301, 469)

The fourth and fifth categories overlap to the extent that they involve the violation of
certain social and cultural rules, either by the individuals while still alive, or by their
relatives who fail to show them due respect either in life or in death by neglecting to
perform the appropriate death rituals. This includes anyone who ill-treats his or her
parents (Kassis 1981, 11); who dies under a curse, especially a parent’s (Lawson 1910,
375 – 76); or who utters a profanity while dying, or is profaned by another at that time. It
is also important that the laid-out corpse be protected from being stepped over by a cat
or other creature: ‘Somebody died and before he was buried, he was jumped over by a
cat. After that, his blood revived and he appeared each night’ (KL MS 2394, 12; Politis n.d.,
578; Avdikos 2002, 184). In her article about vampires, Juliet Du Boulay argues that there
is a particular cyclic pattern which is ‘fundamental to . . . beliefs relating to the
vampire’ (Du Boulay 1998, 86). She uses cyclic imagery as an analytical concept
suitable for an analysis of the Greek vampire, because the customs which cluster around the vampire
show that what is on one level a principle of alliance can become on another level a principle of
destructiveness, in which society appears as much threatened by the phenomenon as consolidated. (Du
Boulay 1998, 87)

This is exemplified in the motif of a cat’s action in ‘crossing over’ the dead body. Such an
action would destroy the social fabric and the relatives of the dead would be socially
stigmatized as well. This argument is expanded by Gregory Forth and Svitlana
Kukharenko, who widen their topic to explore the cross-cultural ‘theme of traversal
leading to reanimation’ (Forth and Kukharenko 2012, 157 and 160). Interestingly, in
Greece prohibition of ‘traversal’ is not limited to the corpse. Rather, it is part of a body of
Greek beliefs related to crossing over a person, alive or dead. This movement is thought
to cause individual unhappiness to the person crossed over. By breaching the protective
‘magic circle’ that surrounds an individual, crossing over is believed to be a violent,
aggressive action that challenges individuality and insults the person.
 314 Evangelos Avdikos

A personal example of ‘crossing over’ leading to vampirization comes from my own

family. My mother, Konstantina Avdikou, recounted the following story that her cousin’s
wife, Nikolena, had told her about what she herself had suffered in the 1960s after the
death of her mother-in-law, my mother’s aunt, while her husband was away from home:
Nikolena’s mother-in-law died in the house. My cousin was not there, as he was away travelling. When
her mother-in-law died, the daughter-in-law, [Nikolena] said nothing to anybody. She took the corpse
out of the house into the courtyard. She put the body on two chairs, covering it with a blanket. Then
she whitewashed the house and did the housework. Then she sent a message to the family and
relatives: the mother-in-law had died and they had to come and bury her.
A cat stepped over my aunt, thus polluting her. My aunt returned at night. Nikolena, her daughter-in-
law, heard repeated knocks on the door all night. ‘My daughter-in-law, Nikolena, open the door to let
me enter the house. It is very cold outside’. Nikolena was terrified. She couldn’t sleep. She went to Olga,
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my sister, who sent her to the priest. He advised her to exhume and burn my aunt, as she had become a
vampire. They went to the grave. The priest read some chants. The daughter-in-law took my aunt out
of the grave and burnt her bones. The priest advised her not to leave even a trace. After burning the
body, the daughter-in-law scattered the ashes. My aunt did not visit her again and since then Nikolena
has calmed down. (Konstantina Avdikou, pers. comm., 2006)

Vampires may also result from dying ‘before one’s time’; for example, a newly married
man may appear to his wife as a vampire and make her pregnant (Kassis 1981, 187).
Related to this is suffering a ‘bad death’, which includes people killed in their own fields
and whose corpses lie unburied for a long time (Politis n.d., 581 –90; Lawson 1910, 375 –
76), or who die by murder or accident, or especially suicide:
A soldier and I went to swim in a stream and he drowned. Nobody could save him. A swimmer came
and took him out of the stream. He was dead. After a few days he became a vampire and went and
swam in this place. And I kept watch there and I heard a noise when he jumped in the stream. (KL MS
2301, 231)
My son, I remember that in my day many vampire stories were told about people who haunted places
and it was not the case for all people, but just those who had a bad death—who had suffocated,
committed suicide, fell over a precipice. Besides, those who are jumped over by a cat might then haunt
the place. That’s why the relatives sit around a corpse until it is buried. After that vampires terrify
people, who pour wine mixed with oil on the grave in order to stop them appearing, especially on the
point of the grave where the head is. So people propitiate them. (KL MS 1608, 100)

Several scholars have remarked that the causes of vampirism focus on violations of
social rules. J. K. Campbell noted this in his ethnographic study of the Sarakatsani
(Campbell 1964, 337). Ariadni Gerouki’s two categories of vampire stories express this
too: excess, whether in life or in death and burial; and lack of fulfilment, where the
deceased failed to undergo a ritual (Gerouki 1996 – 97, 110; Drettas 1985, 201 – 18)
Likewise, Du Boulay considered that the first group of stories all referred to a memorable
sin as the cause of vampirism, while the second includes all those in which vampirism
occurs because the living betray contempt for the deceased by refusing or neglecting the
appropriate ritual (Du Boulay 1998, 88). The second category consists basically of
religious practices performed during the death rites, specifically those associated with
transition from the world of the living to that of the dead, which is regarded as very
important both for the living and the dead (Gennep 1960, 146; Turner 1967, 94; Danforth
1982, 45).
 Vampire Stories and Reinforcement of Socio-cultural Norms 315

Vampires and Cultural Capital

Vampires offer both threat and stability to a group (Du Boulay 1998, 87). This apparent
contradiction is linked with the rituals of death and with the social crisis brought about
by the failure of the deceased to be incorporated fully into the world of the dead. This
concept is found in both paganism and Christianity. Death is regarded as a journey that is
completed only once the deceased are definitely integrated into the world of the dead,
thus avoiding the possibility of remaining in some intermediate no-man’s land.
The relatives of the deceased believe deeply in the importance of this journey and
take care to carry out all of the necessary rites both before and after the interment
of the deceased—mnimosyna (mnhmósyna, ‘memorial services’)—so as to ensure the
completion of the whole ritual. Because the deceased are unable to help themselves
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finish the journey to the world of the dead, it is the responsibility of the family to ensure
that their passage is aided by the prescribed ritual practices. Such practices include the
closing of the eyes of the corpse, so that it is unable to find the way back to the land of
the living, in the form of a vampire. In fact, all bodily orifices are sealed, so that the
whole body is closed and there is consequently nothing to hinder the journey. The rites
also include lamentation and the mnimosyna, all of which derive from ancient Greek
religious practice. The Church has accepted the mnimosyna, which include the trita
(tríta), three days after the death; the niamera (niámera), after nine days; the saranta
(saránta), after forty days; the sto hrono (sto xróno), after one year; and the trihrona
(tríxrona), after three years—to give them their folk names. This cycle of ritual
practices is completed in the third year after the death and links the Orthodox
conception of the soul after death to the folk prevention of vampirization. In contrast,
the person who dies alone, remains unburied, blasphemes while dying or is the object of
blasphemy during the rite of passage, or whose relatives for some reason do not perform
the correct rituals, fails to be incorporated into the world of the dead and runs the risk of
becoming a vampire, which is a source of disgrace to his or her family. Improper
performance of the funerary rites may include excessive lamentation at the moment
when the soul leaves the body, as this may have frightened away the angels who
descended to earth to accompany the soul of the dying person.
Furthermore, the deceased becomes a vampire if his or her life is not consonant with
the ‘cultural capital’ of the community. As Pierre Bourdieu defines it, cultural capital (as
distinct from economic and social capital) is the totality of ways of thought, ideas,
cultural practices, and cultural representations, which are amassed over the centuries as
the cultural heritage of a community. Of his three forms of cultural capital (embodied,
objectified, and institutionalized) it is ‘embodied’ cultural capital that most concerns us
here. Bourdieu himself defines it as ‘the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and
body’ (Bourdieu 1986, 244). Thus, the basic concepts on which further analysis of
vampirism rests are the relations between worldview and cultural capital, and between
worldview and conceptions of life and death.
Narratives convey cultural capital—including representations of the supernatural
world, social relations, and cultural practices—to members of a community. Through
vampire stories, the community transmits not only cultural traditions about vampires,
but also the norms of local culture that the vampires illustrate by antithesis. When a
deceased person becomes a vampire, this generates both discussion about the subject
 316 Evangelos Avdikos

and a social crisis that is capable of reordering the position of the affected family within
the community. As a result, the members of the group become acquainted with, or
refresh their memories of, the local value system and cultural capital is reproduced in
the process.
The cultural capital of a community is also employed in the funerary rituals that aim
to avoid the social crisis that arises upon the failure of the deceased to be incorporated
into the world of the dead. Vampires emerge during ‘critical phases’ (Blum and Blum
1970, 1), and paradoxically support cultural capital and social structure. Transitional
times and phases are commonly associated with danger. Midnight is ‘the dangerous
hour’, as Richard and Eva Blum state, for it marks the transition between one day and the
next (Blum and Blum 1970, 1; Megas 1979, 37). Similarly, the transition of an individual to
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a new social position is a critical—or liminal—phase, during which the object of the rite
of passage loses his or her old social identity (Turner 1969, 15). This liminal phase can
become a crisis if something goes wrong and the transition remains incomplete. Death,
already the greatest of individual crises, may become a serious social crisis, especially for
the family, in the event of a ‘bad death’, where there are grounds for thinking that the
deceased has failed to become incorporated into the world of the dead and has become a
vampire. The deceased individual, the family, and the extended kin run the risk of
negative social consequences if there is any undesirable development arising from the
death rituals. They all face being stigmatized by the suspicion that they have committed
some sin.
Du Boulay argues that a vampire both threatens and stabilizes a society (Du Boulay
1998, 87). Despite its apparent paradox, the correctness of her argument becomes
obvious when we consider the causes of vampirization and how the vampire contributes
to supporting cultural capital. The vampire is a physical expression of liminality,
accompanied by signs of opposition to the cultural capital of the local community.
Although Du Boulay tries to explain prohibitions such as that against allowing a cat to
walk over a corpse by arguing that the space above the body is the meeting point
between the upper and the nether world, which nobody is permitted to enter, she
returns to society and its cultural capital in her effort to interpret this magic circle
around the corpse (Du Boulay 1998, 103). She believes that the possibility of
vampirization for those who disregard the value system of their community forces the
younger generation to look after the old, because such behaviour is fundamental for the
structuring of society (Du Boulay 1998, 103).
At this point, the role of cultural capital as a cohesive force in a community becomes
apparent. Causes of vampirization may lie, for instance, in indifference shown by the
deceased to his or her parents, or lack of respect on the part of the daughter-in-law
towards her mother-in-law. Both of these causes stem from failure to observe basic
components of cultural capital that, when correctly observed, contribute to the
perpetuation of the traditional kinship structure of society. More specifically, Greek
families in the past were extended, consisting of parents, one or two married offspring,
and the latter’s unmarried children. The maintenance of such a social structure rested
upon respect for cultural capital. Thus, the appearance of a vampire implied the
existence of a social crisis, since certain members of the local community now had
doubts about the stability of the cultural capital of that community. At the same time,
 Vampire Stories and Reinforcement of Socio-cultural Norms 317

the existence of the vampire offered younger persons the opportunity for initiation into
the value system of the community by means of a particular example.
Another nexus of reasons for vampirism lay in practices that weaken religious belief,
such as insufficient attendance at Mass, or behaviour that violates religious norms, such
as conceiving children on holy days like the Feast of the Annunciation. These reasons
also included suicide. The aim behind these types of explanations for vampirization is
the strengthening of the position of the Church as a social institution. For Christianity, as
for other religions, faith alone is not sufficient. What makes one a member of the Church
is participation in religious practices (Alfeyef 2011, 19).
In other words, this complex of beliefs about vampires in relation to mortuary rituals,
to proper behaviour towards kin, and to religious practices as a whole protects social
cohesion by preventing both religious belief from weakening and cultural capital from
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fading away. However, sin is not restricted to religion. It includes all the actions that
undermine the social structure. A sin can be considered any activity that is in opposition
to cultural capital and belongs to the impure pole (Stewart 1991, 106). In this sense, sin is
widened to include all negative behaviours pertaining to cultural capital as well as to the
community itself as a structure. Anybody who disputes the institutions and structures of
a community, such as kinship networks or the overall value system, runs the risk of
vampirization. Vampire narratives also attempt to control families that have no head,
because of the death of the husband, and to protect them and manipulate the available
potential population, in the form of widows. So in the case of a widow who gives birth to
children only after her husband has died, the dead husband is considered to have become
a vampire, since he was unable to become a father while he lived, which is necessary for
a man to enjoy social honour (Avdikos 1996, 53).

Vampires and Retribution

One of the characteristic features of vampires in Greece seems to be retribution. Éva
Pócs has argued that ambivalence towards the living was characteristic of the Slavic
mora, a supernatural figure or dead soul who could be either benevolent or retributive,
either bringing help to the living or inflicting punitive harm on those who broke
certain taboos. Thus, the mora was part of ‘a system of jurisdiction sanctioned by the
dead’ (Pócs 1999, 30).
Similarly ambivalent characteristics can also be seen in Greek stories of vampires. In
the following example, there is a stark contrast between a vampire mother’s retributive
treatment of one daughter and her compassionate haunting of the other, according to
how the respective daughters behaved during their mother’s lifetime. The story
illustrates how vampires served to safeguard accepted norms of conduct:
There were two sisters. The younger had an affair with her brother-in-law, who took her and
abandoned his wife. Her mother was very distressed. She wanted to go to the vineyards. She walked
towards the church in the field to light the small pendant oil-lamp. She took oil, candles and about ten
oranges. On the road to the field it started snowing. She threw down an orange in order for the others
to find her. She realized that she might lose her way, because of the snow. People saw that she did not
come back. They took lamps and set off to walk towards her hut. They found the oranges on the road. In
the end, they found her corpse beyond the hut and some ravens were eating it. They took and buried
her. It was said that she became a vampire. One of her daughters loved her mother and was unmarried.
So she [the vampire] went to the other daughter, who was married to her brother-in-law, and she filled
 318 Evangelos Avdikos

the flour with blood and tipped over the water cauldron. She also went at night to the other daughter,
the one who loved her. She used to tidy her house and clean the fireplace. (KL MS 1479, 134 – 36)

In most cases, as here, the deceased still harbours a strong desire to punish someone who
has harmed him or her. This is evidence that Greek vampires were retributive guarantors
of social cohesion, which again supports the notion that they upheld cultural capital.

Otherness and Vampirization

In her analysis of vampire narratives, Juliette Wood notes that the manner in which
Greek and Balkan cultures deal with vampires is an expression of otherness (Wood n.d.).
This otherness may take various forms. Anyone who apostatizes from the Orthodox
Church, or who is already a member of a different faith, is a visible threat, raising the
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possibility of doubts regarding the validity of the cultural capital of the community. Such
a person also undermines, as it were, one of the basic institutions of the social structure
—the Orthodox Church.
An interesting point in these stories is associated with cultural otherness (Görog-Karady
1992, 116; Oinas 1985, 121–50). Gypsy women and strangers fall into the group of persons
with a potential for becoming vampires: ‘A vampire-stranger reached Samos Island coming
from a foreign place and married. When his wife realized that he was a vampire, he
disappeared and did not return again’ (Politis n.d., 593). The corpus of stories related to
vampirized strangers is very rich and interesting. Sometimes the stories move the scene to
other places: ‘a vampire went to a foreign land and married. He had children and lived like
other people’ (Politis n.d., 593). Here the local people sometimes recognize the subjects as
vampires from their peculiar dietary habits, as is evident from the following examples: ‘They
are told that he always buys black meat’ (Politis n.d., 593); ‘He never ate meat, just entrails’
(Politis n.d., 595); and ‘He held the liver and his hands were stained with blood’ (Politis n.d.,
597; also cf. the narrative of the vampirized soldier from the Vlachos Collection, cited earlier).
In general, strangers and Gypsy women represent what is not native and embody the
social and cultural otherness that threatens the local community (Hart 1992, 21). Laurie
Hart argues that local cultural capital holds first place in the local hierarchy, which
creates a tendency towards demonizing strangers who come from elsewhere and have
different patterns of behaviour (including dietary habits) that make the boundaries
strengthening the local identity even more visible. To regard strangers as embodying a
potential threat of vampirization underlines the confusion felt by the local community
in the face of anything that cannot be classified within its cultural capital. Persons who
belong to different faiths are bearers of disorder, since their views and opinions
necessarily differ from the worldview held by the local community. Thus the importance
of religious convictions in the make-up of cultural capital and worldview becomes
apparent. In Greece, the Orthodox faith and the survivals of paganism from ancient
Greece have created a system of religious convictions that form part of cultural capital.

Soil and Water

Exhumation
The stage on which everything so far discussed is both tested and given form is the grave
and the graveyard. This is the physical arena in which the social crisis of death is given
 Vampire Stories and Reinforcement of Socio-cultural Norms 319

expression, while both the deceased and his or her family enter upon an extended state
of liminality, generally lasting about three years. The family of the deceased is expelled
to the margins of society as a carrier of pollution that affects the community. During the
length of the period of grief and the attendant state of liminality, the family is obliged to
perform all the religious and cultural practices that facilitate the completion of the final
rite of passage. This includes ritual exhumation at prescribed intervals to check for and,
if necessary, prevent vampirization.
The grave is important as an intermediate station on the journey of the deceased
towards integration into the world of the dead, a process which assumes various forms
depending on the specific doctrine and the local cultural capital (Muir 2000, 48). For
example, in the Egyptian worldview, the grave is the crucial point between the two
worlds, which ‘marks the transition between them’ (Aswad 2002, 150). Such a
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representation and perception of the grave as a liminal space is generally shared by most
cultures (Gennep 1960, 147). The grave—a cavity in the soil—is the enclosed, liminal
space that holds the human body during its final rite of passage back to its original state
of non-existence, as the womb holds it during its initial one (Metcalf and Huntington
1991, 114 – 15).
Moreover, the grave constitutes the basic unit of a cemetery, which is analogous to the
relationship of a house to a neighbourhood and to a community (Barley 1995, 169). In
this sense, the cemetery, which consists of multiple graves, defines the polluted pole that
stands in antithesis to the pure pole of the community of the living. As a result, the grave
expresses impurity and an attendant vengefulness against the living who inhabit a pure
and sanctified social place (Lagopoulos 2002, 159). According to traditional thinking, a
society consists of both living and dead members (Gerouki 1996 – 97, 110). Consequently,
the cemetery, when regarded as an ‘anti-structure’, corroborates and reinforces the
maintenance of the cultural and social capital of the main structure (Turner 1974, 192 –
94; Muir 2000, 48). Thus, the grave has two dimensions: it is a liminal space, and it is a
physical representation of anti-structure.
As a place of dangerous liminality, the grave holds the possibility that the
funerary rites of passage may not be fully successful. It is a place for hosting the
human body until it decomposes (Danforth 1982, 61). The process of decomposition
offers tangible proof regarding the success of the journey of the deceased towards
the world of the dead. In order to check this, the relatives exhume the body one,
three, and five years after burial to look for signs among the bones that indicate
whether the deceased has been integrated into the world of the dead or whether
this process is not yet complete—a failure that may result in the vampirization of
the dead person: ‘The relatives of the deceased look very worried during the process
of the disinterment, lest the deceased be polluted’ (Dimitrakos 1975– 76, 43). If the
bones are not black, or if they do not display marks, it means that the deceased has
not become a vampire. The bones are then washed in wine (Alexiou 1974, 47 – 48)
and reburied or placed in a special box that is shelved in the osteofylakeio
(ost1ofVlákio, ‘ossuary’), a room reserved for this purpose.
Besides the series of regular exhumations, there are special circumstances and
situations. The decision to exhume the corpse can be taken if several people have seen a
vampire, whose manifestation has disturbed the order of the community. Then the
procedure just described is followed and the relatives take note of signs presented by
 320 Evangelos Avdikos

the bones. These signs may be varied: ‘Then they realized that he had become a
vampire. They disinterred him and they found his body filled with earth and mud’
(Politis n.d., 592); or ‘Their bones are phosphorescent and so people are terrified’
(Mouzakis 1989, 22).
Exhumation either confirms the completion of the death ritual or reveals that the
deceased is still left exposed in an intermediate state and has taken the form of a
vampire. In this latter case, in the eyes of the Orthodox Church, the deceased has
descended into Hell. In other words, the bones and the grave form the tangible proof
that the social crisis that commenced with the death of a member of the community has
not yet been resolved. Rather, it continues in intensified form. Furthermore, the
relatives are held to be responsible for this vampirization, as they did not honour the
deceased properly by carrying out the appropriate death rituals to aid his or her
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incorporation into the world of the dead (Muir 2000, 48). Confirmation of the fact that
the deceased has undergone vampirization, then, has negative consequences both for the
living and for the deceased. The living are stigmatized. Consideration of the marks on the
bones—which is a pagan concept—is used by the local community as a pretext for noting
the side-effects that arise from the failure to adhere faithfully to the basic principles
informing the cultural capital of the community. Moreover, the position of the families
of the deceased in the social structure is reduced, and their social status is seriously
damaged. In traditional communities, status is a form of symbolic capital, which has
cultural, social, and financial aspects. Members of families stigmatized by vampirism
cannot contract hypergamic marriages, nor enjoy a positive presence in the public arena
of the community.

Location
The relationship between a local community and its graveyard is reflected in the
organization of space. Social space is sanctified in various manners, such as the placing of
chapels around the settlement, or the symbolic ploughing of throniasmi (uróniasmi,
‘magic circles’). Supernatural entities are thus placed outside social space. Vampires/
vrikolakes, however, reside in graveyards (Stewart 1991, 165), so that the grave is
capable of turning into a place of danger, where the validity of the social capital of the
community is either doubted or confirmed. It is also regarded as a source of illnesses,
and a place of vindictive attacks and strange noises. In such a case, the extermination of
the vampire and the purification of the soil can reinstate some sort of balance between
the structure (the community) and the anti-structure (the cemetery). Politis describes
the island of Samos, where the residents considered profane both the cemetery and its
soil, which hosts the dead. They also believed that this profanity could be counteracted
by making a magic circle, or throniasma (uróniasma). There were many vampires in
Pagonda; so the villagers invited a yiteftis (ghteyth́, ‘charmer’), to make a magic circle
around the cemetery. He took three oxen born to the same cow and made a magic circle
around the cemetery three times, uttering some magic words. After it, nobody suffered
vampirization. What is more, many people came across from the mainland and took soil
from the Pagonda cemetery and took it to their own cemeteries, to avoid their own dead
suffering vampirization. Some visitors put the soil in bags and hung them on the walls of
their houses as talismans (Politis n.d., 580).
 Vampire Stories and Reinforcement of Socio-cultural Norms 321

This is a clear illustration that among the physical factors which play a significant role
in the process of vampirization are soil and water. The former is mainly associated with
the polluted nature of the grave and the cemetery, while water is connected with
purification. Vampirization in the story of Pagonda is envisaged as a contagious
epidemic that spreads to all the graves via the soil. This undermines the complementary
role of the anti-structure in relation to the structure. One response to such a situation is
the throniasma, which essentially transforms the cemetery into part of the encircled,
‘pure’ community (Megas 1923, 489).
Graveyards always form a long-term threat for the community. For this reason, they
are usually located outside settlements and care is frequently taken to ensure that a
stream or spring lies between community and graveyard. This is in part because water is
necessary for the thirsty soul of the deceased (Lekatsas 1957, 115). However, the main
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purpose is the washing of the hands of those who have accompanied the deceased to the
cemetery, so as to avoid bringing ‘pollution’ into their homes. The funeral procession,
upon its return to the house of the deceased, will take care to cross water after the burial,
so as to break the chain of death (Mouzakis 1989, 42– 43).
A vampire may also be exterminated by transporting it to a place surrounded by
water, which acts as a means of purification. Here the water forms another kind of magic
circle, which stops the vampire from taking any action. The water serves to break down
the physical cohesion of the soil, while also creating an obstacle against the malevolent
behaviour of the vampire (Vakarelski 1960, 32). It is universally believed in Greece that
the soul of the deceased is unable to walk on water, and the location of cemeteries on the
other side of a stream from a settlement clearly illustrates this belief. Thanks to this
quality of water, vampires are frequently transferred to islands. Thus, in the Greek
paradigm, the barren islands of vampires become equivalent to the islands inhabited by
political exiles in times of political turmoil (Kenna 2001). In general, any impurity, when
it reaches a certain threshold, is transported to an island, so as to restore tranquility to
the social structure of the community. In Athens of classical times exile called
eksostrakismos (ejostrakismó6, ‘ostracism’) used to be a way of protecting the town
from a potential political imbalance when some leaders had acquired excessive power
which could be a danger for the democracy in Athens.
Furthermore, Greek islands in the Aegean Sea became places for receiving political
opponents during the period of the Roman Empire. Much later, the islands that were the
smallest, most isolated, and most remote from Athens (Ai Stratis, Gyaros, Ikaria, Kythira,
Leros, Makronisos) were used to exile people of leftist ideology from the 1930s (the
dictatorship of Metaxas) to the civil war and the seven-year junta of 1967– 1974 (Kenna
2001, 31– 41). Both political opponents and vampires relate to the main social structure
in the same way. They threaten to destabilize it. So their essential role lies in reinforcing
the social balance by allowing the pole of impurity to be marginalized.

Body and Soul

Running through everything that we have so far considered is the presence of the body
and soul as a pair that forms the central point of reference for the death ritual and for
the completion, or otherwise, of this ritual upon the incorporation of the deceased into
the world of the dead. The link between body and soul is a universal motif, found in all
 322 Evangelos Avdikos

religions, and is a basic problem for philosophers. For Plato, in particular, the soul
exists prior to the body. It comes from the world of the Forms, of eternal truth, and is
incorruptible. On the other hand, the body is corruptible and is the grave of the soul,
which constantly attempts to escape, in order to attain its earlier state. This it achieves
only upon death, which is to be regarded as form of liberation for the soul (Plato,
Phaedo, 81b).
Plato’s views introduced an extreme dualism that held sway for a considerable time. It
was, however, tempered by Christianity. As they studied the Bible, Christian theologians
and Church leaders put forward the view that body and soul are not two entities foreign
to each other that simply dwell together for a certain period. Rather, they form a unity.
The soul is, as it were, betrothed to the body (Alfeyef 2011, 126). Although it has often
been noted that Christianity finds the body abhorrent and that St Paul stresses the
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hostile relationship between body and soul, neither is believed to be independent of the
other.
The Orthodox Church considers that a human being is composed of body and soul,
both of which will be resurrected on the Day of Judgement. Nevertheless, this progress
towards the ideal incorporation of the dead in Paradise may be hindered by the body,
which is weak and liable to sin. It is not a matter of chance that most of the causes of
vampirization are to do with the sins of the body. For example, one such cause is the
failure to control the sexual instinct on religious festivals, with the fruit of the act
being a vrikolakas. Orthodox Christianity does not actually despise the body. Its aim is
to release the body from the weaknesses of the flesh that lead to sin and thus to the
exclusion of the soul from the world of the dead, which is the ante-chamber to
Paradise, and to the prevention of the resurrection of both body and soul together
(Alfeyef 2011, 375).
The body is therefore a field of conflict, which decides the progress of the soul after
death. For this reason, all ritual practices concentrate on the body. The body is carefully
washed with wine, so as to facilitate its decomposition. Then it is clothed in a shroud,
thus becoming a ritual object, ready for its trip to the next world. Furthermore, the body
functions as evidence of the fate of the soul, which for forty days haunts the place where
it separated from the body. Exhumation is an action vital for the relationship of body to
soul. Marks on the bones or the failure of the body to decompose in the grave are proof
of the inability of the body to unite itself with the soul once more. This may be due to
some sin which the person committed in life, or to the failure of the family to perform all
of the necessary rites correctly.
The state of the body at exhumation may be proof that the soul of the deceased has
been incorporated into the world of the dead. On the other hand, it may reveal that the
person has become a vampire, whose soul usually migrates to grotesque caricatures of
human bodies. Thus the soul loses the chance of uniting with the body. The various
means of destroying vampires, such as by burning the body or by banishing it to an
island, are confirmation of this condition. Curiously, vampire stories are not interested
in giving information about what ultimately happens to the soul and body if the vampire
is successfully destroyed. Instead, these stories focus on the fact that the relatives of the
vampirized dead get rid of a nightmare that had terrified them since its first appearance.
The main social structure, the local community, attempts to solve the problem either in
violent fashion or by driving vampires outside the limits of social space. In this process, a
 Vampire Stories and Reinforcement of Socio-cultural Norms 323

primary role is played by the Orthodox priest, who is present at the exhumation of the
deceased who is suspected of being a vampire. Nevertheless, the social crisis, at least as
regards the family of the deceased, has not been solved. The community has used the
social crisis to demonstrate that its members should abide by the norms imposed by its
cultural capital. The vampire narratives, which draw on local material, remind the whole
community of the social dangers confronted if the members do not follow the cultural
norms. In addition, the stigma never disappears fully, as all the vampire narratives
contribute to a social hierarchy of local families.

Conclusions
This article shows it is clear that vampire stories should be contextualized, if one is to
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read them correctly. Such stories speak of critical social and cultural issues. They focus
upon the anti-structure—the cemetery—which is a prerequisite for the social structure
itself—the community. A study of vampire stories, the types of punishment imposed
upon vampires, and the causes of vampirism provides a solid basis for reconstructing the
cultural capital. The cemetery and the vampires, in the context of the view of death as a
journey that is complete when the deceased is integrated into the underworld, make
up one pole of the antithesis: that of impurity. The vampires’ appearance comes to be
regarded as undeniable proof of the smouldering social crisis caused by failure to adhere
to social and cultural norms. To put it another way: the presence of the vampire makes a
social crisis tangible, for the vampire is the visible indication of such a crisis. Thus, a case
of vampirism actually reinforces social introspection and belief in the values of the
group.

Notes
1
In addition to the common Greek word for vampire, vrikolakas, there are other terms that can be used as
synonyms: tymbanieos (swollen), alytos (unresolved), sarkomenos (incarnated), katahanas (gobbling up), and
anakathoumenos (sitting up in the grave-bed) (Lawson 1910, 377). Vourvoulakos, vourdoulakas, and vourkolakas
are variants of the word vrikolakas (Politis n.d., 589).
2
The Hellenic Folklore Research Centre Archive in Athens is known by the acronym K.E.E.L. in Greek. I would
like to thank Dr Aikaterini Polymerou-Kamilaki, Head of the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre, and Dr
Maria Androulaki, researcher at the Centre, who facilitated my access to and research in the archives.
3
While some Greeks believed that only Muslims became vampires, and thus avoided passing Muslim
cemeteries (Akoglou 1938, 330), the opposite was maintained on the Cycladic island of Amorgos, where
the abbot of the monastery claimed that the incidence of vampires indicates the correctness of the faith
of the Greek Orthodox church, as no one of a different faith has become a vampire after death
(Simopoulos 1984, 540).

Archival Sources
KL MS 2442. Alexandros Adamidis Collection, Damaskinea, Kozani. Hellenic Folklore Research Centre (KL),
Athens, 1962.
KL MS 1608. Nikolaos Dalianis Collection, Orion, Evia. Hellenic Folklore Research Centre (KL), Athens, 1930.
KL MS 1479. M. Ioannidou Collection, Skopelos island. Hellenic Folklore Research Centre (KL), Athens, 1942.
 324 Evangelos Avdikos

KL MS 2301. Dimitrios Loukatos Collection, Redina, Karditsa. Hellenic Folklore Research Centre (KL), Athens,
1959.
KL MS 2394. Georgios K. Spyridakis Collection, Edessa, Pella. Hellenic Folklore Research Centre (KL), Athens,
1961.
KL MS 2042. Anastasios D. Vlachos Collection, Vareleoi, Marmari, Evia. Hellenic Folklore Research Centre
(KL), Athens, 1953.

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Biographical Note
Evangelos Avdikos is Professor of Folklore in the Department of History, Archaeology, and Social
Anthropology at the University of Thessaly in Greece. His main research interests are cultural
identities, rituals, and the supernatural.