Authors: Mark Collins Jenkins
It might be a comparatively crude account, but it typified many similar ones that came from travelers to eastern Europe and the Balkans. The Romantic writers fed off such depictions, because so few had ever been there. Lord Byron was an exception, having visited Albania in October 1809. The first two cantos of his 1812 piece,
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,
helped fix the Balkans as a place of rugged and primitive isolation in western Europeans’ minds. Shortly before returning there to die, Byron remarked that “I have…a personal dislike to ‘Vampires,’ and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to divulge their secrets.”
Those secrets are carried on a buried stream of peasant superstition flowing out of eastern Europe. The vampires there, however, never would have been admitted to a drawing room. They would not have been caught dead in the crypts of castles. English and Irish writers, in creating the literary vampire, had tidied them up a bit.
I
N
1685,
THE TRAVELER
who left the gates of Vienna and turned east “seems to take leave of our World,” as the English writer Edward Browne reported, “and before he cometh to Buda, seems to enter upon a new stage of world, quite different from that of the western countrys.”
This was Hungary, final port on the great sea of grass that, stretching ever eastward, ended only on the borders of China. Out of these prairielands had swept the mounted archers of Attila the Hun, of the Avars, of the Mongols, and finally of the Ottoman Turks. East of Vienna, even the natural world seemed imbued with the oriental: The oaks had a different cut to their leaves and bore acorns capped, like Turkic tribesmen, with a wild fringe of pendant and tassel.
Rimmed by hills and mountains, the sea of grass that was the Hungarian plain was also a Hapsburg lake. An imperial dynasty, stolidly German, devoutly Catholic, the Hapsburgs ruled from Vienna’s Hofburg Palace a polyglot empire that embraced not only the Magyars, or Hungarians, but also those subject peoples who dwelt in the surrounding hills: Bohemians, Moravians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Romanians. Each could be told by their distinctive dress. The Hapsburgs even ruled Poles, whose natural affinities—like the course of Poland’s rivers—ran toward Prussia and the Baltic, and Ruthenians, who looked toward Russia and “Little Tartary,” the nomad-swept grasslands north of the Black Sea.
In the south, the Hapsburgs would come to absorb Slovenes, Croats, and Bosnians as well. Greeks, Bulgars, Turks, and Jews swarmed the cities and towns. Gypsies wandered everywhere, especially in Transylvania, where they had long been famed as musicians and great dancers—whirling, stomping, hand-clapping dancers. Though the hills and orchards, wheat fields and vineyards of Bohemia and Moravia, Slovakia and Slavonia, were all classically European, the presence of these colorful peoples lent those lands an air of exoticism to the Hapsburgs and their fellow elites. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart regarded his visits to Prague, more than 150 miles northwest of Vienna, as “excursions into a culturally different world.”
Armies had long fought for those hills and grasslands. Vlad the Impaler had battled the invading Ottomans on the plains of Wallachia in the 15th century, and the Turks had surrounded the gates of Vienna on more than one occasion. Few travelers had willingly ventured into such a dangerous region, and when they finally did begin to arrive, they found, anthropologist Edith Durham discovered in 1906, that its inhabitants “live in the past to an extent which it is hard for us in the West to realize.”
Harvests in Hungary, Slovakia, or Romania had on occasion been so abundant that grain was left to rot in the fields. As late as the eve of World War I, agriculture in the region was not merely unmechanized but practically medieval: Oxen still pulled wooden plows and harrows, while reaping and haying were done by sickle and scythe.
These crude conditions were even more pronounced in lands long subjected to Ottoman rule. The ebbing of the Turkish tide took centuries: Greece freed itself in 1830, but Romania and parts of Serbia and Bulgaria did not break free until 1878. Lines of castles edged the former tidemarks, as did a shifting zone of desolate countryside, abandoned and wild. The few border crossings were not just Austrian military posts but
lazzaretti,
or quarantine stations. These had been compulsory stops for all travelers coming from the east since at least the mid-18th century, and they had been erected out of fear of a new invader, or rather an old one: the plague.
Seen from a distance, looming over the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, was the dazzling white fortress of Belgrade—
Beo-grad
, the “white city,” gateway to the maze of mountains that were the Balkans (
balkan
is Turkish for “mountain”). From Serbia and Bulgaria down through Macedonia, Albania, and northern Greece, men might be garbed in sheepskin and clad in knee-high sandals reminiscent of Alexander the Great. Women might be decked in colorful embroidery and half-hidden behind scarves and kerchiefs. These were lands of vendetta, but of hospitality, too: the fiery plum wine called slivovitz, the spitted lamb, the Turkish coffee, and the music of horsehair-stringed instruments and goatskin bagpipes.
Although the Ottomans still dominated here, their mosques were squat and uninspiring. Ottoman graveyards, by contrast, were picturesque in the extreme, the tombstones raked at every conceivable angle by the passage of time. Islam had won only Albania and parts of Bosnia; elsewhere, the censer of Eastern Orthodoxy held sway. No organs sounded in those churches, however—only chants that seemed to issue from smoke-blackened icons with large, expressive eyes. Outside its doors might stand an ancient tree, emblazoned with a cross that barely disguised its origins as an object of pagan devotions.
Before the 20th century, travelers had to rough it in the Balkans. Roman roads had degenerated into mere cart tracks, and even four-wheeled carts were rare for years; you went by foot or on horseback. The endless oak forests were haunted by bear, wolf, and the lean, rakish pig that saddled Serbia with the label of “a nation of swineherds.” Higher on the hillsides stretched somber beech woods. “Those of us who have ridden for hours through what is left of the Balkan primeval forests…,” wrote Edith Durham nearly a century ago, “know the awe inspired by the silence, the gold green light, and the endless army of mighty grey trunks towering erect from the soil that is muffled and bedded with the dead leafage of a thousand years and echoes no tread. The horse sinks knee-deep. You dismount and plunge through it with difficulty.”
Those were the forests travelers once had to cross on their way from Belgrade to Nis, where stood the notorious Skull Tower, made from the severed heads of Serbian rebels. There they crossed the mountains to Sofia and rode down the via militaris, the old imperial road that once echoed to the tramp of the legions, to Constantinople. From the 1880s on, they could follow that route in relative comfort by riding the
Orient Express
.
By that time, a visitor could stand on the ramparts of the old fortress at Belgrade and gaze out over the rippling Hungarian plain at its famous sunsets. With the fall of night, he might turn away, call for a fiacre, and head for a delicious dinner at the Crown of Servia, never suspecting that his perch of the past half hour had once been an execution ground where the reigning pasha displayed the blackened corpses of impaled Christians as a warning to the infidels.
Nightfall, however, brought enormous isolation deep in the interior of the Balkans. There, the traveler caught far from a village had better check his pistols. Bandits and smugglers were rumored to be at large—but were they the sole reason his driver, before snapping the reins in the gathering gloom, had so tremulously crossed himself?
D
EEP IN THE
F
OREST
In 1717, when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu passed through Belgrade, it was still a Turkish frontier fortress garrisoned by elite Janissaries, and she was accompanying her husband, the newly appointed British minister to the Ottoman Empire, on his way across the Balkans to Constantinople. For seven days, they and a company of these Janissaries wound their way up the Morava River valley, traversing what Lady Montagu described as the “deserts of Servia.” Others knew it less poetically as the great Serbian forest—a primeval place of giant oaks and beeches, its dread reinforced by the beatings the Janissaries inflicted on the inhabitants of each village they passed through. The abuse brought tears to Lady Montagu’s eyes.
Fifteen years later, much had changed yet little had changed. Having been on the losing side of the 1718 Treaty of Passarowitz, the Turks had withdrawn from Belgrade and most of the Morava River valley. Austrians were now the overseers of that demoralized, undernourished population. Yet, the forest was still there, and quite likely it was up that same road that an Austrian military detachment rode in January 1732. Regimental Field Surgeon Johannes Flückinger, accompanied by two medical examiners and two regular army officers, had departed Belgrade, bound for the village of Medvegia.
Several weeks earlier, an Austrian officer who was a contagious disease specialist had visited Medvegia to investigate the unusually high mortality rate reported there. In three months, 17 people—a large number for a small village—had died, many after an illness of two or three days. The officer had found no evidence of pestilence—only chronic malnutrition. He was urged, however, to examine some of the recent dead—the inhabitants were blaming the deaths on the dead—and probably blanched at what he saw, for he recommended that the villagers be indulged in their desire to destroy the bodies of their former neighbors.
But Belgrade was not yet prepared to go that far. Instead Flückinger and his retinue were dispatched to make a thorough investigation. Medvegia stood near the new border with Turkey, so the Austrians had settled there a company of hajduks—Serbian guerrillas who had once fought the Ottoman occupiers. Upon arriving in the village, Flückinger met with the leading hajduks and the hadnack, or village elder. From them, he heard the story firsthand—or as much of it as could be interpreted, as the villagers surely did not speak German.
Five years earlier, it seemed, a hajduk named Arnold Paole had lived in Medvegia. Paole had served as a Turkish conscript in Kosovo—where, he believed, he had fallen prey to a vampire. At the direction of some folkloric remedy, he had eaten dirt from his assailant’s grave and somehow had smeared himself with its blood. Yet around Medvegia, it seems, such actions were deemed only to deepen, not to remove, the taint. Several weeks after Paole was killed in a fall from a hay wagon, his neighbors began complaining that he had returned as a vampire and was throttling them at night. Soon four of them died, as did some of the village livestock.
Forty days after being buried, therefore, Paole was exhumed and staked through the heart. The villagers then burned his carcass and tossed its ashes back into the grave. And because his four supposed victims would certainly become vampires, too, their bodies were likewise dug up and subjected to similar treatment. Yet, all that had occurred five years earlier, and Medvegia had since returned to normal. Then came this new round of deaths, which the villagers believed to be a fresh outbreak of vampirism.
Perhaps it was the hadnack’s description of the exhumed Paole that intrigued Field Surgeon Flückinger; he emphasized it in his subsequent report. After 40 days in the grave, the village elder related, the dead man had shown no signs of decay. Quite the contrary: Not only had he sloughed off his old skin and nails, but new ones were apparently growing in their places. Though blood was widely supposed to coagulate after death, Paole was said to be wallowing in a coffin full of liquid blood. Blood also flowed from his mouth, his nose, his ears, and even his eyes. When a wooden stake was driven through Paole’s heart, the hadnack asserted, he had emitted an audible groan.
Perhaps Flückinger had read about a similar case in the
Wienerisches Diarium
back in the summer of 1725. This case had taken place in Kisilova, a Serbian village on the Danube east of Belgrade. Villagers there had demanded that an Austrian official be present at an exhumation, else the hamlet might be destroyed—not an uncommon occurrence “in Turkish times,” they claimed. After a peasant named Peter Plogojowitz had died, nine other people had followed him to the grave in the space of just eight days. All had complained of being throttled at night by the resurrected Plogojowitz, who was also said to have visited his wife and asked for his shoes; trusting her own heels instead, the sensible woman had promptly fled the village. By the time an Austrian official arrived, Plogojowitz had already been exhumed.
Though he had been ten weeks in the grave, the Austrian official noted, Plogojowitz’s body was apparently ruddy and plump, its eyes still open. The nose had collapsed, but otherwise the corpse seemed completely fresh. There was not the slightest whiff of odor. Hair, beard, and nails had apparently grown. Old skin was giving way to new. Moreover, the mouth was full of “fresh” (liquid) blood—which, to hear the villagers tell it, belonged to his victims. As the official looked on in horror, a sharpened stake was pounded into the chest of the corpse, whereupon more blood gushed from its mouth and ears, accompanied by certain “wild signs” (customarily interpreted as an erection). The villagers then burned the body—an act that the official insisted had not been his fault: The “rabble…were beside themselves with fear.”
Whether or not Field Surgeon Flückinger had read the official’s report, he probably entered the Medvegia graveyard that January afternoon knowing what to expect. Even so, it must have taken a cold few hours to perform field autopsies on 17 corpses.
The renewed vampirism, the villagers concluded, must have been occasioned by two women: Stana, who had admitted to once painting herself with vampire blood, and Miliza, who had eaten part of a sheep Paole had supposedly killed. These actions had guaranteed that the pair of women would become vampires at death—and their deaths had come just before those of the 15 others.
Stana, 20, had died in childbirth three months earlier. The baby had died, too—but, being unbaptized, it had been carelessly buried behind a garden fence and half eaten by dogs. With the exception of her ravaged womb, Flückinger noticed, Stana—like Paole and Plogojowitz—was remarkably undecayed. Her old skin and nails had given way to new, and her arteries and veins were full of fresh, not coagulated, blood, which was also pooling in her chest cavity. Her lungs, liver, stomach, spleen, and intestines appeared quite fresh, too.
Miliza, 60, had been dead even longer. Her chest, too, was full of liquid blood, Flückinger discovered, while her viscera—like Stana’s—appeared fresh and normal. Most remarkable, however, was the hajduks’ reaction upon viewing the bloated figure stretched out before them; Miliza had been very lean when she was alive, they asserted, and therefore she must have “come to this surprising plumpness in the grave.”