#vampire folklore

map showing the way europe played 5d ping pong with its words for vampires. had to do my own damn map of this so i thought i'd share it cause why not

some words of explanation:

the root of most of these, excluding the blue ones, comes from Turkic languages (most likely Tatar, but we aren't exactly sure, so for simplicity i just made the slightly redder starting point in eastern Turkey, I am ready to face death at the hands of professional linguists) from words like "ubyr", "opyr", "uber", and other variations of that. the general consensus is that they initially meant "witch".

"strix" is Latin for owl; "striges" were owl-like female demons from ancient Rome who fed on human organs, mentioned for example in the Satyricon. "strega" is Italian for "witch".

the Greek "vrykolakas" comes from the Slavic "vukodlak", technically meaning "werewolf", but in reality it was used for vampires as well. the vrykolakas were definitely more vampires than werewolves, being dead bodies who rose from the grave.

the Russian "vurdalak" appeared only in the 19th century with Pushkin's works, because he read Byron's "The Giaour" in which there is a footnote explaining that the Greek word for vampire is "Vardoulacha" (close enough, I guess) and he made his own version based on that

Everyone now uses "vampire" and variations thereof due to pure chance, because it just so happened that the first reports about the living dead reached western Europe from Serbia thanks to Austrian officials recording the panic surrounding Petar Blagojević. It eventually circled back to Eastern Europe in that form overthrowing most of the regional variants like upyr. This map is focused on Poland in this regard because I am Polish and this map is intended for a presentation for a Polish audience.

my sources:

"Upiór. Historia naturalna" by Łukasz Kozak

"Russian "vurdalak" 'vampire' and Related Forms in Slavic" by Francis Butler

“The belief in living corpses is a universal phenomenon. Fantasies about revenants who return to wreak havoc and carry out nefarious deeds following their death have been present in all ages and in all cultures. […] Precursors of the European vampire mythos can be found in the Icelandic sagas of the thirteenth century, which cover several cases of revenancy from the period of the island's Christianization around 1000 AD. In Old Norse tales, the living corpse or “walking dead” operated under the name of draugr.

This term, which only rarely appears, designates a deceased person who has left his or her burial mound, inflicted harm on surviving relatives and who can only be stopped through the physical destruction of the corpse. In the context of the overlapping of the world of the living and the world of the dead in the popular imagination, the existence of revenants was not questioned. Their personalities were experienced as real and were described vividly. People who had allowed themselves to be brought into connection with magical elements or evil portents seemed to be particularly predestined for revenancy. However, as a rule, it was largely troublemakers who were reported to have returned, and contemporary stories therefore often reflected social conflicts.”

— Thomas M. Bohn; “The Vampire: Origins of a European Myth” (2019)

Like what if one walks in through like a secret tunnel in the basement while chasing a rat. Like they were in the sewers, but like were super hungry and followed the tasty little morsel down a passage. And didn’t like even realize they had entered a basement until they’re already munching on that sweet little nu—

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There is a theory that the Slavs who arrived in the Balkans already possessed their own pantheon of dark creatures, centered around werewolves. As for vampire beliefs, they likely absorbed them from the region’s indigenous populations—the Illyrians and the Thracians. Philology even lends support to this: the Serbian word vurdalak, now often used to mean “vampire,” literally translates as “a person covered in hair.” In Greek, there is a related term, vrykolakas.