Bulgarian Vampire
Bulgarian Goblin
Mrasni Dni (Dirty
Days) (Poganni days) 25 December – 6 January. In some parts of the
country they are also called “karakondjo" goblin days. The folk myth
tells the story that during these days the earth is visited by evil
spirits – vampires, goblins and bugbears, who want to “lap the blood
of the slaughtered pigs” and do evil to people. During that period
people don’t arrange engagements, weddings, working bees and
commemoration ceremonies.
They put a clove of
garlic in the children’s clothes to protect them during the day.
Bulgarian superstitions
about Vampires
Bulgarian beliefs
concerning undead vampires are quite varied. Bulgarian names for an
undead vampire include: Vampir, Vorkolak, Ouber, Ustrel, …
The pure Bulgarians call this being by the genuine Slavonic
name of Upior; the Gagaous (or Bulgarians of mixed race) by that of
Obour which is Turkish; in Dalmatia it is known as Wrikodlaki, which
appears to be merely a corruption of the Romaic. It seems that the
names vampir and obour as used in Bulgaria often mean the same thing.
In one account from Bulgaria translated and quoted in
The Darkling by Jan Perkowski, the vorkolak is said to be the soul of
an outlaw who perished in the mountains, or in the forest, or along a
country road, and whose corpse is eaten by crows, wolves, or some
other such scavengers. This soul cannot enter heaven or hell, and so
it remains on earth. This vorkolak haunts the place where he was
killed. At night, this spirit strangles and drinks the blood of anyone
who comes by. The way to rid a place of a vorkolak, is to erect a
cross, bless water, and hold a church service at the spot where the
outlaw died.
In another account from Bulgaria quoted in the same book, a
vampir is a corpse which returns from the grave. A person who died a
violent, unnatural death or whose corpse was jumped over by a cat
before burial becomes such an undead vampire. (This belief is found
all over Eastern Europe where there is belief in undead vampires.) In
a case mentioned in this report, a man became a vampir as the result
of a fatal fall from a roof. The bones turn to gelatin at first and
during the first forty days after burial he performs mischief such as
releasing animals from their pens, scatters house hold items, and
suffocates people. If not destroyed within the first forty days, the
vampir develops a skeleton and becomes even more fierce. At least
during the first forty days, the vampir can be destroyed by a
Vampiridzhija (a professional vampire hunter) or devoured by a wolf.
The report doesn't make clear what it takes to destroy the vampire
after he develops a skeleton.
Another example of Bulgarian beliefs about vampires is given in Twelve
Years' Study of the Eastern Question in Bulgaria by S. B. G. Saint Clair
and Charles A. Brophy (London: Chapman and Hall, 1877). Much of what
the authors say about Bulgarian beliefs in vampires is given as an
excerpt in the Vampire in Europe by Montague Summers (originally
published in 1929, last reprint: Random House, 1996). The name used
for an undead vampire here is obour .
According to Saint Clair and Brophy, the Bulgarians in the
village that they themselves were then currently living in believed
that nine days after a person predisposed to become an obour is
buried, "he returns to upper earth in aeriform shape", invisible
except that in the dark he gives off sparks "like those from a flint
and steel" and in the light he casts a shadow. His harm is confined to
such activities as roaring out in a loud voice or calling out cottage
dwellers in endearing terms and then beating them black and blue, and
entering cottages to turn things topsy turvy like a poltergeist, spit
blood on the floors, and smear cow dung everywhere.
But Saint Clair and Brophy add that, after forty days from
burial, the obour arises from the grave in bodily form and is able to
pass himself off as an ordinary mortal human being "living naturally
and honestly." They give as an example what was alleged to have once
happened in the village they themselves were living in. According to
the tale, a stranger arrived in the village, established himself, and
married a wife. The newly wed wife's only complaint was that every
night he stayed out until dawn. It was soon noticed that there were
many dead horses and cattle about, partially eaten. This came to an
end, but then cattle grew sick and died, and it was noticed that the
blood had been drained out of them.
When the villagers learned from the stranger's wife
that he was always out all night, they suspected that he was a vampire
responsible for the animal deaths. They examined him and found that he
had only one true nostril - a sure sign that he was a vampire. So,
they bound him, took him to a hill outside the village, made a big
fire of thorn bushes, and burned him alive.
Later in their book, Saint Clair and Brophy state that: “Since commencing
this chapter (III), we have learned that the village of Drvishkuoi,
six hours from here in now haunted by a Vampire...he will have shortly
have completed his fortieth day as a shadow, the villagers are in
terrible alarm lest he appear as flesh and blood.”
Saint Clair and Brophy also describe a procedure
which professional vampire hunters used to destroy an obour who was
still in the first stage of his unlife. First, they would put some of
his "favorite food" (i.e., human excrement) in a bottle. Then they
would chase the obour using a holy Orthodox Christian icon. And drive
him towards the bottle. When the obour entered the bottle, they would
promptly cork it. Then they would toss the bottle into a fire and the
vampire was thus destroyed.
Another type of Bulgarian vampire, the ustrel is
described in the original, unabridged Golden Bough by Sir James
Fraser. Here, the ustrel is an infant who had been born on a Saturday
and who had died before receiving baptism. Nine days after burial, the
ustrel claws its way out of its grave. It then finds a herd of cattle
to satisfy its thirst for blood. It then returns to its grave. But on
the next day it returns to the herd and never returns to its grave. It
then resides in the horns or a bull or the hind legs of a milk cow.
It feeds first on the fattest cattle and then
works its way on down as the poor animals whither and die. The way to
rid a herd of cattle of the ustrel is to perform the ritual of the
need fire. On a Saturday morning, all the fires in the community are
extinguished. Then two bone fires are created at a crossroads. The
cattle are then led between the two fires. The ustrel drops onto the
crossroads from the animal whose horns or hind legs it had inhabited
when that animal passes between the two fires. The ustrel cannot leave
the cross road and is eventually devoured by wolves.
In his book I Searched for Death (John Long Ltd., 1940),
Gordon Cooper describes a ceremony he witnessed in Razlog, Bulgaria
called The Second Burial. This involved the reburial of the corpse of
a man who had died five years previously during the time between
Christmas and Epiphany ( January 6) - the same period called Yule Tide
and The Twelve Days of Christmas in England. Bulgarians called this
time the Unclean Days and believed that the forces of evil hold sway
over the world during this period. Any person who died during this
time would become a vampire unless precautions were taken. In this
case, the man, before he died, made his relatives swear that they
would exhume and re-bury his body on the day of his patron saint on
the fifth year after his first burial. This re-burial was what Cooper
observed. It was a full-blown Eastern Orthodox funeral conducted by a
priest. The relevant excerpt from Cooper's book is reprinted in The
Natural History of the Vampire by Anthony Masters (G.P. Putnam's Sons,
1972).
Bulgarians believed that a person sired by an undead
male vampire had the power to see vampires invisible to others and was
frequently employed as a vampire hunter. As in the case of the Gypsy
and Serbian dhampir, this power was inherited by the person's
children, grand children, etc.
Vampires have hovered over
Bulgaria since ancient Slavic times. In fact, the Bulgarian word
"vampir" comes from Latin, which means that the "genealogy" of this
evil creature dates back to much earlier times.
In its 19th century version, a vampire is the incarnated soul of a dead
person that had been jumped over by a cat, dog or some other animal.
That is why before being buried, each dead person's body is closely
guarded by the relatives - lest even a human shadow falls on the
corpse, which can prove to be fatal too. Moreover, those who have been
hanged, stifled or cursed, while still living, may also become
vampires.
The appearance of a vampire is not specific, all the
more that it is invisible. According to some people, it looks like a
"shadow of a human being, a cat, a dog, a hen", etc. Some other people
believe that a vampire resembles the dead person, whom it has come
from, but has no bones or flesh, and is made only of skin, full of
blood. In a modern book for children, it is described in the following
picturesque way: "In the thorn-bushes near the graveyard a skin is
squatting - with short legs, small claw feet, black holes instead of
eyes, with a bony nose and iron teeth. The skin is full of blood, it
is a vampire."
How terrible!... The monstrous thing comes out of its grave
at night. It often comes back to the house, where it had lived before,
squeezes and strangles its dear people in their sleep, raves in the
attic, sweeps the bowls off the shelves, soils the milk and the water.
The vampire drives the cattle away to the fields, sometimes sticks to
the cattle's abdomens and sucks their blood, which makes its victim
grow weak. But on the other hand, it is also rather silly - if the
owners of the house have sprinkled millet on the floor, it is carried
away and begins to count the millet grain by grain. Besides, it can be
cheated in a countless number of ways. And as soon as the cocks begin
to crow, it hurries to retire to its grave.
In fact, a
vampire is as frightful as it is faint-hearted and vulnerable. It is
afraid not only of light, but also of fire, water, thorns, and iron,
of wolves, of animal sculls. Lightning would easily kill it. If it
manages to survive till its fortieth day, and has sucked enough blood,
a vampire stops running wild, gains power and becomes embodied, it
becomes 'platnik' (embodied vampire). It looks like every other human
being, but has no fingernails, its bones are soft like cartilage, and
its eyes - red. In such cases it usually leaves for some far off
village, where gets married and has children. This 'platnik' can also
be transformed into a dog, a wolf or some other animal, it is disposed
to attacking its wife, biting and torturing her in broad daylight.
Still, the embodied vampire never stays too long in the human world,
since if only it pricks itself, all the blood that fills up its skin
leaks away.
It is interesting to note that the offspring born
of such marriages, have also red eyes, and not only can see vampires,
but are their most severe hunters. They are known as 'vampirdzhii'
(vampire-chasers). Vampire-chasers are also people endowed by Heaven
with the power of disclosing (as a rule, with the help of an icon) and
killing vampires. Vampire-chasers of the two types would catch the
monsters, boil them in large cauldrons, or kill them with a briar
picket, only a jelly stuff or some clotted blood being left of them.
The grave of someone who
has turned vampire can be known by its sunken surface, or the hollow
in it. Such grave should be opened, and the corpse, the abdomen or the
head of the dead person, pierced with a hot spike. This should be made
only on Saturday - when the souls of the dead do not leave their
bodies.
All these beliefs were still current among many a
superstitious Bulgarian in early 20th century. Researchers, who deal
with this subject, point out that many locations in the country have
their 'own' vampire stories. They are always related with a particular
person, who, while still living, had been known to everybody.
Extracts from 18th century
beliefs about vampires by
S. Saint Clair
and Brophy.
By
far the most curious superstition in Bulgaria is that of the vampire.
The pure Bulgarians call this being by the genuine Slavonic name of
Upior, the Gagaous (or Bulgarians of mixed race) by that of Obour,
which is Turkish; in Dalmatia it is known as Wukodlak, which appears
to be merely a corruption of the Romaic Vrukolas.
We will now give the unadulterated Bulgarian superstition, merely
prefacing that we ought to be well acquainted with it, inasmuch as a
servant of ours is the son of a noted vampire, and is doing penance
during this present Lent by neither smoking, nor drinking wine or
spirits, in order to expiate the sins of his father and to prevent
himself inheriting the propensity. Poor Theodore is head over ears in
love with Miss Tuturitza, the young lady next door, who fully
reciprocates his affection, but her parents refuse to sanction the
marriage on account of the vampire father.
When a man who has vampire blood in his veins -
for this condition is not only epidemic and endemic but hereditary or
who is otherwise predisposed to become a vampire, [As when a man is
strangled by one of these beings.] dies, nine days after his burial he
returns to upper earth in an aeriform shape. The presence of the
vampire in this his first condition may be easily discerned in the
dark by a succession of sparks like those from a flint and steel, in
the light, by a shadow projected upon a wall and varying in density
accordingly to the age of the vampire in his career. In this stage he
is comparatively harmless and is only able to play the practical jokes
of the German Kohold and Gnoine, of the Irish Phooka, or the English
Puck, [He only resembles these spirits in their misdeeds; unlike them,
he never does a good turn to anybody.] he roars in a terrible voice,
or amuses himself by calling out the inhabitants of a cottage by the
most endearing terms and then beating them black and blue.
The
father of our servant Theodore was a vampire of this class. One night
he seized by the waist (for vampires are capable of exercising
considerable physical force) Kodja Keraz, the Pehlivan or champion
wrestler of Derekuoi, crying out, “Now then, old Cherry Tree, see if
you can throw me.” The village champion put forth all his strength,
but the vampire was so heavy that Kodja Keraz broke his own jaw in
throwing the invisible being who was crushing him to death. Of course,
sceptical persons may be found who would explain this story by the
hypothesis of too much wine and a fall over a heap of stones;
fortunately our village does not contain any such freethinkers, and
Old Cherry Tree will be happy to relate his tale, as we have given it,
to my inquirer after truth: to prove its accuracy, he can call many
witnesses who will swear to the fact of his jaw having been broken.
At the time of this occurrence, five years ago,
our village was so infested by vampires that the inhabitants were
forced to assemble together in two or three houses, to burn candles
all night, and to watch by turns in order to avoid the assaults of the
Obours who lit up the streets with their sparkles, and of whom the
most enterprising threw their shadows on the walls of the room where
the peasants were dying of fear; whilst others howled, shrieked, and
swore outside the door, entered the abandoned houses, spat blood into
the flour, turned everything topsy-turvy, and smeared the whole place,
even the pictures of the saints, with cow-dung. Happily for Derekuoi,
Vola's mother, an old lady suspected of a turn for witchcraft,
discovered the Ilatch we have already mentioned, laid the troublesome
and troubled spirits, and since then the village has been free from
these unpleasant supernatural visitations.
When the Bulgarian vampire has finished a
forty days' apprenticeship to the realm of shadows, Since commencing
this chapter, we have learned that the village of Dervishkuoi, six
hours from here, is just now haunted by a vampire; he appears with a
companion who was suppressed by means of the usual remedy, but this
one seems to be proof against poison, and as he will shortly have
completed his fortieth day as a shadow, the villagers are in terrible
alarm lest he should appear as flesh and blood. He rises from his tomb
in bodily form and is able to pass himself off as a human being.
Living honestly and naturally. Thirty years since a stranger arrived
in this village, established himself, and married a wife with whom he
lived on very good terms, she making but one complaint, that her
husband absented himself from the conjugal roof every night and all
night. It was soon remarked that (although scavengers were and are,
utterly unknown in Bulgaria) a great deal of scavengers' work was done
at night by some unseen being, and that when one branch of this
industry was exhausted the dead horses and buffaloes which lay about
the streets were devoured by invisible teeth, much to the prejudice of
the village dogs; then the mysterious mouth drained the blood of all
cattle that happened to be in any way sickly. These occurrences and
the testimony of the wife caused the stranger to be suspected of
Vampirism, he was examined, found to have only one nostril, [A
thoroughly Slavonic idea: in Poland the vampire is also supposed to
have a sharp point at the end of his tongue, like the sting of a bee.]
and upon this irrefutable evidence was condemned to death. In
executing this sentence, our villagers did not think it necessary to
send for the priest, to confess themselves, or to take consecrated
halters or daggers; they just tied their man hand and foot, led him to
a hill a outside Derekuoi, lit a big fire of wait-a-bit thorns, and
burned him alive.
There is yet another method of abolishing a
vampire, that of bottling him; there are certain persons who make a
profession of this, and their mode of procedure is as follows; the
sorcerer, armed with a picture of some saint, lies in ambush until he
sees the vampire pass, when he pursues him with his Icon; the poor
Obour takes refuge in a tree or on the roof of a house, but his
persecutor follows him up with the talisman, driving him away from all
shelter, in the direction of a bottle specially prepared, in which is
placed some of the vampire's favourite food: having no other resource,
he enters this prison, and is immediately fastened down with a cork,
on the interior of which is a fragment of the Icon. The bottle is then
thrown into the fire, and the vampire disappears for ever. This method
is curious as showing the grossly material view of the soul taken by
the Bulgarians, who imagine that it is a sort of chemical compound
destructible (like sulphurated hydrogen) by heat, in the same manner
that they suppose the souls of the dead to have appetites and to feed
after the manner of living beings, 'in the place where they are.'
To finish the story of the Bulgarian vampire we have
merely to state that here he does not seem to have that peculiar
appetite for human blood which is generally supposed to form his
distinguishing and most terrible characteristic, only requiring it
when his resources of coarser food are exhausted.
Ghosts, as we understand the term in England, are very rare if not
entirely unknown in Bulgaria. There is certainly the white woman of
Gebidjie, who haunts a hilly piece of road in the neighbourhood of
that village, and without invitation takes a ride in any cart which
happens to pass her domain, making the vehicle so heavy that the oxen
are often unable to draw it; her costume, as far as we can make out
from those who have seen her, is that of an ancient Roman lady, and
she is most probably the guardian of a treasure, for the combustible
souls of the Bulgarians seem not to reappear under any form but that
of a vampire, and bear no resemblance to those spectres whose
traditions Europe inherits from the middle ages.
According to a Bulgarian superstition, those Turks who have
never
eaten of the animal sacred to the Rayahs, the pig, become wild boars
after their death. The father of a peasant we know had one day shot a
very fine boar in the forest, and invited a lot of friends to partake
of it; but when the Kebabs were placed on the spit they suddenly and
with one accord jumped off it into the fire - a proceeding which a
good deal frightened the assembled guests. However, an old man, who
had rather a reputation for sorcery, asked the host to bring the head
of the boar to look at. In the ears was found a piece of cotton, which
the wise man said was a fragment of the turban worn by the Turk who
had assumed the porcine shape, so all the meat was thrown away. The
Rayahs also pretend that when a Mussulman who has never eaten pork
dies, the Turkish women anoint the corpse with pig's lard to prevent
his soul entering into the body of the unclean animal.
Finally, according to the national calendar the days from Christmas to
Saint Jordan’s Day are thought to be unclean (dirty) days because
impure forces (karakonjoli) will mean that mischief to people appears.
For protection against these forces people observe a series of
forbiddances - not going out at night, wedding and working-bees are
not done, male cloths are not sewn for protection against wolves. It
is believed that if during these days a baby is conceived he or she
will become a bad person, he/she will see vampires, etc. In the night
before Saint Vassil’s day a bonfire is lighted that stays lit for
three days and three nights.
Everyone has to put a piece of wood into the fire and the last
morning to rake it up so that flickers come out. This act represents
health and fertility. The rest of the ashes are sprinkled around the
houses as a protection from evil forces.
Varna City and Vampires
A little known fact about Varna
is that it features in Bram Stoker's "Dracula"
"The hunters determine that Dracula has sealed
himself in the last box and had it placed on a ship bound for the
Black Sea. They take a train to Varna, a city on the Black Sea, where
they find that Dracula has headed up the River Sereth, which leads to
the valley near his castle. The group splits up: Seward and Holmwood
take a boat up the river; Morris and Harker follow on horseback; Mina
and Van Helsing take a coach directly to the castle. As the three
groups converge near Castle Dracula, they find a group of gypsies with
Dracula’s coffin in their wagon. The hunters attack, and when Harker
and Holmwood drive their knives through Dracula’s heart, he crumbles
into dust. Quincey Morris is killed in the fight, and Mina and
Jonathan Harker later name their first son after him."
The industrial town of Devnya, 30km west of
Varna, is now known only for its noxious chemical industry, but during
the last century its reputation was widespread as Bulgaria's vampire
capital. Reports brought back from the Black Sea
region by
nineteenth-century travellers reveal that belief in vampires was
widespread among the Bulgarian peasantry of the time. Travelling in
the 1880s, the Czech Balkanologist Konstantin Jirecek found a wealth
of vampire lore in the isolated rural communities west of Varna, with
inexplicable illnesses among humans, and particularly sheep - the
region's main source of income - being attributed to a visitation by
some bloodthirsty demon, and local wise men (known as vampirdzhiya or
dzhadzhiya) being paid handsomely by villagers to drive the fiends
away. According to Jirecek, the vampire hunters of Devnya were
considered the best in eastern Bulgaria.
The belief was that people became vampires if proper burial customs
were not observed or if certain portentous events happened before
their death: for example, a shadow passing across their body, or a dog
or cat jumping across their path. After burial, an invisible spirit
would rise up from the grave each night, feeding off local flocks and
bringing listlessness and ill health to the human population. Vampires
could also assume solid form,
often living among humans for many
years, getting married and having children before being detected. To
chase the vampires away, a dzhadzhiya would be summoned to walk among
the flocks, holding an icon aloft. The icon also came in handy when
trying to identify the resting place of the vampire. If it began to
tremble when held above a particular grave, it meant that the culprit
had been found. The best way to deal with a vampire was to exhume the
body, stab it through the heart with a hawthorn branch, then burn it
with kindling taken from the same shrub. If the vampire was in spirit
form, it could be driven into a bottle which was then thrown onto a
fire.
The beliefs noted by Jirecek were by no means isolated
cases. The British travellers St Clair and Brophy, who lived in a
village south of Varna in the 1860s, wrote of a boy forbidden from
marrying his sweetheart because locals earnestly believed that he was
of vampire descent. They also relate how peasants in a neighbouring
village burned a man alive for vampirism, because he was fond of
nocturnal walks and was "found to have only one nostril".
According to Jirecek, the best vampire hunters were thought to be
descended from valkodlatsi, literally werewolves, who resulted from
the sexual union of a vampire and a young maiden, and were the only
living beings who could see vampire spirits. The valkodlatsi's
vampire-hunting descendants were also thought to have another
supernatural power: the ability to detect buried treasure. In an area
full of ancient Thracian, Roman and Byzantine remains, it's not
difficult to see why the idea of hidden hordes of goblets and coins -
all waiting to be unearthed by the lucky peasant - exerted such a hold
on the popular imagination.
Another associated piece of local lore concerns the
Lake of Varna (a fjord-like inlet stretching west from the city),
which used to be known as Vampire Lake. According to popular belief,
the lake required an annual human sacrifice, the last recorded
instance of which was in 1933, when one Ana Konstantinova went
swimming there despite warnings, and was duly sucked underwater”.
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PEACE HAVENS of BULGARIA
