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The Great Island
night, and as a result some vagabonds were caught who undoubtedly
had a hand in the disturbances. But there were still disorders. Numbers
of swords were stuck over the grave of the vampire; and ‘an Albaneze,
that happened to be at Mycone, took upon him to say with a voice of
authority, that it was to the last degree ridiculous to make use of the
swords of Christians in a case like this. Can you not conceive, blind as ye
are, says he, that the handle of these swords being made like a cross,
hinders the devil from coming out of the body ? Why do you not rather
take the Turkish sabres?’ But even this learned advice did no good.
The vampire was incorrigible; and it was finally resolved, rather than
allow the island to be depopulated and left to the ravages of the unnatural
creature – for whole families were packing and preparing to
move to Syra or Tinos – to burn the vroukolakas entire. What remained
of the maltreated carcass therefore was consumed in a great fire on
1 January 1701: and the devil having met with his match, no more
complaints were heard.
The priests were just as frightened of this vampire as anyone else;
and small wonder, for it would take a strong character, or a rigid set of
dogmata to which the village priests at that time did not have access,
to withstand from the inside an outbreak of hysteria such as this. It was
easy for Tournefort, who was an outsider from a different culture. But
in any case, if you are committed to the belief that supernatural powers
take tangible form and are not abstractions, it could be argued that it
is then a matter of empirical evidence whether strange events are caused
by these powers; and the Greeks thought they had this evidence.
Tournefort concludes: ‘After such an instance of folly, can we refuse to
own that the present Greeks are no great Grecians; and that there is
nothing but ignorance and superstition among them?’
The vampire, then, which is called in Crete katachanas, not vroukolakas,
is a corpse gone to the bad, for one of many reasons: sudden death
or suicide, excommunication, lack of the proper burial rites. The unavenged
victims of murder, the unbaptized, the still-born, and those
who die under a curse, are all in danger of becoming vampires. They
are not ghosts, but animated corpses. The lively belief in these revenants
has produced not only horrid superstitions but also one of the
finest of Greek folk poems, the very ancient ballad of ‘The Dead
Brother’, which caught the imagination of neighbouring races and
spread through the Balkans, arriving eventually in England as the
Suffolk Miracle: (though as the ballad moved north a lover-lover
relationship substituted itself for the archetypal Greek brother-sister
relationship). The ballad is of a mother with nine sons and only one
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