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Sphakia – The Vampires
was accepted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One reason
was that the belief accounted for several kinds of phenomena; for the
Greeks had added to the more horrifying, Slavonic, bloodsucking
activities of the vampire, which would account for anaemia and death
after long decline, the down to earth function of the poltergeist. The
vampire Tournefort found on Mykonos was no more than this. The
belief was vastly helped by the vacillating attitude of the church. The
ordinary village priest, being no different from his fellow villagers, and
hardly trained under the Turkish regime, was just as superstitious as
anyone else. But even the bishops were sometimes prepared to accept
that there were vampires. (Not always. In about 1800 the Metropolitan
of Larissa fined a priest for having exhumed two corpses and thrown
them into the Haliacmon; and this put a stop to the current epidemic of
vampire stories.)
There were two reasons for the attitude of the church. First, the
Greek church has always chosen, partly because of the natural sympathies
of her priests, to coexist with paganism rather than crush it.
Second, the church was put in a difficult position by certain beliefs
about excommunication; (and these beliefs themselves stemmed from
the people’s superstition). It could be held that the body of an excommunicate
would remain undissolved. The phrase used by priests in
the formula of excommunication – kai meta ton thanaton alytos kai aparalytos
(‘and after death unloosed and unresolved’) – implies this. And
although there was nothing to show that such corpses could do any
harm, it was natural that the Slavonic belief in bloodsucking corpses
should hook on to Orthodox doctrine. Lawson shows how this must
have happened; and the manuscript from St Sophia of Salonika which
he quotes displays several nice distinctions among the categories of
vampire. ‘Whoever has left a command undone, or is cursed, has the
front parts of his body only preserved. Whoever is under an anathema
looks yellow and has wrinkled fingers. Whoever looks white has been
excommunicated by the divine laws. Whoever looks black has been
excommunicated by a bishop.’ In general an excommunicated corpse
was inflated like a drum. But naturally these distinctions failed to
appeal to the masses, among whom a simple confusion prevailed.
Not to be buried with due rights was one of the worst disasters which
could befall a man in ancient Greece. Undoubtedly this belief has
survived, and not only in vampire stories. There are folk songs of
xeniteia in which the singer laments his exile not only because he is
homesick but also because he will not get a proper burial abroad. One
might assume therefore that the survival of vampires in western Crete
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