free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
was due to the violent history of the area; in a country where frequent
revolts and sudden deaths by murder and blood feud supplied plenty
of unburied corpses, it is not surprising that the superstition should be
tenacious. Curiously, however, it is not so. For if every unburied corpse
turned into a vampire there would be too many to ‘save the phenolmena’
which vampires explain. Thus when Pashley asked why the war
had not created more vampires he was told that no one turns vampire
in time of war; a very neat example of the way superstitions adapt
themselves to the phenomena.
So the strength of this belief and the frequency of vampires is not
directly related to the number of unburied corpses and violent deaths.
The belief waxes and wanes mysteriously according to the conditions
of the society. Superstitions go in ‘crazes’. There was a time when the
Akrotiri, the headland just east of Canea, was said to be teeming with
vampires, who roamed the peninsula at night and caused confusion
in every house: to the benefit of the monastery of the Holy Trinity,
where the priests were able to bury the dead with full rites. For as soon
as this was known, corpses were brought in from all over the countryside.
And the monks got their baksheesh: a field here, a vineyard there,
a barrel of oil here.
After some time however – perhaps the monastery was as rich as it
could decently be – a priest succeeded in banishing all the troublesome
vampires to the neighbouring island of Kalathas, where they are
condemned to shift sand from one mountain to the other, night and
day, with only a shell.
The best Cretan vampire story conies from Kallikrati, a tiny mountain
village between Asi Gonia and Sphakia. Pashley recorded it.
A vampire was haunting the village, and no one knew what was his
history or where he came from. He destroyed children and even grown
men, and created havoc throughout the village in his nocturnal
rambles. It so happened that the vampire’s synteknos,* who was looking
after his sheep near the church of St George, went into the churchyard
to shelter from a shower of rain, and stood just by the grave where the
vampire lay. Since there was an arch over the grave and it was a dry
place, he decided to have a nap there. He therefore unslung his
weapons, and laid them crossways by the tombstone.
*Synteknos (translated correctly by Pashley ‘gossip’), or koumbaros, Is a relation in
God. You are my gossip if I am godfather to your child, and vice versa. The relationship
is an extremely close one in Crete, involving ties often as exacting as those of consanguinity.
(Your son, for instance, cannot marry your goddaughter.) And it was
without doubt the sanctity of these ties which led the shepherd to be lenient with the
vampire. Synteknos is also used familiarly of any friend.
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