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Sphakia – The Vampires
During the night the vampire was seized by the desire to emerge and
pursue his grisly business, and called (in Pashley’s translation),
‘Gossip, get up hence, for I have some business that requires me to
come out.’
The shepherd, instantly realizing that this man, his own synteknos,
was the vampire whom everyone had been looking for, refused to
answer. After the vampire’s third demand, however, he said, ‘I shall
not get up hence, gossip, for I fear that you are no better than you
should be, and may do me some mischief. But, if I must get up, swear
to me by your winding-sheet that you will not hurt me, and on this I
will get up.’
The vampire prevaricated until he saw that the shepherd meant
what he had said. Finally he swore by his winding-sheet and the shepherd
removed his crossed weapons. (It was the coincidence that he had
laid them down in the form of a cross that kept the vampire immobile.)
The corpse then came out of the tomb and told the shepherd to wait
in the graveyard until he came back.
When he did return it was with a liver in his bloody hands. He had
killed a newly married couple some ten miles away. The shepherd
watched him blow into the liver, as a butcher does, to increase its
size; he was then invited to share the meal, but wisely he merely
pretended to do so. The vampire’s parting instructions were that the
shepherd must never tell, ‘for if you do, my twenty nails will be fixed in
your children and yourself.’
The shepherd told, however. The village priest, with a party of bold
assistants, dug up the corpse and found it perfectly preserved, as on the
day of burial. They made a fire and burnt the corpse; but the synteknos,
who arrived late, was touched on the foot by a single droplet of the
vampire’s blood, which ate into his foot like fire. They therefore sifted
the ashes, and found the vampire’s little fingernail still intact. When this
was burnt, the vampire’s power was finally and for ever destroyed.
These supersitions have lost some, but not all, of their power. Most
men are sceptical; the women less so. George Psychoundakis tells of an
old woman who had the fear of vampires in her bones, and suffered
in consequence. She kept a great jar of pork, from which she ate whenever
she felt hungry, and a group of scoundrels, coveting the meat and
knowing that she was nervous, came at night and crept into her house.
One of them took up the lamp and began to dance. The woman covered
herself in her heavy handwoven blankets and screamed prayers to all
the saints, her teeth chattering with fear. She lost the pork of course.
But that could happen to anyone who disliked the dark. I myself
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