At Stampalia (Astypalaea), he proceeds, a short time before my arrival (about the middle of the seventeenth century) five bodies were so treated, those of three married men, a Greek monk, and a girl. In Nio (Ios) a woman who was confessing to me affirmed that she had seen her husband again fifty days after burial, though already his grave had been once changed and the ordinary rites performed to lay him. He began however again to torment the people, killing actually some four or five; so his body was exhumed for the second time and was publicly burnt. Only two years ago they burnt two bodies in the island of Siphanto for the same reason; ‘and rarely does a year pass in which people do not speak with dread of these false resuscitations.’ In Santorini a shoemaker named Alexander living at Pyrgos became a vrykolakas; he used to frequent his house, mend his children’s shoes, draw water at the reservoir, and cut wood for the use of his family; but the people became frightened, exhumed him, and burned him, and he was seen no more.... In Amorgos these vrykolakes have been seen not only at night but in open day, five or six together in a field, feeding apparently on green beans.
I heard, continues the holy father, from the Abbé of the famous monastery of Amorgos, that a certain merchant of Patmos, having gone abroad on business, died. His widow sent a boat to bring his body home. Now it so happened that one of the sailors sat down by accident upon the coffin and to his horror felt the body move. They opened the coffin therefore and found the body intact. Their fears being thus confirmed, they nailed up the coffin again and handed it over to the widow without a word and it was buried. But soon the dead man began to appear at night in the houses, violent and turbulent to such a degree that more than fifteen persons died of fright or of injuries inflicted by it. The exorcisms of priests and monks proved useless, and they thought best to send back the body whence it had been brought. The sailors however unshipped it at the first desert island[970] and burnt it there, after which it was seen no more.
The Abbé considered this possession by the devil to be a proof of the truth of the Greek persuasion, alleging that no Mohammedan or Roman Catholic ever became a vrykolakas[971]. This however is not strictly accurate, for in Santorini a Roman priest, who had apostatized and turned Mohammedan and who for his many crimes was finally hanged, appeared after death and was only disposed of by burning.
Another case was that of Iannetis Anapliotis of the same island, an usurer who about a year before his death repented of his misdeeds and made what amends he could; he also left his wife an order to pay anything else justly reclaimed from him. She however though giving much in charity did not pay his debts. It was just six weeks after his death when she refused to satisfy some just claim for repayment, and immediately he began to appear in the streets and to molest above all his own wife and relatives. Also he woke up priests early in the morning, telling them it was time for matins, pulled coverlets off people as they slept, shook their beds, left the taps of wine-barrels running, and so on. One woman was so frightened in broad day-light as to lose the power of speech for three days, and another whose bed he shook suffered a miscarriage. Then at length his name was published—for as a man of some position he had till then been spared. Exorcism was tried in vain by the Greek priests. Then by my advice the widow paid off all her husband’s debts and made due restitution. Also she had the body exhumed and exorcised a second time. On this occasion I saw it, but it did not look like a real vrykolakas; for, though the hands were whole and parchment-like, the head and the entrails were to some extent decomposed. At the end of the ceremony of exorcism the priests hacked the body to pieces and buried it in a new grave. From this time the vrykolakas never re-appeared, but this was due, in my opinion, to the restitution made, not to the treatment of the body.
There are in Greek cemeteries dead bodies of another kind which after fifteen or sixteen years—sometimes even twenty or thirty—are found inflated like balloons, and when they are thrown on the ground or rolled along, sound like drums; for this reason they have the name ντουπί[972] (drum).... The common opinion of the Greeks is that this inflation is a sure sign that the man had suffered excommunication; and indeed Greek priests and bishops add always to the formula of excommunication the curse, καὶ μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος καὶ ἀπαράλυτος, ‘and after death to remain indissoluble[973].’
In a manuscript from the Church of St Sophia at Thessalonica, he continues, I found the following:
Ὁποῖος ἔχει ἐντολὴν ἢ κατάραν, κρατοῦσι μόνον τὰ ἔμπροσθεν τοῦ σώματός του.
Ἐκεῖνος ὁποῦ ἔχει ἀνάθεμα, φαίνεται κιτρινὸς καὶ ζαρωμένα τὰ δακτύλιά του.
Ἐκεῖνος ὁποῦ φαίνεται ἀσπρὸς[974] (sic), εἶναι ἀφωρισμένος παρὰ τῶν θείων νόμων.
Ἐκεῖνος ὁποῦ φαίνεται μαῦρος, εἶναι ἀφωρισμένος ὑπὸ ἀρχιερέως.