‘He who has left a command of his parents unfulfilled or is under their curse has only the front portions of his body preserved.
‘He who is under an anathema looks yellow and his fingers are wrinkled.
‘He who looks white has been excommunicated by divine laws.
‘He who looks black has been excommunicated by a bishop.’
From this account it is manifest that Father Richard, with the experience acquired by residence in Santorini, drew a distinction not known to Leo Allatius between two classes of dead persons. Those, who though not subject to the natural law of decomposition lay quiescent in their graves, were merely τυμπανιαῖοι or ‘drum-like’; while vrykolakes proper were addicted also to periodical resurrection. And the extract with which he concludes his description shows that the authorities of the rival Church pretended to powers of even more subtle discrimination between different species of incorrupt corpses. The importance of Father Richard’s distinction will appear later; there was originally a difference in the usage of the two words, although not precisely the difference which he makes; but by the middle of the seventeenth century popular speech rarely discriminated between them. To the common-folk, whose views Leo Allatius fairly presents, any body which was withheld from decomposition for any cause was at least a potential vrykolakas, even if its power of resurrection was not known to have been exerted and no act of violence had been traced to it.
For further attestation of the prevalence and the violence of this superstition it would be easy to quote many graphic accounts by other writers, such as Robert Sauger[975], another Jesuit of Santorini, or the traveller Tournefort[976]. But it will suffice to call as witness Paul Lucas, whose observations concern a part of the Greek world remote enough from either Chios or Santorini, the island of Corfu. ‘Some persons,’ he says, ‘who seem possessed of sound good sense speak of a curious thing which often happens in this place, as also in the island of Santorini. According to their account dead persons return and show themselves in open day, going even into the houses and inspiring great terror in those who see them. In consequence of this, whenever one of these apparitions is seen, the people go at once to the cemetery to exhume the corpse, which is then cut in pieces and finally is burnt by sentence of the Governors and Magistrates. This done, these quasi-dead return no more. Monsieur Angelo Edme, Warden and Governor of the island, assured me that he himself had pronounced a sentence of this kind in a case where upwards of fifty reasonable persons were found to testify to the occurrence[977].’
The superstition, which had so firm a grip upon the Greeks of two or three centuries ago, has by no means relaxed its hold at the present day, in spite of the efforts made by the higher authorities civil and ecclesiastical, native and foreign, to suppress those savage and gruesome ceremonies to which it leads. The horrible scenes of old time, when the suspected body was dragged from its grave and dismembered by a panic-stricken and desperate mob, when the heart, as sometimes happened, was torn out and boiled to shreds in vinegar, or when the ghastly remains were burnt on a public bonfire, have certainly become rarer. The administrative action of the Venetians in the Ionian Islands in requiring proof to be furnished of the vrykolakas’ resuscitation, and official sanction to be obtained for exhuming and burning the body; the more vigorous suppression of such acts by the Turks in the Aegean Islands[978] and probably also on the mainland; the somewhat half-hearted condemnation of the superstition by the Greek Church, which, as we shall see later, maintained the belief in the non-decomposition of excommunicated persons and notorious sinners, hesitated between denying and explaining the further notion that such persons were liable to re-animation, but certainly endeavoured to repress or to mitigate the atrocities to which that notion led; and at the present day the forces of law and order as represented on the one hand by the police and on the other by modern education, the chief fruit of which is a desire to appear ‘civilised’ in the eyes of Europe; all these influences combined have certainly succeeded in reducing the proportions of the superstition and curtailing the excesses consequent upon it. Thus in some places the old practice of burning corpses which fail to decompose within the normal period—and it must be remembered that exhumation after three years’ burial is an established rite of the Church in Greece—has been definitely superseded by milder expedients. In Scyros the body is carried round to forty churches in turn and is then re-interred, while in parts of Crete, in Cythnos[979], and, I believe, in some other Aegean Islands the custom is to transfer the body to a grave in some uninhabited islet, whence its return is barred by the intervening salt water.
None the less the superstition itself still holds a firm place among the traditional beliefs of modern Greece. Witness the following account of it from a history[980] of the district of Sphakiá in Crete written by the head of a monastery there and published in 1888:
‘It is popularly believed that most of the dead, those who have lived bad lives or who have been excommunicated by some priest (or, worse still, by seven priests together, τὸ ἑπταπάπαδον[981]) become vrykolakes[982]; that is to say, after the separation of the soul from the body there enters into the latter an evil spirit, which takes the place of the soul and assumes the shape of the dead man and so is transformed into a vrykolakas or man-demon.
‘In this guise it keeps the body as its dwelling-place and preserves it from corruption, and it runs swift as lightning wherever it lists, and causes men great alarms at night and strikes all with panic. And the trouble is that it does not remain solitary, but makes everyone, who dies while it is about, like to itself, so that in a short space of time it gets together a large and dangerous train of followers. The common practice of the vrykolakes is to seat themselves upon those who are asleep and by their enormous weight to cause an agonizing sense of oppression. There is great danger that the sufferer in such cases may expire, and himself too be turned into a vrykolakas, if there be not someone at hand who perceives his torment and fires off a gun, thereby putting the blood-thirsty monster to flight; for fortunately it is afraid of the report of fire-arms and retreats without effecting its purpose. Not a few such scenes we have witnessed with our own eyes.