‘This monster, as time goes on, becomes more and more audacious and blood-thirsty, so that it is able completely to devastate whole villages. On this account all possible haste is made to annihilate the first which appears before it enter upon its second period of forty days[983], because by that time it becomes a merciless and invincible dealer of death. To this end the villagers call in priests who profess to know how to annihilate the monster—for a consideration. These impostors proceed after service to the tomb, and if the monster be not found there—for it goes to and fro molesting men—they summon it in authoritative tones to enter its dwelling-place; and, as soon as it is come, it is imprisoned there by virtue of some prayer and subsequently breaks up. With its disruption all those who have been turned into vrykolakes by it, wherever they may be, suffer the same lot as their leader.
‘This absurd superstition is rife and vigorous throughout Crete and especially in the mountainous and secluded parts of the island.’
So too another well-informed Greek writer, who has published a series of monographs upon the Cyclades, says in one of them[984]:
‘The ignorant peasant of Andros believes to this day that the corpse can rise again and do him hurt; and is not this belief in vrykolakes general throughout Greece?’
To that question I might without hesitation answer ‘yes,’ even on the grounds of my own experience only; for the places in which I have heard vrykolakes mentioned, not merely in popular stories[985] such as are told everywhere, but with a very present and real sense of dread, include some villages on the west slopes of Mount Pelion, the village of Leonidi on the east coast of the Peloponnese, Andros, Tenos, Santorini, and Cephalonia.
The wide range and general prevalence of the superstition in modern times being thus established, it remains only to record a few recent cases in which the peasants, in defiance of law and order, have gone the length of exhuming and burning the suspected body.
Theodore Bent[986] states that a few months before his visit to Andros (somewhat over twenty years ago) the grave of a suspected vrykolakas was opened by a priest and the body taken out, cut into shreds, and burnt. In January of 1895 at Mantoúde in Euboea a woman was believed to have turned vrykolakas and to have caused many deaths, and the peasants resolved to exhume and burn her—but it is not stated whether the resolve was actually carried out[987]. In 1899, when I was in Santorini, I was told that two or three years previously the inhabitants of Therasia had burnt a vrykolakas, and when I visited that island the incident was not denied but the responsibility for it was laid upon the people of Santorini. In 1902 there was a similar case of burning at Gourzoúmisa near Patras[988]. These are certain and well-attested instances of the continuance of the practice, and, regard being had to the secrecy which such breaches of the law necessarily demand, it is not unreasonable to suppose that even now a year seldom passes in which some village of Greece does not disembarrass itself of a vrykolakas by the traditional means, cremation[989].
Of the causes by which a man is predisposed to become a vrykolakas some mention has already been made in the passages which have been cited from various writers above; but before I conclude this account of the superstition as it now is and has been since the seventeenth century, and proceed to analyse its composite nature, it may be convenient to give a complete list of such causes. The majority of these are recognised all over Greece and are familiar to every student of modern Greek folklore, and I shall not therefore burden this chapter with references to previous writers whose observations tally exactly with my own; for rarer and more local beliefs I shall of course quote my authority.
The classes of persons who are most liable to become vrykolakes are:
(1) Those who do not receive the full and due rites of burial.