The Vrykolakas: How a Greek Village Knew Its Restless Dead

On Chios, a knock at night could mean more than a late neighbour. Leo Allatius, a scholar born on the island who spent most of his working life in Rome, wrote in 1645 that the vrykolakas went about the streets knocking on doors and calling the name of someone inside. Whoever answered would die the next day. Whoever kept silent was safe – and since the creature was said to call only once, the islanders, he tells us, made a habit of never answering a voice in the dark until it had called a second time.

For the villagers who held it, this was not a tale told for a thrill. It was a way of understanding certain deaths, certain illnesses and certain graves, and it came with signs and remedies as practical as anything in the farming year. What follows draws on the travellers, churchmen and folklorists who recorded it, and treats it, as the best of them did, as the tradition of real communities.

A borrowed word for an old fear

The word came from the north. Vrykolakas is borrowed from a Slavic term related to Bulgarian and Serbian words for a werewolf – the Serbian one means, literally, “wolf’s hair” – but in Greek it came to mean something different: not a man who turns into a beast, but a dead body that will not lie still. Other names were used in other places; on Crete the revenant was called katachanas.

The fear underneath is far older. Homer’s dead cannot rest until they are buried, and Patroclus comes to Achilles in a dream with a complaint that any later Greek villager would have understood:

Bury me as fast as you can, so that I may pass the gates of Hades. The spirits, the shadows of the worn-out dead, keep me away and will not let me cross the river to join them; I wander, lost, outside the wide-gated house.

Homer, Iliad (our rendering)

In the ancient picture the boundary is meant to work one way only: the hound at the gate, as our folio on Cerberus describes, welcomes the dead and lets none of them out. The vrykolakas is what happens when that boundary fails. Antiquity had its walking corpses too. Phlegon of Tralles, writing in the second century CE, tells of Philinnion, a girl six months dead, who came back at night to her parents’ guest room to lie with a young visitor; when the household found her, she fell lifeless, and her body was burned outside the city boundaries.

The Church added its own teaching. The body of someone who died excommunicated, or under a solemn curse, was believed not to dissolve in the earth until the ban was lifted. Such a swollen, unrotted corpse was called tympaniaios, “drum-like”, from the sound it was said to make when struck.

Who might come back

Folklorists such as Nikolaos Politis, who gathered Greek popular traditions around the turn of the twentieth century, and J. C. Lawson, an English scholar who travelled in Greece in the same years, recorded a fairly consistent list of those at risk. Someone excommunicated, or cursed by a parent, might not be received by the earth. So might a person who died violently or by their own hand, a murder victim left unavenged, or someone buried without the full rites. In many places an animal, most often a cat, leaping over the body before burial was enough to put it in danger, which is one reason the dead were never left alone between death and funeral.

Families guarded against these things as part of ordinary mourning. Women kept watch by the body through the night. Lawson reports that a small wax cross, or a potsherd marked with the letters for “Jesus Christ conquers”, might be laid on the lips of the dead so that nothing evil could enter. After the burial came the memorial services on the third, ninth and fortieth days, with their dishes of boiled wheat; the soul was thought to linger near its old haunts through those forty days, and the prayers helped it on its way.

Signs in the village and in the grave

A vrykolakas made itself known first through the living. People spoke of knocking at night and voices calling names, of a weight pressing on sleepers, of lamps snuffed out, of animals dying in their pens and of a run of deaths in one household. Sometimes the dead man was seen in the lanes, or was said to have come home to his wife.

The French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort watched a whole island convince itself. On Mykonos at the start of the eighteenth century, a peasant murdered in the fields was buried, and within days people were saying he walked at night, overturned furniture and seized people from behind. About ten days after the burial a Mass was said, the body was dug up, and a butcher was set to cut out the heart, which was carried to the shore and burned. When the disturbances went on, the people finally burned the whole body. Tournefort, standing in the stench and the clouds of incense, was openly sceptical and blamed fear and rumour, but his account remains one of the most detailed descriptions of the rite.

The grave gave the final evidence. Across much of Greece the dead were, and in many places still are, exhumed some years after burial, when the bones are lifted, washed with wine and placed in the village ossuary. That second burial is an anxious moment. Clean white bones mean the earth has done its work and the soul is at peace. A body that is whole, dark, swollen or supple suggests that something has kept it bound to this world. The anthropologist Juliet du Boulay, who studied a mountain village in Euboea, described how the state of the remains was read as a verdict on the dead person and on the family that had buried them.

Laying the dead to rest

The remedies ran from the gentle to the drastic, and the order mattered. First came prayer. A priest might read the prayers of absolution over the grave, and if a curse or a ban of excommunication was thought to be the cause, the one who had pronounced it, or the bishop, could be asked to lift it. Families had further memorial services said, sprinkled holy water and asked forgiveness on behalf of the dead. Often that was where the matter ended.

If the troubles continued, the grave was opened. In several regions Saturday was held to be the one day when the vrykolakas lay quiet in its tomb, so that was the day to act. The body might be reburied after more prayers, or the heart cut out and burned, or, in the gravest cases, as on Mykonos, the whole corpse burned. Some island communities carried such bodies to an uninhabited islet, trusting the belief that the restless dead could not cross salt water. Santorini, whose volcanic soil was blamed for preserving the dead, had such a name for revenants that sending vrykolakes there became a byword, much as English speakers talk of carrying coals to Newcastle.

What strikes a reader of these accounts is how seldom the vrykolakas is simply a monster. It is almost always someone: a quarrelsome neighbour, a man murdered in a field, a son who died under his mother’s curse. The tradition gave a village a way to name its unease about a death that had gone wrong, and a sequence of duties to put it right. Laying a vrykolakas to rest meant, above all, finishing the obligations the living owed to the dead – a theme as old as Patroclus at Achilles’ bedside, and as near as the next memorial service in the village church.