Marin (2015) - "The Son of The Vampire" Greek Gothic, or Gothic Greece

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Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

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“THE SON OF THE VAMPIRE”:
GREEK GOTHIC, OR GOTHIC GREECE?
ÁLVARO GARCÍA MARÍN
While it is widely accepted that the Serbian and Eastern European revenants that
came to light in the 1730s are at the origin of the Western literary vampire, and
therefore of Dracula, the critique has neglected a prior source probably more
prominent in the West during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the Greek
vrykolakas. In fact, this creature appears in Occidental European bibliography before
the properly Slavic vampires, and continues to be relentlessly present throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, either in theatre, poetry, prose fiction,
ethnography, or travel accounts. This article argues that the disturbing presence of a
Greek vampire was repressed both in and outside Greece due to the classical bias of
Philhellenism, which tried to pose a suprahistorical Hellenic world as the origin of
Western civilization (and consequently could not accept the stain of a barbaric and
Oriental or Balkanic remainder such as the vrykolakas). The article also discusses the
crucial entanglement of the Greek revenant not only with the origins of the literary
vampire (Polidori’s Vampyre acts for the first time in Greece like a Greek revenant),
but also with Gothic literature itself. Before the fixation of the vampire myth
accomplished by Bram Stoker, many of the first vampire fictions were actually
inspired by the Greek creature, destabilizing thus the reified image of Greece as the
cradle of rationalistic Europe by means of its intertwining with the uncanniness of the
revenant.
Why is Dracula a Transylvanian? My main point in this article will be

to try to answer, or at least to pose, this seemingly banal question,
which is however crucially entangled with the history of European
modernity and of Greece’s national construction. This question may
be posed in other terms: why is Dracula not a Greek? If we were to
judge from the standpoint of a Western European of 1730 or 1820,
Dracula, without any doubt, should have been a Greek. At the
beginning of the eighteenth century, when the Slavic vampire was still
unknown to the West, the Greek vrykolakas had been recurring in
theological treatises, travel accounts or books on occultism from the
beginning of the sixteenth century.
In the following pages, I would like to present some of these
allusions, highlighting their unresolvable negotiations and dialectic

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22 Álvaro García Marín
between the (re)construction of Modern Greece as an Oriental Other

for Europe and its definition as the core of Europe’s cultural and
epistemological origin. The very concept of the West is destabilized
by the presence of this irrational monster at the roots of hyperrational
modernity, as long as its disturbing logic of resuscitation and
undeadness epitomizes the historical gap underlying this process of re-
birth. I will also interrogate the decentring role of the vrykolakas in
Greek discourses of national configuration, considering the colonial
context in which they develop. The vrykolakas stands in a certain
sense for colonial difference itself, and tries to be effaced from the
official cultural imaginary.
In the first section, some early mentions of the vrykolakas in the
Renaissance are analysed from the perspective of an incipient
Philhellenism entrenched in the logic of early Occidental modernity.
Section two focuses on the role played by the vrykolakas during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the discursive construction of
Greece as the ethnic, religious Other of the West, and simultaneously
its philosophical or epistemological ancestor. In section three, the
Romantic revival of the vrykolakas in the heyday of Philhellenism is
connected to the broader emergence of vampire fiction, while section
four analyses how the Greek (and, thus, too European) origins of the
vampire are gradually effaced in favour of Eastern European ones so
as to externalize the inner threat posed by the uncanniness of
modernity.
Three founding allusions to the vrykolakas in the Renaissance

By the time when Ancient Greece was being recovered (or even
resurrected) in the Occident, three founding allusions brought the
vrykolakas to the fore of European thought for the first time. Antonio
de Ferraris, a Renaissance author, orientalizes the monster and the
superstition in his De situ Japygiae (composed between 1506 and
1511, but first published in 1558), inaugurating a long-lasting
association of the vampire belief with the Others of the West, or even
making it historically coincide (and not casually, as we will see) with
the very construction of the West as the Self of its Others:
It is like the fable of Brocolae, which exists in the entire East: they
affirm that the souls of the persons who devoted themselves to a
wicked life use to fly in the night as balls of flames over their graves,
to haunt acquaintances and friends, to feed on animals, to scare and


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Greek Gothic, or Gothic Greece? 23
kill the children, and then to return to their tombs. Superstitious

people dig the graves and, after pulling the heart out of the corpse,
they burn it and scatter the ashes to the four winds, that is, to the four
corners of the world: so they believe they will stop the plague. Even if
this is a fable, it provides us with an example of how all those who
lived according to evil, either dead or alive, are hated and cursed.1
There is already, as we can appreciate, a discursive distrust in such

Oriental beliefs, labelled with contempt “fabulae” and
“superstitiones”. Western references to the vrykolakas, and to
vampires at all, thus start by implicitly opposing a rational,
discursively and spiritually healthy “we” to a superstitious and
unhealthy “them” that paradoxically overlap, at least in this case, with
the very origin the Occident claims for its historical uniqueness:
But you haven’t
Greece. Consequently, is the vrykolakas external or internal to the established that
modern notion of Europe? Is it not reinscribed in the very gesture of Ferraris understands
the “broklocae” as
its discursive expelling? The Greek vampire, as a strange body, will Greek; only “eastern”
— given that the word
prevent from perfect closure the fiction of a Western incorporeal itself is not indigenous
mental and epistemological space founded on a non-mediated to Greek but derived
from Bulgarian you
continuity with Ancient Hellenes. It will somehow become the would need to prove
ineffaceable bodily rem(a)inder of the historical difference inherent in that Westerners
understood it as
such a narrative. Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia Greek if you want to
make this point
highlights in 1531 the coarse corporealness of Greek revenants,
alluding to the Cretan version of the vrykolakas, the katakhanas:
We read also in the Chronicles of the Cretensians, that the ghosts

which they call Catechanæ were wont to return back into their bodies,
and go to their wives, and lie with them; for the avoiding of which,
and that they might annoy their wives no more, it was provided in the
common laws that the heart of them that did arise should be thrust
through with a nail, and their whole carcase be burnt.2
why not Crusius?
Even the Proto-Philhellenic text by Martin Kraus, Turcograecia
(1584), while trying to clearly distinguish the glorious Greeks from
the barbaric Ottomans who rule them at the moment, is haunted by the
1
Antonio de Ferraris, De Situ Japygiae, Basel: Petrus Perna, 1558, 620-21 (my
translations throughout).
2
Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia Liber III, item Spurius Liber de
Caeremoniis Magicis, qui Quartus Agrippae habetur, Paris: Beringos Fratres, 1531,
430.


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uncomfortable simultaneity of strangeness and Greekness in the

vrykolakas:
In Pentecost Saturday, the Turks burned a Greek dead two years

before, which the crowd believed to come out from his grave in the
night, and to kill men. Others hold that the true cause is that fifteen
men, after seeing his spectre, died. They unburied him, and saw how
his flesh was consumed but his skin was intact and stuck to his bones.3
Following the logic of the Freudian uncanny, Greekness, a

historical revenant on its own, presents itself to modern Europeans as
familiar and strange at the same time, the ideal summit of civilization
towards which the West must always progress, and the Other in/of the
Occident. Philhellenism, so important an undercurrent in the
Enlightenment two centuries later, both for the construction of a
rationalistic concept of Europe and for the promotion of an
independent Greek nation, is therefore pervaded from its inception by
the uncanny figure of the vampire, which unfolds, and to some extent
embodies, many of the paradoxes and inconsistencies inherent in the
project of modernity and in the construction of Western transparent
epistemology.
The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century reinforcement of the

“low” Greek Other
During the seventeenth century, references to the vrykolakas multiply,
especially in theological works. The creature became so popular as to
be included in another Philhellenic effort: the first dictionary of
Modern Greek, Charles du Fresne’s Glossarium ad Scriptores Mediae
et Infimae Graecitatis (1688). From this title we can infer that such
“medium” and “low” Greekness is already mediated by a historical
difference that makes it less or worse than itself, far away from its
properness, a sort of subproduct of the once bright Hellenic people
just like the vampire is the subproduct of a man or of the catholic
Resurrection of the Body. Theological arguments were indeed the
most common context for the vrykolakas in the seventeenth century.
3
Martin Kraus, Turcograeciae Libri Octo: Quibus Graecorum Status Sub Imperio
Turcico, in Politia et Ecclesia, Oeconomia et Scholis, iam inde ab amissa
Constantinopoli, ad haec usque tempora, luculenter describitur, Basel: Leonardus
Ostenius, 1584, book VII, 490.


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Greece, still under Ottoman yoke, was orientalized not only on the
grounds of its being under Muslim rule, but also of its belonging to a
space of intra-European otherness defined by Christian Orthodox
faith. The “schismatic” Greeks are relentlessly blamed for their heretic
dogma, not afar from superstition, as the very example of the vampire
tradition demonstrates. From the twelve works that mention the
monster from Heinrich Kornmann’s De miraculis mortuorum in 1610
to Robert Saulger’s Histoire nouvelle des anciens Ducs et autres
souverains de l’Archipel in 1698, most references are found in
theological treatises by Jesuit missionaries in the Cycladic islands who
tried to refute Orthodox dogmas by showing the backwardness,
irreligiosity and ignorance in which their populations lived.
Though sometimes the authors explicitly believe in it, the mention
of the vrykolakas is always used to attack the alien faith and to
highlight the gap between the spiritual and salvation doctrine of
Western religion, and the superstition and rude materialism of the
East. François Richard’s Relation de ce qui s’est passé de plus
remarquable à Saint-Erini Isle de l’Archipel depuis l’établissement
des Pères de la Compagnie de Jesus, published in 1657, is probably
the best known work in this genre, as the frequent quotation by later
authors attests. François Richard explains how the fact that no
Catholic in the Archipelago has ever become a vampire after his death
proves that Catholicism, unlike the Orthodox Church, is the only faith
to provide full redemption. But maybe the most influential of all these
theological treatises is Leo Allatius’ De Graecorum hodie quorundam
opinationibus (1645), quoted by almost every author after him. Leo
Allatius himself was a Greek who converted to Catholicism and wrote
against his childhood beliefs, among which was the vrykolakas and his
destructive power. Leo Allatius’ refutation, published in Cologne, not
only contributed to deepen the orientalization of Greece on the
grounds of its faith, but made the vrykolakas widely known in the
West due to the great detail of the author’s narrative.
Theologians continued studying and mentioning Greek vampires
during the first third of the eighteenth century, as in Johann Gottlieb
Heineccius’ monograph Dissertatio de absolutione mortuorum
excommunicatorum seu tympanorum in ecclesia graeca (1709), or in
John Covel’s Some Account of the Present Greek Church (1722), but
they were gradually replaced by philosophers and scientists. Likewise,
science and philosophy increasingly replaced the discourse of

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theology, though still at work in some texts. Credulous narratives and

abstract presentations now gave way to more analytical examinations
of the facts that tried to demystify and explain them in order to reduce
the superstition to the modern epistemology it had come to defy. The
power of the Western rationalist thought was thus deployed to convey
a sense of political and cultural superiority.
The French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort’s Relation d’un
voyage du Levant became the best illustration of this. Joseph de
Tournefort travelled to Greece in the winter of 1700-1701 and in
1717, after sixteen years, published what was probably the most
widely known story about vampires before the 1730s events in Serbia.
His book was actually supposed to be a journal of the scientific
mission he was commissioned to fulfil in Greece as a botanist, so
vampirism emerges as a disturbing body in the context of accuracy
and precision of the scientific discourse. As such, the excess has to be
reduced through integration into the semiotic framework of modern
epistemology, that is, through scientific explanation (what in this age
means also the naturalization and redefinition) of the phenomena he
contemplates. So, he narrates the epidemic of collective fear
unleashed by the alleged apparition of a vrykolakas in Mykonos while
he was visiting the island, in the late autumn of 1700, and seeks to
meticulously describe all the ceremonies in order to make clear not
only his disbelief (his epistemological disconnection from the
credulous Greek peasants as a representative of the modern Europe),
but also the true interpretation of the facts. Even though the title of the
chapter where this narrative is included is “État présente de l’Église
grecque”, his focus is not already on heresy, but on superstition and
underdevelopment:
On the tenth day they said one mass in the chapel where the body was
laid, in order to drive out the demon which they imagined was got into
it. After mass, they took up the body, and got everything ready for
pulling out its heart. The butcher of the town, an old clumsy fellow,
first opened the belly instead of the breast: he groped a long while
among the entrails, but could not find what he looked for; at last
somebody told him he should cut up the diaphragm. The heart was
pulled out, to the admiration of all the spectators. In the meantime, the
corpse stunk so abominably, that they were obliged to burn
Frankincense; but the smoke mixing with the exhalations of the
carcass, increased the stink, and began to muddle the poor people’s

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pericraniums. Their imagination, struck with the spectacle before

them, grew full of visions. It came into their noodles that a thick
smoke arose out of the body; we durst not say it was the smoke of the
incense. They were incessantly bawling out vroucolacas, in the chapel
and place before it: this is a name they give to these pretended
redivivi. The noise bellowed through the streets, and it seemed to be a
name invented on purpose to rend the roof of the Chapel. Several
present there averred, that the wretch’s blood was extremely red: the
butcher swore the body was still warm; whence they concluded, that
the deceased was a very ill man for not being thoroughly dead, or in
plain terms for suffering himself to be reanimated by the devil; which
is the notion they have of a vroucolacas. They then roared out that
name in a stupendous manner. Just at this time came in a flock of
people, loudly protesting they plainly perceived the body was not
grown stiff, when it was carried from the fields to the church to be
buried, and that consequently it was a true vroucolacas; which word
was still the burden of the song.
I don’t doubt they would have sworn it did not stink, had we not
been there; so amazed were the poor people with this disaster, and so
infatuated with their notion of the dead being reanimated. As for us
who were got as close to the corpse as we could, that we might be
more exact in our observations, we were almost poisoned with the
intolerable stink that issued from it. When they asked us what we
thought of this body, we told them we believed it to be very
thoroughly dead: but as we were willing to cure, or at least not to
exasperate their prejudiced imaginations, we represented to them, that
it was no wonder the butcher should feel a little warmth when he
groped among the entrails that were then rotting; that it was no
extraordinary thing for it to emit fumes, since dung turned up will do
the same; that as for the pretended redness of the blood, it still
appeared by the butcher’s hands to be nothing but a very stinking
nasty smear.
After all our reasons, they were of the opinion it would be their
wisest course to burn the dead man’s heart on the sea-shore: but this
execution did not make him a bit more tractable; he went on with his
racket more furiously than ever: he was accused of beating folks in the
night, breaking down doors, and even roofs of houses; clattering
windows; tearing clothes; emptying bottles and vessels. It was the
most thirsty Devil! I believe he did not spare anybody but the Consul
in whose house we lodged. Nothing could be more miserable than the
condition of the island; all the inhabitants seemed frightened out of
their sense: the wisest among them were stricken like the rest: it was
an epidemical disease of the brain, as dangerous and infectious as the

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madness of dogs. Whole families quitted their homes, and brought

their tent-beds from the farthest parts of the town into the public-
place, there to spend the night. They were every instant complaining
of some new insult; nothing was to be heard but sighs and groans at
the approach of night: the better sort of people retired into the country.
When the prepossession was so general, we thought it our best way to
hold our tongues. Had we opposed it, we had not only been accounted
ridiculous blockheads, but atheists and infidels. How was it possible
to stand against the madness of a whole people? Those that believed
we doubted the truth of the fact, came and upbraided us with our
incredulity, and strove to prove that there were such things as
vroucolacas by citations out of the Buckler of Faith, written by
François Richard, a Jesuit missionary. He was a Latin, they say, and
consequently you ought to give him credit. We should have got
nothing by denying the justness of the consequence: it was as good as
a comedy to us every morning, to hear the new follies committed by
this night bird; they charged him with being guilty of the most
abominable sins.4
Joseph de Tournefort defines thus two epistemological spaces

which both his narrative voice and the Greeks in Mykonos assume:
the one of the West, privileged in the binary opposition, from where
he himself speaks, and the one of the East, which the superstitious
peasants inhabit. The authority is conferred to the first one both by the
narrator, through the rhetorical devices he deploys, and by his
autochthonous interlocutors, who consider it more believable than
their own. But where is Joseph de Tournefort’s epistemology
considered to come from? Is it not a by-product of Ancient Greek
civilization? Is it not Greek itself, after all? Where is then the
vrykolakas to be put as a historical and even geographical figure? Is
its space not undefined and undecidable from this point of view? Is
the colonizing logic of European epistemology not being colonized by
this irreducible creature and its questioning of discursive authority?
Joseph de Tournefort seems to perceive this paradox, as he feels
himself compelled to explain the difference between proper and
improper Greeks, thereby inscribing a historical difference in the core
of Greekness (which is the historical difference brought about by
modernity in Europe), a difference governed by the logic of the
4
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Relation d’un Voyage du Levant, Fait par Ordre du
Roy, Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1717, 132-34.


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revenant itself: “Après cela ne faut-il pas avouer que les Grecs
d’aujourd’hui ne sont pas grands Grecs et qu’il n’y a chez eux
qu’ignorance et superstition!” (“After such an instance of folly, can
we refuse to own that the present Greeks are no great Greeks and that
there is nothing but ignorance and superstition among them?”).5
Before the Serbian cases of vampirism came to light in 1732 and
spread the fame of the creature across Europe, other theoretical works,
such as Huetiana ou pensées diverses de M. Huet (1722), by Pierre
Daniel Huet, reflected also on the stories about the Greek vrykolakas
from a philosophical point of view. But even after 1732, the Greek
specimen seems to remain the source of all vampires in the mind of
many experts and theoreticians. In the most famous and influential
treatise on vampirism in the eighteenth century, Augustin Calmet’s
Dissertation sur les vampires (1746), the author returns to the heresy
argument and blames the Orthodox Greeks as the origin of this
superstition, created just to distinguish themselves from the Western
Catholic Church:
The belief of modern Greeks, who will have it that the bodies of the
excommunicated do not decay in their tombs or graves, is an opinion
which has no foundation, either in antiquity, in good theology, or even
in history. This idea seems to have been invented by the modern
Greek schismatics, only to authorize and confirm them in their
separation from the church of Rome.6
He appears also disappointed by the fact that the “spiritual Greeks”

have fallen to such a state of intellectual poverty and materialism as to
introduce such dangerous and coarse bodies into the West:
The vroucolacas of Greece and the Archipelago are again revenants of

a new kind. We can hardly persuade ourselves that a nation so witty as
the Greeks could fall into so extraordinary an opinion. Ignorance or
prejudice must be extreme among them since neither an ecclesiastic
nor any other writer has undertaken to undeceive them.7
5
Ibid., 136.
6
Augustine Calmet, Dissertation sur les Apparitions des Anges, des Démons et des
Esprits et sur les Revenants et Vampires de Hongrie, de Bohème, de Moravie et de
Silésie, Paris: De Bure, 1746, 251-52.
7
Ibid., 252-53.


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Augustine Calmet’s work was widely commented by the

philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose rationalism had been
strongly challenged by the phenomenon of vampires. Dozens of
scientific monographs were produced in Germany and France around
1732 in order to refute or explain the possibility, or not, of vampirism.
But, some decades later, the most important philosophers in Europe,
such as Voltaire, Diderot, or Rousseau, were still trying to eradicate
this belief. The vampires made it into the Encyclopaedia, where Louis
de Jaurcourt wrote that Augustine Calmet’s treatise on the subject was
not only absurd, but unbecoming to such a personality. The German
Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexikon also included an entry on
vampires where Greek vrykolakes occupy a pre-eminent position, and
Gerard van Swieten, the physician in charge of carrying out the
fieldwork research commissioned by the Austrian Empress Maria
Theresa in Central Europe, blames also the Greeks, orientalizing them
once more, in his Anhange vom Vampyrismus (1768): “The origin of
this evil has its roots without any doubt in the naivety of the Greek
schismatics, who believe that the devil can possess people’s bodies
replacing their souls.”8
But maybe Voltaire’s is the most extensive and important allusion
in this sense. The vampires make it too into his Philosophical
Dictionary (1764), which attests their relevance in the configuration
and empowerment of the Enlightened epistemology. Voltaire once
again expresses the paradox that had stricken Joseph de Tournefort
and Augustine Calmet, that is, how could the “philosophical Greeks”
have given rise to such an irrational belief? By expressing his
bewilderment, he nonetheless acknowledges the widely spread belief
about the Greek origin of vampirism:
Who would believe, that we derive the idea of vampires from Greece?
Not from the Greece of Alexander, Aristotle, Plato, Epicurus and
Demosthenes; but from Christian Greece, unfortunately schismatic.9
Voltaire inscribes the same historical gap as Joseph de Tournefort

into the notion of Greekness, inverting the narrative of progress and
development inherent in the Enlightenment, and thus challenging it:
8
Gerard Van Swieten, Abhandlung des Daseyns der Gespenster, nebst einem
Anhange vom Vampyrismus, Augsburg: No publisher, 1768, 6.
9
Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (1769), Paris: Cosse, 1838, 920-21.


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Modern Greeks are but the degeneration of Ancient Greeks, while

Europeans, starting also from the Hellenic culture, continuously
advance toward rationalism leaving aside barbarism and superstition.
A revival of the Greek revenant in the nineteenth century

In the last third of the eighteenth century there appear to be fewer
allusions to the vrykolakas. The first vampire fictions, in fact, seem to
exclusively draw from the Slavic events of the 1730s. But around
1810, coinciding with a boost in Philhellenism due to the claims of the
Greek-speaking communities of the Ottoman Empire for
independence, a clear revival of the Greek revenant pervades
European literature. The most famous Philhellene at the time, Lord
Byron, wrote the poem Giaour in 1813. Curiously enough, in the first
part, he depicts Greece itself as an undead; the shores of Ancient
Greece are in the present like a corpse waiting for a soul to be able to
stand up and walk:10
He who hath bent him o’er the dead

Ere the first day of death is fled,
The first dark day of nothingness,
The last of danger and distress,
(Before Decay’s effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,)
And mark’d the mild angelic air,
The rapture of repose that’s there,
And fix’d yet tender traits that streak
The languor of the placid cheek,
And – but for that sad shrouded eye,
That fires not, wins not, weeps not, now,
And but for that chill, changeless brow,
Where cold Obstruction’s apathy
Appals the gazing mourner’s heart,
As if to him it could impart
The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon;
Yes, but for these and these alone,
Some moments, ay, one treacherous hour,
He still might doubt the tyrant’s power;
So fair, so calm, so softly sealed,
10
See Matthew Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French
Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth-Century Near East, New York: Palgrave, 2006,
26-27.


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Such is the aspect of this shore;

’Tis Greece, but living Greece no more!
So coldly sweet, so deadly fair,
We start, for soul is wanting there.11
This introduction thematizes the content of the poem, whose

protagonist, a giaour (a Christian of mixed racial origins rather than a
pure ethnic Greek) fighting the Ottomans in order to attain Greece’s
independence, is cursed by his Turkish enemy to become a vampire
after his death. Even if Byron supports the modern Greeks’ claims for
autonomy, it seems as if the spurious population of contemporary
times could only (re)emerge as a vampiric counterfeit of their glorious
ancestors, precisely because of the Oriental impurity and the historical
difference inscribed in them.
Some scholarly footnotes in the Giaour, as well as one in Robert
Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, show that the figure of the
vrykolakas was still well known in the broader context of vampirism.
Indeed it is this figure that stands at the origin not only of the two
vampire fictions produced during the renowned 1816 evening in Villa
Diodati, but even of the very reformulation of Gothic that took place
there. The two great myths of horror fiction in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the monster of Frankenstein and the modern
vampire, were born exactly that evening among famous Philhellenes,
some of whom would participate a few years later in the Greek War of
Independence. John Polidori’s The Vampyre, originally a rewriting
and a completion of Byron’s “Fragment” told that very evening in
Villa Diodati, stands at the beginning of the line of vampire fictions
that will culminate in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The vampire in it is
modelled on the vrykolakas, and acts for the first time in Greece. In
the Introduction John Polidori explains the traditions upon which it is
founded, referring especially to Greece:
The superstition upon which this tale is founded is very general in the
East. Among the Arabians it appears to be common: it did not,
however, extend itself to the Greeks until after the establishment of
Christianity; and it has only assumed its present form since the
division of the Latin and Greek churches; at which time, the idea
becoming prevalent, that a Latin body could not corrupt if buried in
11
Byron, The Works of Lord Byron, London: John Murray, 1900, III, 70.


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their territory, it gradually increased, and formed the subject of many

wonderful stories, still extant, of the dead rising from their graves, and
feeding upon the blood of the young and beautiful. In the West it
spread, with some slight variation, all over Hungary, Poland, Austria,
and Lorraine .… In many parts of Greece it is considered as a sort of
punishment after death, for some heinous crime committed whilst in
existence, that the deceased is not only doomed to vampyrize, but
compelled to confine his infernal visitations solely to those beings he
loved most while upon earth – those to whom he was bound by ties of
kindred and affection.12
The protagonist, Lord Ruthven, is an English aristocrat who

resuscitates for the first time in Greece after being murdered by a
group of autochthonous brigands who eventually become his
accomplices. He comes back from Greece to England to haunt and kill
some bourgeois ladies he has previously seduced. This half-Greek
vampire contaminating modern and bourgeois Europe from the
outside was an immediate success after the first publication of the
work in 1819. A whole bunch of Ruthvens spread over Europe across
the nineteenth century, and especially during the 1820s (precisely the
decade when Greece was fighting for secession from the Ottomans
with the support of the Western public opinion). Charles Nodier’s
theatrical adaptation of Cyprien Bérard’s novel Lord Ruthwen ou les
vampires in 1820 unleashed a long series of sequels that filled the
French, English and German stages for decades. More than twenty
such texts are premiered or published just in the 1820s, and the
popularity of Ruthven along the whole century represents without any
doubt one of the main influences on Bram Stoker.
Repression and effacement of the Greek vampire

The birthplace of the vampire, however, was gradually shifted. While
in the 1820s Greece coexisted with Scotland, Moldavia or Hungary as
the birthplace of fictional vampires, by the 1870s allusions to the
vrykolakas were almost only to be found in travel accounts and
ethnographic scholarship. As the 1828 novel by the German Theodor
Hildebrand indicates, at this moment the Greek vampires were still
considered the source of the whole species: though the protagonist of
the book is an undead woman from Moldavia, the subtitle is Ein
12
John William Polidori, The Vampyre: A Tale, London, 1819 (Woodstock facsimile
edn, 1990), xix and xxii.


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Roman nach neugriechischen Volkssagen (A Novel after a Modern

Greek Folktale). That the vrykolakes lost popularity and prominence
is demonstrated by the fact that, in the first edition of his Dictionnaire
Infernal (1818), Jacques Collin de Plancy included two separate
entries for broucolaques and vampires, while in the fourth one, from
1845, the entry broucolaque refers the reader to “vampire”. In any
case, in French, the word broucolaque, attested from the 1780s, is still
used in 1924 by Gaston Leroux in his novel La Poupée sanglante to
allude metaphorically to vampires, and, in English, it is employed
until at least 1880.13 This means that Greek vampires were well
enough known to the readers so as not to need an explanation for the
term.
How can we explain, then, the process of repression and
effacement undergone by the vrykolakas and Greece as a land of
vampires in the Western European culture during the nineteenth
century? It seems that, as these monsters became more popular and
crystallized in a myth of modernity, the Greek factor slowly
disappeared until it left almost no traces at all at the present.
To help solve this riddle we should look at the entwinement
between modernity, Greece, and the Freudian uncanny, especially
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All of them, as well as
the vampire, are governed by the same logic: resurrection, return,
discontinuity and historical gap. It is not a coincidence that both
Greece and the vrykolakas (re)appear together in the West, in a period
called “Renaissance”. The Renaissance entails a rebirth of the dead
Ancient Greece, which tries to be constructed as the origin and the
foundation of the Occident. But there is always an excess and a
difference in such a return: as in the Freudian uncanny, Greece is the
familiar that comes back as the strange, or the strange that reveals
itself as the familiar. I contend that the vampire, a revenant who
returns from the grave neither dead nor alive to haunt the living and to
destabilize the borders between neatly defined concepts, times and
spaces, emblematizes such a disquieting difference, which disjoints
the aim to full identity inherent in modernity. As soon as Western
Europeans turn their gaze on modern Greece, they perceive a
13
In Eliza Lynn Linton’s “The Fate of Madame Cabanel”, a short story published in
the Christmas number of All the Year Round, XXIX (1880), “Vampire!
Broucolaque!” appears several times.


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historical gap that undermines their claims of continuity for Western

civilization.
The constructed nature of such a concept comes to light in an
uncanny manner. Vampire stories, as happened in Serbia in the 1730s,
emerge in contexts of cultural crossing, especially when the Turks are
involved. They come to symbolize, both inside and outside this
territories, the monstrosity transmitted by the contact with the full
alterity of such oriental aliens. In short, they embody the disjoining of
identity, continuity and ethnic group that haunts Western Europe in its
process of alleged modernization and self-delimitation. But, while the
notion “Eastern Europe”, created in this period precisely for the Slavic
regions that were haunted by vampires, became a comfortable
container for border communities split between familiarity and
otherness, Greece exceeded such a narrow categorization. It was
intended to be not just familiar to Europe, but the very historical and
spiritual core of its modern reconfiguration. Percy Bysse Shelley even
said “we are all Greeks”. Hence the bewilderment of philosophers and
scientists such as Voltaire, Joseph de Tournefort, or Rousseau, before
the fact that vampires, that such a figure undermining the whole
discourse of Enlightenment, belonged to the same Greece they were
trying to reify as its origin. Greekness, then, has to be orientalized as a
part of the process of self-delimitation of the West, but that,
paradoxically, implies a destabilization of all accepted cultural
categories. Philhellenism, a crucial current of Enlightenment, is thus
haunted from the beginning by the vrykolakas (as we have seen
regarding the protophilhellenic work by Martin Kraus) and by the
disquieting logic of undeadness and vampirism.
Neither wholly Occidental nor Oriental, Ancient nor Modern, dead
nor alive, exactly like the vampire, Greece challenges the
encyclopedistic epistemology that tries to assign a unique signified to
each signifier, and vice versa. That is also, as Helène Cixous14 or
Samuel Weber,15 among others,16 have asserted, a feature of the
14
Hélène Cixous, “Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das
Unheimliche”, New Literary History, VII/3 (Spring 1976), 525-48.
15
Samuel Weber, “Uncanny Thinking”, in The Legend of Freud, Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2000, 1-31.
16
For a general panorama of the critical reflection about the uncanny, see Anneleen
Masschelein, The Unconcept: the Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century
Theory, New York: State University, 1995.


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uncanny. If we accept, following Terry Castle,17 that the concept of

uncanniness is historically determined and emerges in the
Enlightenment, I would dare to suggest that Philhellenism and the
dream of a revivified Greece, however entangled with rationalism
they seem to be, are inextricably linked to the uncanny and, therefore,
to the conditions that gave rise to Gothic literature.
The Greek War of Independence brought this process to a climax.
Europe projected on the nation to come the ideals of Philhellenism,
the utopia of the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, the idea of founding a
new nation from scratch as an embodiment of the internal structure
governing modernity had to rely in the restoration of the ancient. It
was already the resuscitation of a corpse. The new state was called
“Modern Greece”, even if it could not wholly fulfil the conditions of
any of both terms: it was not modern, since it had to carry on its
shoulders the burden of the Ancient, and it was not sufficiently
Greece, since it was a contemporary region under Ottoman rule.
Where the Europeans thought they would find an empty lot to build
their particular Hellenistic utopia, they actually found an Orthodox
Christian community with oriental customs unaware of who their
glorious ancestors were. The encounter with the “body of Greece” was
also, by itself, uncanny, and destabilized the Philhellenic ideals
through a kind of secondary revenance: that of Greece’s Orientalist
and Balkanist Otherness linked precisely to the superstitions of
vampirism.
This conglomerate of factors, and the reluctance to wholly
categorize Greece as “Eastern Europe”, brought about the repression
of the vrykolakas in Western European fiction. The focus was shifted
towards Romania, Serbia, and such easier emblematizations of intra-
European Otherness. The space of the Balkans remained associated
with vampirism itself because of its alleged attachment to previous
stages of historical development and to premodern violence, while
Greece was turned into just another Mediterranean paradise of exotic
authenticity and light.
However, despite any repressions, the uncanny always comes back
to haunt – this time not outside, but within Greece. European
Philhellenism prompted the construction of the Greek state in the
nineteenth century, to the point that many authors have coined for this
17
Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the
Invention of the Uncanny, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.


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process the term “metaphorical colonization” or “colonization of the

mind”.18 Since the Greek elite itself assimilated such a discourse as
the only chance to achieve national independence, Vangelis
Calotychos has used the more accurate term “self-colonization”.19
Instead of founding a nation, the Greek-speaking Ottomans inhabiting
the Ancient territories of Hellas found themselves trying to resuscitate
one, even if it did not coincide at all with their daily practice and
recent background. Self-colonial pedagogy, to borrow Homi Bhabha’s
concept,20 dictated nonetheless the logic of uncanniness as the way to
structure the nation: completely alien elements had to be familiarized,
while familiar ones were despised as alien and inadequate.
Modernization and Europeanness became the main goal of the state. This just doesn’t
fit with Valaoritis,
Superstitions, marks of backwardness or oriental customs, in short however, who was
everything that might deny the dogma of uninterrupted continuity just as much anti-
Frankish as anti-
between Classical and Modern Greece, were repressed in the official Ottoman
discourse. Anxiety about self-identity prevailed over any other
collective feeling. The tradition of the vrykolakas, as allegorizing not
only the fear of impure ethnicity and of discontinuity, but also the
economy of revenance structurally governing the process of national
configuration, underwent a particularly intense repression. It not only
represented an embarrassment for Greece’s claims of belonging to the
West, but also revealed the constructedness of the nation and the
uncanny fractures in the national narrative.
In the first wave of Greek nationalism, the vrykolakas tried even to
be de-orientalized and assimilated to the Hellenic lineage. Adamantios
Korais, one of the founding fathers of the country, wrote in his Atakta,
an early dictionary of the modern Greek language, a fake classical
etymology for it, disregarding the clear Slavic origin of the term, in
order to suggest continuity in vampire lore from Ancient to modern
times.21 In spite of the moderate success of this theory, within the
country and among some foreign folklorists, the revenants did very
soon what they do the best: to come back from the death-like fixation
through which they tried to be controlled and obliterated.
18
See especially Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization,
and the Institution of Modern Greece, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996,
and Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1995.
19
Vangelis Calotychos, Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics, Oxford: Berg, 2003.
20
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994.
21
Adamantios Korais, Atakta, Paris, 1832, II, 84-85; and Atakta, Paris, 1835, V, 31.


via free access
The economy of revenance governing Greek national construction

brought them back. After the first classicist wave, around the 1880s, a
group of intellectuals began claiming the autochthonous heritage of
their country. Naturally not the Ottoman elements, but the Byzantine
and the popular ones developed under Turcocracy. Colloquial
language, folkloric traditions, and oral literature were recovered,
though often as an attempt to prove the survival of Ancient customs in
Modern Greece, and thus historical continuity. Not surprisingly, the
revival in the national discourse of previously repressed strata of self-
identity brought about the resuscitation of vampires. Once more an
allegory of the very structure of collective self-conceptualization, the
vrykolakas, first banned from the public space, started now to appear
again in journals, fictions and even ethnographic studies.
From the 1860s until the first decades of the twentieth century, a
set of short stories about vampires was published in Greece. However,
such voluntary revival seemed to exceed its initial aim and became
uncanny and anxiety-provoking. Maybe that is why these incipient
samples of Greek Gothic underwent censorship and repression in their
turn, not assuming Gothic generic conventions, but the conventions of
the narrative of customs and manners, and, yet, becoming almost
totally excluded from the literary canon.
Unlike European ones, Greek literary vampires do not come from

remote colonized lands, but from the same community, and even
family, as their victims. Like the famous Serbian vampire Arnold
Paole, however, they carry a mark of Otherness usually connected to
contact with the Turks or, in the case of Greece, even Slavs. The
repressed plurality of identities through which Greece was initially
constructed, returns now under a monstrous form to destabilize and
weaken the foundations of the community. In the first of our texts (see
Appendix II), Aristotelis Valaoritis’ Thanasis Vagias (1867), the dead
hero who pays a visit to his terrified widow has been accused of
committing treason against Greece by revealing national military
plans to the Turks in the War of Independence. The alleged vampire in
“The Grave of the Excommunicated” (1926) is discovered to have had
secret commercial dealings with Turks, whose revelation to his family
and fellow countrymen seems to be the only cause of his
vampirization. While it is not said whether the vrykolakas in “The Son
of the Vampire” (1933) be a Turk at all, the description of the cave

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where he lives reminds one of an Ottoman Palace as those which the

ruling class of Turkish governors of Greek regions, the pasha, used to
inhabit. Since the vampire was always someone excommunicated
from the Orthodox Church, Andreas Carcavitsas’ “The
Excommunicated” (1888) features a man who is banned from the
community before he dies by means of a public sentence for theft, and
has to leave his village to go to live among the nomadic Slavs of the
mountains. In other cases, it is the transgression of a communal taboo
that leads to vampirization, either for practising sorcery, as in “She did
not decompose”, or for not submitting oneself to collective
superstitions, as in “The Vampire”. A fear of not belonging enough, of
not being sufficiently pure as a Greek, is at stake here. This is
reinforced by the anxiety of having descendants with vampires and
thus prolonging the spurious lineage for the nation. A motif in folklore
itself, intercourse or even marriage with a vrykolakas is thematized
both in Thanasis Vagias and in “The Son of the Vampire” as the
uttermost horror to be endured by a Greek woman. While the hero in
the former proposes that his wife has a child, which seems to be for
her more horrible than the apparition itself, in the latter the child has
already been born, with several monstrous marks that make him
unhuman.
I contend that these short stories, which would deserve a much
more detailed study, allegorize the economy of revenance and the
uncanniness involved in the construction of Modern Greece, and
express the anxiety about discovering fearful secrets in the body of the
national self: especially, alien ethnicities and deviant identities. But,
unlike Western representations of alterity through vampirism, the
vrykolakas in such postcolonial context does not embody the fear of
“reverse colonization”, in Stephen Arata’s expression about Dracula
(1990), but of “reverse self-colonization”.
That is why Dracula is a Transylvanian, since depicting him as a
Greek would have been too fearful for Europeans themselves:
Otherness would not come from outside, but would have been already,
from the beginning, among them.

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Appendix I: List of Western works that mention the vrykolakas
1506-11 (published 1558): Antonio de Ferraris, De situ Japygiae,

Basel.
1531-33: Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, Paris and
Cologne.
1584: Martin Kraus, Turcograecia, Basel.
1610: Heinrich Kornmann, De miraculis mortuorum, Frankfurt.
1645: Leo Allatius, De Graecorum hodie quorundam
opinationibus, Cologne.
1657: François Richard, Relation de ce qui s’est passé de plus
remarquable à Saint-Erini Isle de l’Archipel depuis l’établissement
des Pères de la Compagnie de Jesus, Paris.
1660: Christian Friedrich Garmann, De miraculis mortuorum,
Leipzig.
1664: Jean de Thévenot, Relation d’un voyage fait au Lévant,
Paris.
1674: S. Gerlach, Tagebuch der vonzween Glorwürdigsten
Römischen Kaysern Maximiliano und Rudolpho, Frankfurt.
1676-86: Alexandre Noël, Selecta historiae ecclesiasticae capita,
et in loca ejusdem insignia dissertationes historicae, chronologicae,
dogmaticae, Paris.
1677: Jean-Baptiste Cotelier, Ecclesiae graecae monumenta, Paris.
1678: Paul Ricaut, The present state of the Greek and Armenian
Churches, London.
1688: Charles du Fresne, Glossarium ad scriptores Mediae et
Infimae Graecitatis, Lyon.
1695: Sieur de la Croix, État présent des nations et Églises
grecque, armenienne et maronite en Turquie, Paris.
1698: Robert Saulger, Histoire nouvelle des anciens Ducs et autres
souverains de l’Archipel, Paris.
1698: Thomas Smith, De Graecae Ecclesiae hodierno statu,
Utrecht.
1704: Paul Lucas, Voyage au Lévant, Paris.
1709: Johann Michael Heineccius, Dissertatio Theologica
Inauguralis De absolutione mortuorum excommunicatorum seu
tympanicorum in ecclesia graeca, Helmstedt.
1717: Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Relation d’un voyage du Lévant
fait par ordre du roy, Paris.

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1722: John Covel, Some Account of the Present Greek Church,

Cambridge.
1722: Pierre Daniel Huet, Huetiana ou pensées diverses de M.
Huet, Paris.
1730: Antoine de la Barre de Beaumarchais, Lettres sérieuses et
badines sur les ouvrages des savans, et sur d’autres matières, The
Hague.
1732-54: Joseph Heinrich Zedler, Großes vollständiges Universal-
Lexikon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, Halle and Leipzig.
1733: Willem Cuypers, Ad Historiam Chronologicam
Patriarcharum Constantinopolitanorum – in Acta Sanctorum Augusti
I, Antwerp.
1741: Antoine Banier-Jean-Baptiste Le Mascrier, Histoire générale
des cérémonies, mœurs et costumes religieuses de tous les peuples du
monde, Paris.
1745: Richard Pococke, A Description of the East and Some other
Countries, London.
1746: Augustine Calmet, Dissertations sur les Apparitions des
Anges, des Démons et des Esprits, et sur les revenants, et Vampires de
Hongrie, de Bohème, de Moravie, et de Silésie, Paris.
1751: Nicolas Lenglet-Dufresnoy, Traité historique et dogmatique
sur les apparitions, les visions et les révélations particulières avec des
observations sur les Dissertations du R.-P. Dom Calmet, Avignon.
1764: Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, Paris.
1768: Gerard van Swieten, Vampyrismus, Augsburg.
1799: Saverio Scrofani, Viaggio in Grecia, London.
1801: Robert Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer, London.
1809: Marc-Phillippe Zallony, Voyage à Tine, l’une des isles de
l’Archipel de la Grèce, suivi d’un Traité de l’Asthme, Paris.
1810: John Wilkes, Encyclopaedia Londinensis ; or, Universal
Dictionary of Arts, Science and Literature, London.
1812: S. Chardon de la Rochette, Mélanges de critique et de
philologie, Paris.
1813: Lord Byron, The Giaour.
1818: Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire infernal, Paris.
1819: Gabrielle de Paban, Histoire des fantômes et des démons qui
se sont montrés parmi les hommes, Paris.
1819: J. W. Polidori, The Vampyre.
1820: Cyprien Bérard, Lord Ruthwen ou les vampires, Paris.

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1820: Charles Nodier, Pierre Carmouche and Achille Jouffrey

d’Abban, Le vampire (theatre), Paris.
1820: Eugène Scribe and Mélesville, Le vampire, ou Le vampire
Amoureux (theatre), Paris.
1820: Nicholas Brazier, Gabriel Lurieu and Armand d’Artois de
Boumonville, Les trois vampires, ou le claire de la lune (theatre),
Paris.
1820: Emile B. L., Encore un vampire (theatre), Paris.
1820: August Rousseau, Les Etrennes d’un Vampire (theatre),
Paris.
1820: Marc Antoine M. Désaugiers, Cadet Buteux au vampire
(theatre), Paris.
1820: Anonym, Le Vampire (theatre), Paris.
1820: James Planché, The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles
(theatre), London.
1820: William Thomas Moncrieff, The Vampire (theatre), London.
1820-22: François de Pouqueville, Voyage de la Grèce, Paris.
1821: James Planché, Giovanni the Vampire!!! or How Shall We
Get Rid of Him? (theatre), London.
1821: St. John Dorset, The Vampire, London.
1821: Heinrich Ludwig Ritter, Der Vampir oder die Totenbraut
(theatre).
1822: Charles Nodier, Infernaliana, Paris.
1822: Cäsar Max Heigel, Ein Uhr! (theatre), Munich.
1822: L. Ritter, Der Vampyr oder die Todten-Braut (theatre).
1823: François Alexis Blache, Polichinel Vampire (theatre), Paris.
1826: Karl Spindler, Der Vampyr und seine Braut, Berlin.
1826: Martin Joseph Mengals, Le vampire (theatre).
1826: Charles Swan, Journal of a Voyage up the Mediterranean,
principally among the Islands of the Archipelago and in Asia Minor,
including many interesting particulars relative to the Greek
Revolution, London.
1827: Friederike Ellmenreich, Der Vampyr (theatre).
1828: Theodor Hildebrand, Der Vampyr, oder die Todtenbraut :
ein Roman nach neugriechischen Volkssagen.
1828: August Wohlbrück and Heinrich Marschner, Der Wampyr
(opera), London.
1828: C. M. Heigel and P. von Lindpainter, Der Vampyr (opera),
Berlin.

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1828: A. Cosmar, Der Vampyr (theatre), Berlin.

1835: William Martin Leake, Travels in Northern Greece, London.
1837: Robert Pashley, Travel in Crete, London.
1837: Richard Alfred Davenport, Sketches of imposture, deception
and credulity, London.
1841: Ferdinand Aldenhoven, Itineraire descriptif de l’Attique et
du Péloponèse.
1846: James K. Paulding, “The Vroucalacas: A Tale”, in Graham’s
American Monthly Magazine of Literature and Art, Philadelphia.
1869: Henry Fanshawe Tozer, Researches in the Highlands of
Turkey, London.
Appendix II: Greek poems and short stories about the

vrykolakas
1867: Aristotelis Valaoritis, “Thanasis Vagias” (“ĬĮȞȐıȘȢ

ǺȐȖȚĮȢ”).
1888: Andreas Karkavitsas, “The Excommunicated” (“ȅ
ĮĳȦȡİıȝȑȞȠȢ”).
1890: Alexandros Papadiamantis, “The Injured Woman” (“Ǿ
ȤĲȣʌȘȝȑȞȘ”).
1894: Kostas Pasagiannis, “The Vampire” (“ȅ ȕȡȣțȩȜĮțĮȢ”).
1907: Alexandros Moraitidis, “Koukkitsa” (“ȀȠȣțțȓĲıĮ”).
1907-1908: Christos Christovassilis, “She did not decompose” (“Ǿ
ȐȜȣȦĲȘ”).
1926: Ȁonstantinos Kazantzis, “The Grave of the
Excommunicated” (“ȉȠ ȝȞȒȝĮ ĲȠȣ ĮĳȠȡİıȝȑȞȠȣ”).
1933: Achilleas Paraschos, “The Son of the Vampire” (“ȅ ȖȣȚȠȢ
ĲȠȣ ȕȡȣțȩȜĮțĮ”, first published this year, unknown date of
composition).

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PART I*RWKLF6SDFHVRUWKH 'H &RORQL]DWLRQRID*HQUH

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

ÁLVARO GARCÍA MARÍN

Why is Dracula a Transylvanian? My main point in this article will be

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

between the (re)construction of Modern Greece as an Oriental Other

Three founding allusions to the vrykolakas in the Renaissance

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

kill the children, and then to return to their tombs. Superstitious

There is already, as we can appreciate, a discursive distrust in such

We read also in the Chronicles of the Cretensians, that the ghosts

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

uncomfortable simultaneity of strangeness and Greekness in the

In Pentecost Saturday, the Turks burned a Greek dead two years

Following the logic of the Freudian uncanny, Greekness, a

The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century reinforcement of the

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

theology, though still at work in some texts. Credulous narratives and

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

pericraniums. Their imagination, struck with the spectacle before

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

madness of dogs. Whole families quitted their homes, and brought

Joseph de Tournefort defines thus two epistemological spaces

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

He appears also disappointed by the fact that the “spiritual Greeks”

The vroucolacas of Greece and the Archipelago are again revenants of

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

Augustine Calmet’s work was widely commented by the

Voltaire inscribes the same historical gap as Joseph de Tournefort

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

Modern Greeks are but the degeneration of Ancient Greeks, while

A revival of the Greek revenant in the nineteenth century

He who hath bent him o’er the dead

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

Such is the aspect of this shore;

This introduction thematizes the content of the poem, whose

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

their territory, it gradually increased, and formed the subject of many

The protagonist, Lord Ruthven, is an English aristocrat who

Repression and effacement of the Greek vampire

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

Roman nach neugriechischen Volkssagen (A Novel after a Modern

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

historical gap that undermines their claims of continuity for Western

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

uncanny. If we accept, following Terry Castle,17 that the concept of

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

process the term “metaphorical colonization” or “colonization of the

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

The economy of revenance governing Greek national construction

Unlike European ones, Greek literary vampires do not come from

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

where he lives reminds one of an Ottoman Palace as those which the

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

Appendix I: List of Western works that mention the vrykolakas

1506-11 (published 1558): Antonio de Ferraris, De situ Japygiae,

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

1722: John Covel, Some Account of the Present Greek Church,

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

1820: Charles Nodier, Pierre Carmouche and Achille Jouffrey

Álvaro García Marín - 9789004308060

1828: A. Cosmar, Der Vampyr (theatre), Berlin.

PART IRWKLF6SDFHVRUWKH'H&RORQL]DWLRQRIDHQUH