Poland’s ‘anti-vampire’ graves
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
How would you otherwise recognize a vampire incident it one were to happen?
(That's also historically the first recorded incident of organizational rage-quit after losing the game to a cheese strategy.)
Have you considered a career with Homeland Security?
Well - now they no longer need to hide themselves away, they are hiding-in-plain sight...
Almost. I'm Polish, so I know how to pronounce "Bytów", but I got confused for a moment if maybe I didn't know hot to say "bit" in English…
Wiktionary says "bit" is pronounced as [bit] using IPA.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bit
Wiktionary also says "Bytów" is pronounced as IPA: [ˈbɨtuf], AS: [bytuf].
You can listen to it here:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Pl-Byt%C...
London, South African, Southern American "lip" is one example of this vowel:
Anyway I was born in Gdańsk so now I'll be self conscious about yet another thing I mispronounce in English.
I remember one detail regarding the decapitated (17th century IIRC) bodies they found: one would put a sickle between the head and the rest of the body. Some of the local construction site workers hired to help with digging were quite upset/scared by the view.
Also, I think we can thank Austro-Hungarian civil servants and bureaucracy for the amount of documentation we have on the subject. Central Europe was much luckier in that regard than the regions farther east.
Tangentially related: the WoD (World of Darkness, esp. Vampire: the Masqureade) scene in Poland was relatively big in 2010s, compared to the rest of Europe IIRC. I used to run one of the biggest bi-weekly LARPs in the region, called Totentanz, with 25 regular bloodsuckers joining the game every Sunday.
Krakow, my hometown is an excellent setting for that: the medieval city moved up by one floor, so we have a tonne of old dungeons/cellars to dress up as vampires, plot against each other, and pretend we like smoking clove cigarettes.
What does that mean? How did it come to be?
It seems like the practice could well share inheritance with ancient Greece, but I'd be surprised if the motivating mythology would be quite the same. Wonder what the story was in ancient Poland..
I suspect this one may have more to do with countering external threats.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/38468
This would imply that helping the soul cross the river doesn't prevent "vampirification".
Some 18th century people didn't like it because they thought it was too colloquial but its been a part of English for a fairly long time, roughly 10 times as long as the "Internet age".
I think it's quite common to see front lines and new borders form around ethnic or cultural borders, instead of existing / established country borders. Or that there's clear cultural differences on old borders, like for example where the Roman empire's borders were, or the borders between England, Wales and Scotland in the UK.
There has been a lot of history since the days Roman empire.
It makes me appreciate how hard it’d be to craft messaging that can survive hundreds of generations without merely piquing the interest of that day’s archaeologists.
> Bastide and Fabbri came to the conclusion that the most durable thing that humanity has ever made is culture: religion, folklore, belief systems. They may morph over time, but an essential message can get pulled through over millennia. They proposed that we genetically engineer a species of cat that changes color in the presence of radiation, which would be released into the wild to serve as living Geiger counters. Then, we would create folklore and write songs and tell stories about these “ray cats,” the moral being that when you see these cats change colors, run far, far away.
10,000 - Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty):
http://emperorx.bandcamp.com/album/10000-year-earworm-to-dis...
This would seem to fail as a long-term plan due to genetic drift and natural selection.
Presumably, there is no reproductive advantage to the cat in expressing fur color that indicates radiation. In the absence of selective pressure, the phenotype will gradually disappear as the radiation expressing cats mix with non-expressing cats. Since humans won't be actively maintaining the phenotype in the population against genetic drift (the opposite, in fact, since they avoid the cats) then over hundreds or thousands of years there will be no indicator cat phenotype.
They are not able to do this for High Voltage lines.
In fact, such superstitious practices were almost non-existent during middle ages: they're one of the natural consequences of de-christianization, which happened at a faster pace after the middle ages.
I know I need to assume good intentions, but "post-medieval" seems just misplaced and an attempt to associate these practices to the middle ages. I thought we were finally past the times in which we demonized the middle ages. At least in Italy, several historians are finally talking about how great and important that time was.
Look for "Alessandro Barbero" on YouTube for more.
> the natural consequences of de-christianization
Poland in middle ages was less catholic than Poland in 17th century. If anything it was over-chrisianized not de-christianized in that period.
It is curious that you claim that such practices could only be a result of de-Christianization. In the Balkans, fears of vampires, incubi, and succubi have always co-existed happily with a Christianity that deeply permeated all levels of society.
It's a very peculiar type of Christianity, that's for sure, and even the local high-placed Christian men are quite hesitant to talk about it. Bogomilism is, of course, its most famous form, but it has circulated in one form or other for many hundreds of years, no matter the official repressions it has faced (ever since the 10th century [1], maybe even earlier).
Back to the article, the strzyga and strigoi which are mentioned there are basically Romanian words, and Romanian most probably took them from the Latin strix [2]. In fact a local species of owl is called strigă.
And now back to the local Manichaeism present here, a grand-father of a friend of mine (in fact, his corpse) was unearthed at some point after his death (I think it was 7 years) and a spike was put through its (the body's) chest, so that his spirit would stop wandering among the living. Granted, that was happening in a Romanian region a little bit on the more traditional side, you won't find that in Bucharest or Cluj anymore. Also, up until very recently there was a tradition at the church in my parents' village where the most "wealthy" family in the village would have to bring a black rooster on Easter inside the church, let it loose, people would catch it and then give it to one of the poor families, so that that poor family would cook it as an Easter meal. Black roosters are, of course, not that Christian to begin with.
As I said, lots and lots of Manichaeism beliefs around these parts of the continent (in many, many folk tales the Devil is on the same level as God), Middle Ages or not, it's quite fascinating.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Treatise_Against_...
In 1500s at one point majority of nobility went protestant, and there was still a lot of orthodox nobles from Lithuania. Peasants were orthodox or pagan in the east, catholic in the west with some protestants, muslims and jews mixed in. In the cities there was a lot of german immigrants who were protestant or catholic depending on the city they immigrated from. Whole towns and villages were created by importing people from the west and giving them religious freedoms and tax benefits for a few years.
By 1700s it was mostly gone, because the country kept fighting muslims, orthodox and protestant countries. So kings turned to catholicism and counter-reformation as uniting factor. So religion got a lot of influence.
Nowadays that's on paper mostly, especially that apostasy is difficult and not really worth the trouble for most.
The pandemic especially revealed that many people were attending only because everyone else was.
This doesn't really agree with my understanding of things. The late medieval and early modern period was a time of increasing religious control due to the reformation and counter-reformation.
This was a new kind of problem, since during most of the medieval period the biggest threat was external in the form of Islam during the crusades and reconquista, but you could send armies to deal with that problem.
Heretics from within, like Jan Hus, John Wycliffe, and eventually Luther and Calvin and later the protestants were much harder to defeat with armies, since they'd crop up anywhere and erode the power of the church from within. To hold against the protestants, you needed to control what people thought, paying lip service to the church wasn't enough anymore. This is when you get the inquisition and so on.
A mirror image of things were happening along the protestants since it was very important that everyone held the line when the jesuits came a'knocking. There was also a fairly strong impetus to enforce protestantism from the temporal powers-that-be, since it was basically what allowed them to cut free from the pope.
Closet papists among the population was as bad thing for a protestant king as closet protestants were for a catholic pope (or catholic king).
It depends on hystorians. In our school was thought that middle ages ended around 1848.
Maybe it is just me, but 17th century seems way too recent to be digging people up. I’m into family history and I know who a lot of my ancestors were back to the 1500s and even into the 1400s. There are surely people alive right now who could trace their family lines back to some of the people being dug up.
My SO recently visited her family tomb in France. It was gone. Lease lapsed, no more tomb. Last person was buried there some 40 years ago. Church didn’t know who to contact to renew the lease, good bye.
I think this is fairly standard practice in much of Europe where space is scarce. Moreso in larger towns and cities than rural villages. It’s also why family tombs are common in the first place.
My grandpa’s family, for example, has shared the same cemetery plot since before ww1. That’s how you fit a whole village into one little tiny church cemetery.
https://onlinecampus.fcps.edu/media2/Social_Studies/WHGII_20...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/MotelOfThe...
There are theories that a vampire panic in early New England was attributable to misinterpreting the symptoms of tuberculosis[0].
Exorcisms have been booming in Poland for quite some time: https://www.dw.com/en/why-exorcism-is-booming-in-poland/a-36...
We already have to pay respects to the WHO God so religious beliefs may come back in strength
Exorcisms aren't blooming here nor are popular, or gained any widespread attention in last years.
It is being driven by the Church in Poland which has a powerful connection to the Government.
So maybe this is an indication, that communist movement started already in the XVII century... and the smart village guys tried to prevent it from spreading already at that time... huh
PS. It is a joke. (the idea, not the writer & the books).
I also like “What We Do In The Shadows” (tv show version) extension of the metaphor to the “energy vampire”, which is essentially a criticism of bloated bureaucracy which is another one of the modern monsters draining the life out of us all.
I don’t think these terms were ever meant to be taken literally by those who created them but as platonic ideals to describe personalities and systems, but the education level and lifestyles of the time were so barbaric, primitive and rooted in physicality that the majority struggled to comprehend them as such.
I mean I don't think they care per se if they're actually dead?
That said, there were things like bells on wires as well for cases like that.
Poland is bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukraine to the east, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the south, and Germany to the west.
Romania does border Ukraine, however if you were to travel from Ukraine to Romania the best route is actually through Slovakia and Hungary.
Also before the WWII, the Second Polish Republic shared a border with the Kingdom of Romania. Before the partitions in late 18th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth overlapped with some territories making up modern day Romania and Moldova and the Principality of Moldavia was a vassal of Poland and PLC for a time.
This is to say it is reasonable to imply Poland's close proximity with Romania, both in geographical and cultural sense, even though the borders have shifted.
[1] - https://dalekieobserwacje.eu/rumunia-widziana-z-tarnicy-most...