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40 Fang-tastic Facts about the History of Vampires

Tim Flight October 24, 2019 26 min

Wiertz Museum - The Premature Burial — The Premature Burial by Antoine Wiertz, 1854. Wikimedia Commons

34. The ancient Slavs might have worshipped vampires

A female upyr depicted in a dictionary of Slavic folklore of 1996. Wikimedia Commons

Despite how little we know about Slavic paganism, the practice of worshipping ancestors is widely attested. It seems that this often involved sacrifice and the spilling of blood. Moreover, worshipping ancestors works on the assumption that the dead are still alive and can make things happen on earth. Did this also include vampires, perhaps to prevent them from physically harming the living? Intriguingly, a manuscript from Sofia Cathedral, Bulgaria, has a 15^th-century insertion which makes just such a stunning claim. ‘The Slavs made sacrifices to Rod [God of Fate]… previously, however, they made sacrifices to the Vampires’.

Written by

Tim Flight

I am a freelance historical and literary writer based in West Yorkshire, UK. I read for a funded PhD in English at the University of Oxford (Magdalen College) and graduated in 2016. I am a former lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. My publications include peer-reviewed articles in academic publications, and pieces in mainstream magazines such as History Today and Fortean Times. For more information, please see www.drflight.co.uk