The Vrykolakas: Greece’s Undecayed Dead

On the island of Chios, wrote a learned Chiot in the seventeenth century, people would not answer a voice that called their name at night, not the first time. A vrykolakas, they said, called only once. If you answered, you would be dead the next day. If the voice called again, it was probably a neighbour, and you could open the door. Small rules like that one, handed down in villages, are where the Greek revenant lives. But the belief was shaped over many centuries: by ancient fears, by the teaching of the church, and by the islands themselves.

A borrowed name for an older fear

The word vrykolakas (plural vrykolakes) is not ancient Greek. It was borrowed from a Slavic word, related to Bulgarian varkolak and Serbian vukodlak, that meant a werewolf. In Greek the meaning drifted, and by the early modern period the word had come to mean a corpse that would not stay in its grave: swollen, undecayed, walking by night, knocking on doors, calling names, pressing down on sleepers and bringing sickness to a village.

The ancient Greeks had no such word, but they had the fear. Homer’s Odysseus, at the edge of the world, pours the blood of sacrificed sheep into a trench, and the dead rise to it:

Up out of Erebus they came thronging, the souls of the dead who are gone: brides and young men unwed, old men who had suffered much, and tender girls whose hearts were new to grief.

Homer, Odyssey (our rendering)

Greeks also feared the dead who had been cheated of proper rites, the unburied and those who died by violence, and believed such souls might linger. One extraordinary ancient story comes close to the later revenant. Phlegon of Tralles, writing in the second century CE, tells of Philinnion, a young woman who returned months after her death to visit a guest in her parents’ house by night. When her parents found her, she fell lifeless again. Her tomb, once opened, held nothing but gifts the young man had given her, and the city had her body burned outside the walls. Myth kept the dead in with a three-headed hound at the gate; folk belief worried about the ones who got out.

When the earth would not receive the body

Christian teaching gave the old fear a new explanation. In the Orthodox world a body was expected to return to dust, and in many Greek communities families exhumed their dead after a few years, washed the bones, often with wine, and placed them in an ossuary. Most of the time that was simply an act of care. But if the body had not decayed, something was wrong.

Byzantine and later Orthodox churchmen linked incorruption of this kind to excommunication. A person who died under a church ban, the reasoning went, remained bound, and the earth would not dissolve the body until the ban was lifted. Such a corpse was called tympaniaios, “drum-like”, because it lay swollen and taut as a drum skin. The remedy was spiritual: a priest or bishop read prayers of absolution over the grave, and the body was expected to crumble. The irony was not lost on anyone. The same incorruption that marked a saint’s relics as holy could mark an ordinary sinner’s body as a danger.

Folk belief added other causes. Folklorists recorded that a person might become a vrykolakas after dying under a curse, especially a parent’s curse, after a violent or sudden death, after a life of great wickedness, or if a cat or another animal leapt over the corpse before burial. That is one reason the dead were watched through the night before the funeral, and why the forty days after a death, when the soul was believed still to linger near home, were marked with such care.

Allatius and the voice in the night

The fullest early description comes from that learned Chiot, Leo Allatius, born on the island in the late sixteenth century, who became a scholar and librarian in Rome. In 1645 he published a Latin treatise on the beliefs of the Greeks of his day, De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus, and gave many pages to the vrykolakas. He was no skeptic. To Allatius, the creature was the body of a wicked man taken over by the devil, who used it to wander the streets, knock at doors and call out names. He describes the custom of waiting for a second call, and the measures taken when a grave fell under suspicion: the body was dug up, prayers were read, and if it remained whole it was burned.

His account mixes island hearsay with the church’s own teaching on excommunication and the undecayed dead, which shows how closely the two had grown together. The church did not invent the vrykolakas, but it gave villagers a language and a ritual for dealing with one.

Mykonos, Santorini and the island tradition

Around the turn of 1701 the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort was on Mykonos when a vrykolakas scare broke out, and his account, published in 1717, is one of the most vivid we have. A sullen, quarrelsome peasant had been murdered in the fields; soon after his burial, people said he was walking at night, overturning furniture, putting out lamps and terrifying the townsfolk. Masses were said and the body was exhumed; the heart was cut out and burned on the shore; and the panic went on until the whole body was burned. Tournefort was scornful, blaming fear and suggestion, but he recorded what the islanders did in careful detail.

No island had a stronger reputation than Santorini, the volcanic Thera. A proverb spoke of sending vrykolakes to Santorini much as English speaks of carrying coals to Newcastle, because the island was thought to have plenty already. Its volcanic soil was said to keep bodies from decaying, and its people were credited with special skill in laying the restless dead.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, folklorists began collecting these traditions systematically. Nikolaos G. Politis, the founder of Greek folklore studies, gathered accounts from across Greece in his Paradoseis (1904). The British scholar John Cuthbert Lawson, who travelled in Greece around 1900, argued in Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (1910) that the fear of the undecayed body was far older than Christianity, a survival of ancient ideas about the dead who could not rest.

Today the vrykolakas lives mainly in stories, local memory and the tales grandparents tell, though the exhumation of bones after a few years remains common in Greek cemeteries. The belief deserves to be understood on its own terms. It expresses a deep sense that the living owe the dead the right rites, that quarrels and curses do not end at the grave, and that a community must make peace with those it has lost. Like the Hydra’s immortal head under its rock, the vrykolakas is a danger that has to be laid to rest properly, or it rises again.