1 - Vampire Country: Borders of Culture and Power in Central Europe

Summary

For about twenty years In the early half of the eighteenth century, parts of Europe caught vampire fever. The etiology and epidemic nature of the phenomenon are not well known today, and, at first glance, the matter has little to do with the forms that vampirism subsequently assumed. This chapter does not discuss the aristocratic and refined creatures that emerged at later stages of the vampire's career. Instead, it examines peasants who, once they had died, would not stay dead and buried, but instead rose from the grave to kill their former family and friends. This chapter's attention then turns to the mystified reactions of military men and city folk who wished to make sense of the incredible events occurring in the hinterlands for, without the violent acts generated by group panic among members of rural communities fearing collective destruction through supernatural predation, the vampire would never have had the chance to extend its grasp to threaten and thrill the rest of the world. Serbian vampirism threw the spark igniting the flames in which the vampire we know was born.

The history of the vampire began as an enigma. In 1725, a medical officer of the Austrian army named Frombald wrote a letter from the imperial backwaters to the central administration in Vienna. Frombald reported that the Serbian hajduks (peasant-soldiers) under his supervision had exhumed a corpse, transfixed it with a stake, and burned it to ashes.