Real Historic Vampires - Eastern Europe
Examining Slavic Historical Figures With a Real Blood Lust
“Beneath every myth, there must be a basis of fact. Otherwise, the myth could not survive.”
-Dr. Donald Omand
While fictional novels, plays, and movies got their cue from other fictional predecessors, they also had to get their cues from real life. When discussing vampires, people often dwell almost entirely on the fictional depictions of them, or the rumored folklore. This is useful to do if the goal is to understand cultural norms, reactions to catastrophic events, religious views, and the like. But if we want to understand whether real vampires truly exist, we must also study the other source of those famed writers’ inspiration: true vampiric figures found throughout history.
To focus only on the folklore and the alternative medical explanations behind vampires is to dismiss the notion of their reality entirely. But taking a look at people deemed true vampires from the past will give us a more clear picture of what they may truly be in their nature, rather than laughing about what silly traits they possess in books and films.
This article will focus on the true OG historic vampires - those from Eastern Europe.
Vlad the Impaler
Vlad III, also known as Vlad the Impaler and Drǎculea (“Son of Dracule”) was a prince and military commander in 15th century Transylvania and Wallachia (modern day Romania). Born to Vlad II and a princess in 1431, his life would be a tumultuous and violent one.
Vlad was immediately born into a region and family battling for control and chaos amidst many invasions and coups. At the age of 5, he was initiated into the Order of the Dragon (“Dracule”) by his father. His father, Vlad II, was called Vlad Dracule; Dracule then meant both “devil” and “dragon.” Vlad III would go on to sign his name Drăculea or Drakulyain in documents. The Order of the Dragon was a resistance movement meant to protect greater Romania from the encroaching Islamic forces of the Ottoman Empire.
Vlad’s brother and father both died cruel and miserable deaths at the hands of competing rulers trying to take over Wallachia. His brother had his eyes burned out of his face before being buried alive, and his father was assassinated in the marshes. Vlad was installed as a puppet ruler when this happened, and began to form strange and complicated dynamics with various rulers who sought to conquer his region. He was groomed to be a ruler, but this happened at the hands of his enemies.
Eventually Vlad’s uncle was also assassinated, and he fled to safety of his uncle’s home to go back to Wallachia to rule once more. Wallachia by this point was in a total state of anarchy and chaos after so many political upheavals. Vlad sought to restore order, but felt he needed to be brutal to accomplish that. He channeled his lifetime of experiences with brutality and brought the hammer down on anyone even considering invasion of Wallachia.
Vlad the Impaler earned his moniker when he began driving stakes up the rear orifices of tens of thousands of soldiers. In 1459, he had 30,000 German settlers and officials impaled for questioning his authority. He staked thousands of residents of a nearby village where Vlad believed one of his brother’s killers was hiding. He eventually found that man and forced him to read his own funeral oration while forced on his knees in front of his freshly dug grave.
This enraged a nearby Sultan, who ordered 90,000 troops to invade Wallachia. They were greeted by 20,000 impaled corpses - Turkish prisoners Vlad felt like turning into a forest of warning signs. Vlad was captured and imprisoned.
At this time, his first wife despaired and took her fate into her own hands. Rather than be caught by the Turks, she chose to fling herself out of her tower window and into the river below. Perhaps this was the inspiration of the first scene in the 1992 film adaptation of “Dracula.”
Vlad would go on to eventually remarry and exit captivity as a Catholic. Once again he returned to Wallachia and attempted to rule over it, this time employing the assistance of Stephen V Bathory (we review his descendent, Elizabeth Bathory in the next section).
Eventually Vlad was killed, though the details of how and by whom vary. What everyone does agree on though is one aspect of his death: he was beheaded by Turks and the head was submerged in honey and sent to Istanbul, where the ruling Sultan displayed it for all to see.
The historical accounts on Vlad Dracule are varied and contested. Eastern Europeans tend to discuss Vlad in a favorable light, saying he did all he could to preserve his Christian nation. Western Europeans, mostly Germans, describe him as a bloodthirsty and murderous lunatic who did the most horrifying things imaginable to innocent people.
The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. After all, the torture methods used by Vlad were common at the time, so while we now consider it all totally cruel, it may not have been unusually cruel in that place at that time. It is pretty evil though, objectively. Vlad is accused of not only impaling thousands of men through their rectum, but women and infants as well. It is said that he used burning, skinning, roasting, boiling, drowning, severing off all manner of body parts, and nailing hats to heads to make his point.
The numbers are also hotly debated, ranging anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 victims. The motivation to lie would be simply to spread propaganda to push forward an agenda to get rid of the Prince.
But the gruesome manner of his strange methods of justice cannot be overstated, even if some of the stories are exaggerated. Vlad would often leave the corpses of his murderous rampages out for months to rot and to horrify onlookers. This is no the mark of a healthy, happy man. This is a mark of the devil.
The connection to his nickname may be more significant than most imagine. While Dracule can mean either devil or dragon,the old Romanian word for serpent is drac. In Biblical and Apocryphal texts, serpents are associated to the Devil. So there is almost a circular reference to the demonic in the name Dracule.
Vlad had his castle built by slaves he captured after he murdered and impaled their family members. Each slave died building that castle. So the very home Vlad dwelled in was ridden with dark and tortured energy. Could that have exacerbated an already dark and evil situation?
Is it possible that Vlad the Impaler was demonically possessed? After all, what normal sort of human being, even a psychopathic serial killing sort, could impale men women and children and otherwise torture them, and do so tens of thousands of times over? To say that he was doing this in the name of Jesus Christ is absurd, and incredibly dark.
To this day, Vlad the Impaler remains one of the most feared, loathed and discussed rulers of all time. He is well regarded as a real life vampire by many, to this day.
Elizabeth Bathory - The Blood Countess
One day, while casually flipping through portraits of European royals of yore, the portrait of a young Hungarian Countess gave me great pause. Most portraits of these figures leave one asking, “Were they really considered all that attractive?” The fact of the matter is, health and beauty standards change with time and differ across cultures. Those we now consider plain or even ugly could have well been regarded as gorgeous in those days. However, the picture of Ms. Bathory caught my attention because she was simply beautiful. And I mean beautiful by today’s standards. Elegant and lean, with a pretty face and dark red hair, she instantly had me inquiring as to what may have helped her be so much prettier than any other royal I’d yet seen.
Well, color me horrified when I discovered her little beauty secret. It turns out, this young countess had murdered hundreds of virgin girls in her village, and bathed in their blood to retain her youth.
Bathory also tortured her victims, a group comprised of both servants and noblewomen. She committed every cruelty from burning their genitals to covering them in honey to let ants devour them alive. Ms. Bathory had a real blood lust, preferring to also bite her victims as part of their torture sessions, before killing them off and finally bathing in their blood. Some testimonies also claimed she drank the blood.
While the details of her serial rampage and actual crimes differ among historians, it is generally agreed upon that 289 witnesses came forth to testify against her, and 600-650 women and girls were on the victims list. Bathory herself admitted to 650 murders when the official number was only 600. “Only 600”…
Incidentally, or perhaps not, Elizabeth was a Countess who married into a Hungarian Dynasty, but her family ruled over Transylvania. It is possible that she was also a descendent of Vlad the Impaler, whose reign of terror had occurred a century before hers. At the very least, Vlad performed a military invasion with her ancestor, Stephen Bathory. Both royals were the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In fact, Countess Bathory was called not only “the Blood Countess”, but also “Countess Dracula.”
So could this trend in Transylvania be a family curse? Could Transylvania itself be the source of this rampant vampirism?
Serbian Vampires
During the 18th century, the death of two different men sparked a mass vampire hysteria among Eastern Europeans, and had lasting impacts.
Petar Blagojević was a Serbian man whose death was quickly followed by the sudden deaths of nine other people. Within one week of Blagojević dying, nine people developed illnesses which killed them within 24 hours. Each of these people claimed Blagojević had visited their beds and “throttled” them. His widowed wife also claimed he came back from the dead to visit her and demand she give him her shoes. Some legends add that Blagojević visited his son, demanded food, murdered the son when refused, and drank his blood. The village decided to dig up his corpse and check for “signs of vampirism,” which in those days meant longer hair, longer fingernails, and lack of sufficient decomposition.
Unfortunately all of these can be present with a naturally decomposing corpse, but medicine had not caught up with that just yet.
Villagers demanded this be done immediately without approval from the authorities, convinced that a vampire plague was visiting them for a second time (the first being when they were still ruled by the Turks). The exhumation revealed all these signs, plus blood around Blagojević’s mouth, and so he was deemed a vampire and his corpse was burned.
Again, medicine was not what it is now. It is possible Blagojević had died from tuberculosis or some similar malady which would have caused the coughing up of blood at the late stages. If the poor fellow had been buried before he was actually dead (common at the time), he may have coughed up additional bloody phlegm before expiring.
Blagojević’s Serbian village of Kisiljevo held fast to its notions around vampires after this, and to this day there are rumors of a female vampire ghost who haunts the area.
Arnold Paole was also a Serbian whose corpse had a very similar fate. After Paole died in the village of Meguegna, four people died immediately (claiming Paole had tormented them first), and his exhumed corpse was staked, beheaded, then burned after its longer hair and nails were observed. 5 years later, ten more people died suddenly, but it was still blamed on Paole.
Leading up to his death, Paole had told people that he’d been plagued by a vampire, but had solved the issue by smearing himself in the vampire’s blood and eating the dirt from its grave. In 1725, he perished when he fell and broke his neck. Five years later, when the villagers began suddenly dying again, two of them attributed it to Paole by saying they had all come into the village around the same time from the Turkish Ottoman-run region nearby, and that it was there where these two victims had consumed meat of a sheep killed by Paole. These two women also claimed to have “smeared themselves in vampire blood.” While the women believed this act was protecting them from vampires, the villagers hearing this tale believed it actually turned them into vampires.
Again in 1731 we have reports of people claiming to have been “throttled” by the recently deceased just before they themselves died suddenly. And again these accused corpses were exhumed, deemed vampiric, and ruined to prevent resurrection.
Impacts of Vampire Mania
Importantly, these two men were among the first nonfiction vampires to be officially documented in Eastern Europe. These cases were spread as serious news (rather than hysterical rumor) specifically because of the involvement of the Austrian authorities, such as physicians and law officers.
Word of these and other similar incidents quickly reached greater Europe thanks to various publications writing about them. Kings like George II of Britain became alarmed at the threat of vampires, and a “vampire mania” broke out in Western Europe as it had in the East. It is around this precise time that the word “vampire” seems to have entered the English language (its exact origins are not agreed upon or known with much confidence). This “vampire mania” resulted in many instances throughout the 18th century of plagues and tragedies hitting towns, only to be dealt with afterward by all corpses being exhumed and “vampire-proofed” to prevent resurrection. This would entail methods such as weighing the corpse down with a padlock, or securing a sickle above the neck.
Popes and Emporesses became alarmed at all this grave digging and corpse defiling, quickly declared that vampirism was mass hysteria, and banned the execution of suspected vampires along with the desecration of corpses. It was decreed that all books on demonology and witchcraft were also banned. Courts and churches alike were instructed to cease all activities involving persecution and accusation of humans as vampires.
Doctors did continue to diagnose certain medical conditions as vampirism, but this stamping-out of the term politically and religiously did a lot to decrease this throughout the remainder of the 18th century. By the start of the 1800s, accusations of vampirism usually got labelled as Western European racism against Eastern Europeans (because of course it did).
Soon thereafter, the fictional accounts of Polidori, Stoker et al would take over our collective imaginations to dictate the traits and motives we commonly assign to vampires.
The contents of this article serve as a sneak peak into my upcoming book, which will uncover the truth behind real vampires. If you’re enjoying this topic, watch for more articles like this. The book should be ready to publish by March 2025!