Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History

by Amila Buturovic

  century, such as Clarimonde in Theophile Gauthier’s La morte amoureuse (1836)1

  or Die Braut von Korinth (1797) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.2 Nevertheless,

  we still find women cast into the role of the “hero vampire” in the twentieth

  century, notably Miss Christine in Mircea Eliade’s short novel Domnişoara

  Christina (1936),3 which can be cited as an example of an original southeast

  European adaptation of the folkloric vampire figure.

  Taking a glance at the official reports written by Austrian military doctors

  during the eighteenth century, we see that in these records the earliest mention

  of a vampire refers to a man named Peter Plogojovic.4 His case was the first that

  was made the object of an official report to the imperial government in Vienna,

  written in 1725 by the Kameralphysicus Frombald. But Frombald was not a good

  chronicler, and so though his short report made its way through the administration

  in Belgrade and Vienna, it gained no further attention in public opinion.

  Only a few years later, in December 1731, a new case attracted the interest

  of the imperial administration in Belgrade. In the Serbian village of Medvegya,

  13 people had died within six weeks under strange circumstances. Therefore the

  Physicus Contumaciae Caesareae (Imperial Plague Physician) Glaser was sent

  to Medvegya to investigate. The result of his visit on 12 December 1731 was a

  report that was considered inadequate in Belgrade, because of Glaser’s confusing

  style and his failure to investigate the outbreak of the reported vampire attacks.5

  It is noteworthy, at least, that Glaser reported that two dead women had been

  accused by the villagers of being the deadly revenants with whom the widespread

  deaths in Medvegya had supposedly started. One was a 50-year-old woman by

  the name of Miliza; the other, the 20-year-old Stanna, had died immediately after

  giving birth to a child who had, in turn, died only a short time after her mother.

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  Both Miliza and Stanna had told neighbors of having been in close contact with

  vampires, the former even pretending to have eaten the meat of two sheep killed

  by a vampire.

  Only a month after Glaser’s visit to Medvegya, a second investigatory

  commission was sent to the village. This time the head of the commission was a

  young regimental medical officer named Johann Flückinger, who examined the

  case very conscientiously and personally supervised the exhumation of both the

  suspected vampires as well as all the people that had been allegedly killed by

  them. His report became famous all over Europe and marked the beginning of

  Age of Enlightenment vampire discussions during the 1730s.6 The report itself

  is a curious document: its contents are very rich and detailed, but the German

  language of the eighteenth century makes it difficult to understand and translate.

  The language is stilted, and Flückinger was indifferent to questions of grammatical

  accuracy. Furthermore, inadequate editorial practices on the part of the authors

  and editors of books and anthologies on vampires have led to a vast amount of

  variation in the text, and many mistakes. Paul Barber successfully translated

  Flückinger’s Visum et Repertum [Seen and Discovered] into English in his study

  Vampires, Burial, and Death.7

  Flückinger not only reported the case of Arnold Paole, who had fallen off a

  hay wagon six years earlier, but also wrote a great deal about the actual case he

  had been charged with investigating. What, then, do we learn from him about the

  female vampires of Medvegya? The following is part of his account:

  At this we went the same afternoon to the graveyard, along with the often-

  mentioned oldest haiduk s of the village, in order to cause the suspicious

  graves to be opened and to examine the bodies in them, whereby, after all of

  them had been dissected, there was found:

  1. A woman by the name of Stana, twenty years old, who had died in

  childbirth two months ago, after a three-day illness, and who had herself

  said, before her death, that she has painted herself with the blood of a

  vampire, wherefore both she and her child—which had died right after

  birth and because of a careless burial has been half eaten by dogs—must

  also become vampires. She was quite complete and undecayed. After the

  opening of the body there was found in the cavitate pectoris a quantity of

  fresh extravascular blood. The vasa [vessels] of the arteriae and venae,

  like the ventriculis cordis, were not as is usual, filled with coagulated

  blood, and the whole viscera, that is, the pulmo [lung], hepar [liver],

  stomachus, lien [spleen], et intestina were quite fresh as they would be

  in a healthy person. The uterus was however quite enlarged and very

  inflamed externally, for the placenta and lochia had remained in place,

  wherefore the same was in complete putredine. The skin on her hands

  and feet, along with the old nails, fell away on their own, but on the other

  hand completely new nails were evident, along with a fresh and vivid

  skin.

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  2. There was a woman by the name of Miliza (sixty years old, incidentally),

  who had died after a three-month sickness and had been buried ninety-

  some days earlier. In the chest much liquid blood was found, and the other

  viscera were, like those mentioned before, in a good condition. During her

  dissection, all the haiduk s who were standing around marveled greatly at

  her plumpness and perfect body, uniformly stating that they had known

  the woman well, from her [or their] youth, and she had, throughout her

  life, looked and been very lean and dried up, and they emphasized that

  she had come to this surprising plumpness in the grave. They also said

  that it was she who had started the vampires this time, because she had

  eaten of the flesh of those sheep that had been killed by the previous

  vampires.8

  Flückiger’s list of opened graves contains thirteen items, but more than one corpse

  had been buried in some of the graves—in the case of Stana, for example, both

  mother and child were found. Flückiger found female corpses in seven opened

  graves and dissected them; thus, it can be estimated that about half of the dead

  people examined in this case were women. Some were completely decomposed

  or significantly decayed, but others were in surprisingly good condition. In one

  instance, that of Miliza, her body was neither decomposed, nor had it remained

  unchanged: on the contrary, it was described as plump even though she was said

  to have been lean when alive.9 Flückiger goes on to write:

  After the examination had taken place, the heads of the vampires were cut

  off by the local gypsies and then burned along with the bodies, and then the

  ashes were thrown into the river Morava. The decomposed bodies, however,

  were laid back into their own graves.10

  The main point of this account is not only that Miliza was a vampire, but

  furthermore that the entire spate of killings in the village had started with her. Her

  case shows, in a nutshell, the main elements of the popular vampire belief, and

/>   makes it clear that in principle there was no difference between men and women

  in this respect: both could become the victim of a vampire, and likewise both

  could also be the initial one—the first vampire who had started to kill neighbors

  and cattle.

  Even the way Miliza had become a vampire was not typically female. She

  had eaten the meat of sheep that had supposedly been killed by a vampire. As

  for Stana, being tormented by another vampire she had tried to protect herself by

  painting herself with the blood of a vampire, exactly as Arnold Paole—the man

  who had fallen off a haywagon—had done. In both cases, the remedy appears to

  have failed.11

  In another way too the case of Miliza can be seen as typical for a vampire story.

  In the first report, that of Glaser, Miliza was described as being “50 years old,

  laying seven weeks in grave, having moved from the Turkish part of the frontier

  six years ago.”12 Glaser further mentioned that she had only eaten of two sheep.

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  Yet, scarcely a month later, her age had changed from 50 to 60, and her move

  from the Turkish part of Serbia to the Austrian had not only disappeared, but it

  now seemed that she had been an autochtonous member of this village since her

  youth—or the youth of the haiduk s, since here the German text is unclear. In any

  case, the time period must have been longer than the mere six years mentioned in

  Glaser’s report. Even within a single text it is not unusual that a vampire should

  change its age, circumstances, or even its shape: the case was so astonishing that

  the details seemed to be of secondary importance.

  It is also noteworthy that women appear as both vampires and victims in later

  texts. A notorious case in the German-speaking part of Europe was that of Dorothea

  Pihsin of Kapnick in 1753.13 Kapnick was a mining town in Transylvania, important

  for its gold and silver resources. But then it became even more famous when, in

  the first six weeks of 1753, five miners died under mysterious circumstances.

  The corpse of one of the dead miners was dissected and found, according to the

  official report, to contain only a water-like liquid, but no blood. After a short

  investigation, two women—Anna Tonner and Dorothea Pihsin—both deceased

  in late 1752, were accused of being vampires. Both their graves were opened on

  20 February 1753, and while the body of Anna Tonner was nearly completely

  decomposed after 105 days in the ground, the corpse of Dorothea Pihsin was

  found to be in very good condition even though she had been interred for even

  longer—129 days. Her body was exhumed and burned by the hangman under the

  town gallows, while Anna Tonner was reburied with all the usual rites.

  It must be noted that the number of reported female vampires is smaller than

  that of reported male vampires. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but it was

  clearly believed that men faced greater threat from the fate of the revenant than

  women. Otilia Hedeşan of the West University of Timişoara, the most prominent

  contemporary Romanian folklorist with a special interest in vampire belief,

  provides some data about this fact in her doctoral dissertation.14 Regarding the

  term strigoi, the Romanian word for vampire, she points out that

  In the majority of cases, the more general dictionaries list only the article

  strigoi, masculine, and only some also list a derivative feminine form of

  this word, strigoaie, with a more obscure meaning. The folkloric reality

  proves that this new derivative does not indicate purely and simply the

  feminine variant of the strigoi, but has a more restricted sense. Strigoaicele

  are “thieves of milk and, in general, thieves of abundance,” i.e. persons who

  practice magic and whose moment of strongest power—but also of most

  intense threat—is Sângiorz, the day when, according to popular belief, they

  can steal manna, but can also be defeated.15

  This somewhat weakened and rather restricted definition of strigoaie shows

  clearly that the conception of the male strigoi cannot be identically applied to

  women. Yet, if the vampire figure of Romanian folklore exhibited the same

  structure in both the male and the female case, would it not have been logical

  for the characteristics of the female strigoaie to be the same as those of the male

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  strigoi? If it is claimed that the strigoi is the Romanian word for vampire—defined

  as a revenant corpse causing death, illness, and horror to both human beings and

  cattle—then it has to be admitted at the very least that there exist more than a

  single notion of strigoaie, and that one of these notions deals with magic rites and

  practises but has nothing to do with the vampire belief itself.16

  Leaving vampires aside for a moment, and focusing on related figures

  in popular belief, we notice at least a similar vagueness regarding the female

  variant of yet another male figure, the vîlva lupilor, or leader of the wolves.17

  This particular figure is in a sense a cousin of the werewolf—a man who leads

  wolves and communicates with them, but who shows no (or only minor) signs

  of transformation himself. Belief in the vîlva lupilor is limited to an area in

  northern Transylvania called Munţii Apuseni, and remains alive even today.18

  Although it refers to a male figure and to male human beings, the word by itself

  is grammatically feminine within the regular a-declension of Romanian grammar.

  Yet, there is no reported case of a female vîlva lupilor. If the word vîlvă is ever

  used for a demoniacal figure of the female sex, she is conceived as fairy-like

  and no connection with wolves exists. There is the vîlva apei or vîlva pădurii,

  but an approximate English translation for this being would be something like

  “water fairy” or “spirit of the forest.”19 Thus, in this special case as well, the male

  conception cannot be transferred onto women, and the female version of the term

  refers to something quite different from the male. Furthermore, we have to note

  that in this case a male figure is named with a grammatically feminine word.

  How can this fact be explained? Certainly the answer to this riddle is not to be

  found in a general lack of women or female figures in popular beliefs. Perhaps

  it has something to do with the prominence of female demons.20 Looking for

  example at the demons that cause disease, we see not only that nearly all the

  names of such demons/diseases are grammatically feminine in structure, but

  also that even the figure itself is seen as a woman.21 Demons are not material

  beings but are more akin to spectres. Additionally, they are not imagined in an

  individual sense as a specific human being, but more as a stereotype like “old

  hag” or “ugly woman.” There is no well-defined idea of them; rather, they remain

  uncontoured in their appearance. Concrete figures of popular belief tend to be of

  the masculine sex and exhibit behavior associated with the male gender, while the

  more ghostly or phantom-like among them are of the feminine sex and exhibit

  behavior associated with the female gender. Cases where both types are mixed

  t
ogether can not be excluded either.

  It is women who are believed to be healers, using herbs or magical rites. Men

  are believed to be experts in injuries or teeth, but for any kind of disease, the

  baba—an old woman with knowledge of healing—is the only one that the people

  of the region will visit. Female demons are fought by female healers. Here we

  can also state one of the main differences between the agriculturally-oriented

  Bulgarians, Serbs, and Romanians, and the Turks and Hungarians whose ancestors

  had been nomadic. Among the latter, women have nothing to do with any kind

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  of medical activity—whether with practical operations like amputation or fixing

  broken bones, or with (magical) healing.22

  There also exist even simpler explanations based on medical arguments.23

  Already in the eighteenth century medical officers of the Austrian army attempted

  to find some scientific explanations for the vampire belief.24 The most convincing

  among these early medical attempts was that of Georg Tallar, who saw in the

  eating habits of the Romanian population of Transylvania certain health risks that

  he believed might lead to illness, weakness, and hallucinations.25 In the twentieth

  century, certain medical doctors identified a specific disease and its symptoms—

  e.g. anthrax or porphyria—as having served as a foil for the formation of the

  vampire figure. Most of these explanations are too ridiculous to discuss here,

  because in every case the authors confused the folkloric vampire with its literary

  counterpart, leading to the misinterpretation of popular beliefs. In one particular

  instance, however, the proposed disease may in fact answer our question. In 1995,

  the Spanish neurologist Juan Gómez-Alonso published a study on vampires and

  medicine, with rabies at the center of his theory.26 Three years later, he wrote

  a short paper in English about rabies as a possible explanation for the vampire

  belief.27 There we find the following statement: “Similar to the case in vampirism,

  rabies is seven times more frequent in males than in females, both in humans and

  in animals, and prevails in rural areas.”28 It is known that in most cases, rabies

  is transferred through the bite of an infected animal like a fox, wolf, or other