Before Dracula: Sava Savanović and the Great Vampire Panic

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In the 1730s, something strange began happening in the villages of Eastern Europe.
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People were dying suddenly.
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Mysterious figures were seen prowling through the night, and before long, Europe was awash with rumors of the dead rising from the grave to feed on the living.
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This was the great European vampire panic, a wave of hysteria that cemented vampire legends into Western culture, culminating in the release of Bramstoker's Dracula in 1897.
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The source of this panic, however, wasn't the legend of Vlad the Impaler, instead, the origins of Europe's vampire hysteria lay south of Transylvania, in Serbia, where a dead miller named Zavar Zvanovich was rumored to be sucking the blood of nearby villages.
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So was Zavanovic really an undead monster?
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Were there others like him?
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And what does this vampire panic tell us about the clash of science and folklore in the 1700s?
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Stay tuned to find out on this week's episode of History's Devils.
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My name is James Crossland, and this week we are stepping into the murky grey area of history that lies between fact and folklore to explore the legend of the Serbian vampire, Zavasavanovich, and the vampire panic that spread out from Serbia across Europe in the 1700s, a panic that gave the West not only the word vampire, but a lot of the other tropes and images we associate with the undead to this day.
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The fangs, the garlic, the wooden stakes through the heart, all this stuff, as we'll find out, predates Bram Stoker and his novel about a Walachian prince with a penchant for impaling people and helping me to explore this unknown true history of the vampire legend in Europe.
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It's my pleasure to welcome to History's Devils, the author of Monsterland, a journey around the world's dark imagination.
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Nick Jubber, how are you doing today?
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Oh, thank you, James.
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I'm I'm doing well, thanks.
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Looking forward to chatting to you.
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So, Nick, in your book Monsterland, you uncovered some interesting, and I think in some respects, quite quite forgotten or unappreciated myths from across the world about zombies, about werewolves.
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If I remember correctly, didn't you there was a bit of the book where you talked about the the Rougarou from uh the bayou of Louisiana?
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Yes.
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He gets in there as well, yeah.
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Absolutely.
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One of one of my favorites, yeah.
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I mean, it was very much about trying to find some of those monsters that that um so certainly in the UK that we don't get don't get so much traction and to try and sort of put a bit of a spotlight on them.
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But the the Rougarou took me down a fantastic little adventure out in Louisiana, and I ended up uh on the on the narrative stage at a Rougarou Fest, which is a festival dedicated to the Rougarou in the town of Homer in Louisiana, interviewing storytellers and alligator farmers and voodoo drummers and all kinds of people and listening to some very, very spooky tales about not only about the Rougarou but also about the skinwalkers and other shapeshifters, because uh that that area of America really does seem to specialise in shapeshifters for some reason.
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And it was actually Halloween time when I was there.
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So um, you know, on sort of the the the sidewalk, the pavements of you know of a you know of any anywhere in in the south of the US, um, you know, there's nobody else around it except there are these huge, really impressive sort of Halloween displays bursting over the edges of the very and the picket fences of the various homes.
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So it was uh it was a really you know it was an atmospheric experience.
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Yeah, and that's it's one of the many places that your book takes you to, and this this immersion in the culture of these places and understanding how the culture, as you say, informs this.
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I mean, the the bios of Louisiana, that's a cultural melting pot.
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So you've got legends from Africa, you've got uh legacies of the slave trade, you've got legacies of the come over from France, you've got all this sort of stuff, uh, native legends as well, like skinwalkers.
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But when it comes to the vampire legends, um, we're when we first when we were talking about doing this episode, I originally said Dracula, and you and I could I could feel in the email you kind of rolling your eyes like, oh Dracula, good god, Dracula.
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Come on, come on, come on.
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There's there's more to this.
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Yeah, yeah, and and and we can because you you know you I mean I love Dracula, I think it's an amazing, an amazing novel, but yeah, it feels like it's you know, it it's it's been done.
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Yeah, it's it's definitely been done, and and as you point out, and as we'll get into, I mean, you you can trace a lot of what turns up in Dracula to what's actually happening in Serbia.
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Also, and I'm I'm often very interested in the sort of the passageway to the iconic, the sort of the big icons and the big famous stuff, like what what takes us on the pathway to that.
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And I think following that trail towards Dracula is actually really, really intriguing.
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I'm sure we'll go into some of that.
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Yeah.
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But before we do that, I just want to talk broadly speaking about vampire myths in general, because I think this is something that a lot of people don't appreciate when we think about vampires.
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We tend to forget that vampire myths, this idea of some sort of undead creature that that walks the earth, drinks blood to sustain its life.
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This is a global myth, and it and you can trace it back millennia, it pops up everywhere from ancient Mesopotamia.
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They got this creature called the Ekemu that's a malevolent spirit uh that that that arises from the dead and drains people's life force in in ancient India.
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They got the Vitala, which is a very important thing.
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Um yeah, I looked into the Vitala in my last book actually when I was looking at Indian fairy tales, and um there's some wonderful, very creepy stories of of them that turn up where they sort of you know sort of leap down and sort of hold themselves onto people and and sort of drain their life essences.
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Yeah, so like you say, yeah, you can you can find sort of echoes of the vampire in in various cultures and in all sorts of places around the world.
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But I think when we when we're thinking of vampire, certainly with that word, um which comes, you know, there's a very disputed etymology of that word, but certainly in terms of it coming into Western Europe, we can date it to the to the 18th century.
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And and a lot of the tropes that we think when we think of a vampire, when we think of the idea of the sort of the sort of figure of the undead who who sleeps by night in a coffin, or sorry, by day in their coffin and comes out at night, sucks people's blood, and is sort of defeated by staking them in the heart, but also kind of repelled by some symbol of religious orthodoxy, usually a crucifix, then uh that's that's very much uh something that comes out of out of Eastern Europe and actually specifically out of the Balkans in the in sort of around the 17th and 18th century.
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And the and those those troops you just mentioned, I mean we when when we think of that in popular culture, we're thinking about Lestat from Anne Rice's vampire chronicles, Dracula, obviously Blade, even from the Marvel comics, the the guy from Twilight before he became Batman, like you know, the all these all these things turn up in in this.
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But as you say, we can trace these legends or the these ideas of what a vampire looks like in in in sort of let's call it the Western tradition.
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We can trace it actually to Eastern Europe, 1700s, not just this Zabazavanovic guy who we'll get onto, but two other Serbian vampires whose stories really inform the legends of the modern era.
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Um, I'm wondering if you can talk about these two guys, because I think they're they're very formative to this story.
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I'd actually like to first talk about somebody else, actually, who one of the earliest uh cases of an of a description of an account of a vampire comes from the late 17th century, which is somebody called Juri Grando, who who lived in a place called Kringe in Croatia.
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And he was written about by a Slovenian writer called Johann von Balfasor in his book The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola, which was published in 1689.
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And it's the first written account that we have of uh, I believe, of a vampire beheading.
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The story there goes that this man had died, he'd come back, um come back from the dead.
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A priest was comforting his widow when he saw the dead man standing by the door, realised something was something was awry, told the local mayor, who was like, Well, I'm not having any any any sort of dead guy on my patch, went to the went to the graveyard and sort of opened it up with his hoodlums around him, and they were so terrified by what they saw that they ran away.
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But uh they came back a few days later, having plied themselves with the local moonshine and stabbed him in the heart with a with a hawthorn steak, which is often considered to be the best wood to uh to do away with a vampire, and then cut off his head for good measure to make sure that he wasn't coming back.
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So that story was written about uh in 1689 and and is often sort of cited as being that sort of the beginning of that tradition.
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Now the tradition goes back much further.
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We can go into sort of legal records from the Serbian Empire in sort of in the medieval times around the sort of 13th, 14th century, where we can see traces of what might be a vampire in terms of rules about about the excavation of graves, which suggests that sort of things were going on.
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But in terms of an actual story where we can see a sort of A to B plot in it, we can see a sort of an outcome of it, that that really takes us to Croatia around that time.
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And then once we, you know, that's sort of the beginning, and then they're just sort of popping up like whack-a moles after that, you know, lots of stories of vampires, which is really just uh to do with the printing press and the fact that stories are getting written down and getting distributed now.
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Um, you know, those stories I think would have been doing the rounds in in sort of all, you know, through the communities over the centuries, but now they're actually they're actually sort of getting transmitted.
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And so in the early 18th century, we see a number of stories.
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And the ones you mentioned, there's one um who comes from from a place called Kassiljovo, but the one that really interested me actually was Arnold Polar in a place called Mevegya in south um southern Serbia, because that's when the the word vampire moves across into especially into the English language.
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Because it so the 1730s was described by Voltaire, the great French satirist, as um I think he put it that um in the 1730s from he was very specific about it.
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From 1730 to 1735, he said nothing was spoken about more than vampires.
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So these stories were everywhere.
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Um, but the one about Arnold Polo is is is is a particularly powerful one because he was um he was a he was a hay cart driver, just an ordinary, you know, ordinary Joe at the streets, driving his haycart when it got overturned, he died, and then he came back from the dead, so it was said, and he started attacking people.
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And in fact, he was so dreadful that it was said that he even attacked the the livestock, so he killed all the all the cows and the and the sheep, which meant you couldn't eat them because they became infected, and if you ate them, you might become a vampire too.
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And the impact of this story um and of other stories around that, as as as you've sort of hinted at, you know, there were many stories sort of starting to sort of trickle out, but these were the kind of stories that were then sort of drawing people in.
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Um, and officers from the Austrian Empire were going to these villages to find out what they were talking about, and it's really fascinating when you see some of the reports that they then dispatch, their their dispatches back to Belgrade and so on, where you can see that they're wrestling with something that they think can't possibly be true, and yet their observation suggests that maybe it is, because when they're opening up the graves and they're seeing these bloated corpses and these sort of often sort of they're described as sort of having sort of blood trickling out of their mouths and these sort of very ruddy faces, um, and you know, they were still, you know, this is still before a real kind of understanding of oxygen and the the impact of sort of corpses in in sealed containers and so on, um, had to sort of really sort of be understood.
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So there's a lot of those sort of things going on that they hadn't progressed quite as far scientifically as as they believed.
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Um and so they were still sort of prey to these, these, sort of, these, these, these stories from from medieval folklore.
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I'll read out to you one of the reports, which was um a guy called Johann Pflukinger, and this is quite a significant one in terms of how it transmitted.
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So he went out to this place, Medvedejo, where Arnold Polo had died, and he looked at the excavation of another court, which is a woman called Militza, who was in her sixties, and um and he described the opening of the grave, um, revealing much liquid blood in the breast.
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The remaining viscera were in good condition.
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During the dissection, all the surrounding Hajj's were very surprised about her fat and perfect body, unanimously saying that they knew the woman from their youth, and all her life she looked thin and desolate.
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It reached this astonishing plumpness in the grave.
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I think it's a fascinating sort of vignette there, where we can see this officer who's trying to speak in very sort of what he sees as sort of the modern scientific language, and yet he can't not believe this story.
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And he's surrounded by people who believe it, and you know, this as you know, you know, you know, whenever you're amongst sort of people who who are completely convinced by a story, it becomes very hard not to share that conviction.
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Now that particular report was taken back to Belgrade, and then eventually it it passed into the hands of of Kaiser Wilhelm I of Prussia, and then he passed it on to the Scientific Society of Prussia.
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And you you can't imagine a more somber, serious organization than the Scientific Society of Prussia, and they gave it their every consideration.
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They decided ultimately that they didn't believe it, but they thought about it and wrestled with it for quite a long time.
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But the thing is that this is not just the age of the vampire, it's also the age of the coffee house.
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So all these stories are getting distributed and they're being passed, these reports by officers, by military officers, are being passed on to the writers in the in the huge, there's a sort of huge explosion of literary media, of periodicals and newspapers.
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People are sitting in those coffee houses having their delicious sort of sleigh globe coffee and they want something to read, something sensational, um, you know, as you know, as we all do when we were in a cafe.
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Now we just, you know, we check our phones, but you know, they didn't have that.
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So they so they you know they pick up the paper and they'd read the most exciting, lurid story that they could find there.
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And those would often be these reports of vampires, and the fact that they might be true made them all the more exciting.
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So there's another officer, um, a an expert in contagious diseases called Glazer, who was also writing about this same area.
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And then his report was picked up by, well, he sent it to his father, who was a who was a physician, but also wrote for one of the publications called the um Commercium Literarium.
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And he talked about in that about a magical plague that has been rampant for some time.
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Perfectly normal buried people are rising from their undisturbed graves to kill the living.
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That really does sum up the vampire.
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So that's then being translated, these, these, these, these articles and these periodicals have been translated from from German, then into French and English.
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Um, over in England at the time, King George II, it was said, was completely convinced about stories of vampires, because with his German background, he may well have read those original reports.
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And Horace Wolpole, who's the Prime Minister of the Son at the time, said that he wouldn't listen to anybody who said that vampires didn't exist.
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So there's a sort of sense of this of this media spreading, that it's not just reflecting the story of the vampire, but it's also reflecting the growth of media itself.
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And I think that's one of the interesting things about the vampire, that the vampire is does sort of track the changes of sort of the development of mass media as as it sort of ripples through Western European history.
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Um, and so you know, these stories just sort of spreading all over the place, it becoming, you know, more and you know, more and more of them being published and people getting very excited.
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And so, you know, when they talk about that sort of rampant plague of the undead, there's also this sort of plague of the spread of this kind of misinformation where the stories are getting distorted and and embellished and becoming these very, very exciting tales that people are lapping up all over Europe.
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That impact of media is obviously very significant, and the fact that we've got this explosion of, you know, more printed mediums at this time, but there's something else going on here that I think is worth for for context, just to explain to people that we're also talking about there's a geopolitical, and this is funny to talk about geopolitics and an episode about vampires, but there's a sort of geopolitical realignment happening in Eastern Europe at this time that I think is quite significant.
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You mentioned um 1718, that's that's the year that uh a treaty is signed between the Habsburgs, the Austrian Empire, and the Ottomans, which cedes control of Serbia from Ottoman control, which has been under Ottoman control since the 1400s, to the Austrians.
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They then um have to hand it back to them in 1739.
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So what you've got is this period between 1718 and 1739 where the Austrians have absorbed Serbia into their empire, and they have absorbed the culture, the history, the traditions of that area.
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They're trying to get their heads around it, trying to figure out who are these people, how do we govern them.
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And this is happening at this precisely the time you mentioned the the Arnold Polar um uh case.
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I think that's like 1725, something like that.
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It's it's in that neighborhood.
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And at the same time, there's another case of a guy called uh Peta Blegoyevich, who is again the same story.
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This guy dies, he's risen from the dead, there's people mysteriously dying around him.
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I think it's I think they ended up saying there was about 30 odd people or something died in the vicinity.
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And they all, I mean, these aren't necessarily people who are dying because they've been found drained of blood, they've just died mysteriously and or supposedly mysteriously.
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And you mentioned that they send out these these two doctors.
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Um uh there's another another fellow who sent out uh Fromold, I think his name is.
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Uh uh Yeah, Fromold.
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Ernst Fromold, military officer from the Habsburg court.
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And when I was reading about Fromeld's story to go get to the to the bottom of what's happening with the Blagoevich case, I kept thinking this this seems like it should be a Netflix series or something.
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This sort of outsider comes in from the this, you know, you know, military guy comes into this little backwards village where mysterious things are happening and he's an outsider, he doesn't really know what's going on.
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And particularly because when he arrives in the in this village, he gets there just in time to to encounter a mob who are ready to go and dig up the grave of Blagoyovich and stake him through the heart.
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And I I was reading from Al's report, and he seems like, as you were mentioning, a rational man, a man of reason, a man of empiricism.
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And he's trying to calm these people down.
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He's trying to say, look, let's not go desecrate a corpse, at least not without getting permission from the local authorities.
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But they've got the Hawthorne stake as you mentioned, they've got they've got a priest, they're ready to go.
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And so he ends up going to see this.
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And I'm just going to quote from his report here what he sees, because he does not present this attendance of his at an exhumation.
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He doesn't present it as this grave-digging mob of hillbillies.
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Instead, what he says is he glanced down at Blagoyovich's body.
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I did not detect the slightest odor that is otherwise characteristic of the dead, and the body, except for the nose, was which was somewhat fallen away, was completely fresh.
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The hair and beard, even the nails were growing as if still alive.
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The old skin, which was somewhat whitish, had peeled away, and a new, fresh skin had emerged underneath it.
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He also said that he saw fresh blood in Blagojevich's mouth, which according to he says, which, according to common observation, had been sucked from the people killed by him.
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In short, all the indications were that such people, he means vampires, are said to have possessed.
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So that's what you're saying, this this weird thing where they're observing something that is completely, you know, out of this world, and yet they're trying to rationalize it.
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They're using this language.
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Yeah, I think it's such an interesting sort of moment of of change because you have all this scientific knowledge coming through, but it's still a lot of it's still very new, and there are still more things to be discovered.
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So that the language of the scientific report is sort of being developed, but at the same time, there's there's so much uncertainty that so that for example, that he could look at the blood in the in the mouth, which we would we would interpret differently now.
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Um and uh but nah, but then he's he's he's seeing that as evidence of the you know the of the of the vampire sucking its victims, yeah.
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But also to come back to the the sort of geopolitical thing, I think that's one of the one of I think it's one of the very interesting things that happens when a lot of places where you get these sort of sort of so-called kind of crazes or sort of epidemics of of of of monster attacks, of perceived monster attacks.
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You have something similar happening in um in France in the 1600s with the with the sort of the werewolf craze, where you get lots of suddenly lots of court cases of people getting sort of pulled before the the courts, especially in the west of France, I think sort of in the Bordeaux region, where um people were being accused of of becoming werewolves, transforming into whales and attacking people.
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Um and that was in a period of tremendous uncertainty with wars of religious persecution, terrible harvests, and um a lot of people trying to move across to the new world.
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So I think that that something similar was happening with Serbia in in that period where it was being tussled between the Ottoman Empire and the Austrian Empire, and they were being sort of sort of passed backwards and forwards.
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And you can imagine that in in that period of tremendous political uncertainty, people are moving around, you know, they're not quite sure, you know, where they've got to go, where they're going to be safe, and other people are looking over their shoulders at these strangers in their midst and and being very suspicious of everybody because there's so much uncertainty around.
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And so that really sort of amplifies those those stories that are rooted in in ancient folklore, but that they can then sort of become amplified by this this sense of suspicion and uncertainty for people then to then spread those stories around.
00:20:40.799 --> 00:20:48.640
And so I think that that geopolitical dimension is very much there under the surface or throughout this this sort of this spate of storytelling that's going on.
00:20:48.960 --> 00:20:50.880
Yeah, it's it's the nature of panics, isn't it?
00:20:50.960 --> 00:20:56.000
I mean, I'm I'm reminded of the the UFO panic after the uh the the Second World War.
00:20:56.079 --> 00:21:01.200
It's this time of great uncertainty, a few lights in the sky, people you know don't know what to make of them.
00:21:01.359 --> 00:21:10.000
Similarly, I mean, before the first world war, you have people in the south of England seeing airships that aren't there because they're convinced that the Germans are coming and and and this is war panic.
00:21:10.079 --> 00:21:14.880
So it's it yeah, like like real-world anxieties manifest in strange ways.
00:21:15.119 --> 00:21:26.079
We see it even today, you know, when we look at places that are going through war and that sort of the ease with which the which the language of monsterification can suddenly be projected onto anybody who's seen as a stranger.
00:21:26.240 --> 00:21:42.960
Now, in the case of Arnold Polo, he was a stranger because he'd been um a sort of military figure, a sort of paramilitary out in Kosovo, and that you know, Kosovo out in Serbia, you know, immediately has this sort of very powerful sort of emotional residence, this sense that it's a place where all kinds of anything can happen, miracles can happen.
00:21:43.200 --> 00:21:46.640
Um and um he his story was that he had been bitten by a Turk.
00:21:46.720 --> 00:21:55.440
So there's already this sense of sort of playing into the story itself playing into sort of local prejudices and sort of age old enmities, um, and that that's where his vampirism had come from.
00:21:55.519 --> 00:22:27.119
And you can well imagine you know that story sort of you know spreading the rounds in the you know in the in the in you know amongst the gossips in the local um to vernas and cafes so but i think there's um there's there's this uh a very strong sense that that the these stories which we think of now is this sort of um sort of some something kind of completely winced of any sort of political uh undertones but that it's absolutely as you sort of mentioned it's absolutely sort of sort of mired in in all the the the the the political context of the period and I think that's one of the things that makes it such a fascinating phenomenon.
00:22:27.440 --> 00:22:34.160
Well as you mentioned uh the King Wilhelm of Prussia gets excited about this and asks some experts about it.
00:22:34.319 --> 00:22:47.279
Uh King George II also you know starts starts insisting and and maybe there's a dimension to this as well of the as you say like you know the the these blood suckers from eastern Europe what if they come over here something like that.
00:22:47.359 --> 00:23:29.200
Like this that the that use of the word plague by Glasner in his report is interesting because vampires and plague are often associated this idea that this the monster is a disease and the monster is a foreigner yeah his entities was in contagious diseases so he was trying to find out yeah how contagious is this and is it going to spread um but yes there is that sense very much that you know that that that bad things come from the east and that I think that's you know that was something that would have would have both horrified terrified but also fascinated people you know that bad things come from the east but it was was it was an idea but also that very interesting things come from there as well and um you know so I think it's sort of it's kind of sort of going along a two different streams there of the fear of what is coming but also the fascination for it.
00:23:29.440 --> 00:23:39.039
There is one monarch however who is a little bit more perhaps level headed about all this and that is the the Empress of the Habsburg Empire Maria Teresa.
00:23:39.200 --> 00:24:19.359
Yeah now she she is a hardline Catholic she's one of these people that she censors books she doesn't like she's a very hardened no nonsense person she does not like foreigners very much uh vehemently anti-Semitic um she she would be what we'd call today a sort of like a far-right conservative I guess and she really doesn't seem to have much time for this vampire stuff and I I was thinking about this in in the in the wider context because you mentioned that we've got you know reactions in Prussia we've got reactions in in England also got reactions in France where there's a rumor going around uh amongst the commoners let's say saying the king King Louis and other well to do's they're drinking the blood of children and all this sort of stuff.
00:24:19.440 --> 00:24:29.279
Yeah and I do wonder if Maria Theresa's looking at this and going well those sort of rumors being spread about the the great and good of Europe that those aren't very good.
00:24:29.599 --> 00:24:30.240
That's not good.
00:24:30.319 --> 00:24:37.279
Like the idea that the the great unwashed might might see us as monsters and we need to kind of clamp down on this hysteria.
00:24:37.599 --> 00:25:09.200
Well exactly she had a daughter called Marie Antoinette so she had uh you know she had every reason to be closed about those sort of things yeah um and uh she but she also had tremendous power I mean it is an incredibly powerful thing that she could say at um in the 1750s she basically said that's enough ganook finished we're not having this anymore and she stopped the vampire craze now you can stop the importation of of of onions or the you know or or laudanum or whatever but to say this story you can no longer have it that's incredible that she was able to do that.
00:25:09.279 --> 00:26:29.839
I mean she did it was more specific um her counselors doing things like um forbidding the priests from from officiating over the excavation of the graves and of course people aren't going to go to the excavation of a grave if they don't have a priest there to to sanctify the process so um so it's a very practical process that that that sort of sucked the energy out of the crates but still it's an incredible thing that she was able to to to damp it down that as much as she did um but of course you cannot kill a story and the story did carry on sort of sort of being told in all sorts of different ways but it very much sort of went off in different directions I think in the um east of Europe compared with in the west of Europe sort of after that point um but um yeah she she she was uh she was somebody who was able to sort of spread her tentacles or the imperial tentacles across these huge huge territories you know and and when you when you look at the sources and the the sort of the fear of of various various stories of various graves being opened up in so many different places both in you know in the Balkans but also in places like Moldova or on the Russian border or in Poland and you can see just how widespread was the empire the the Habsburg Empire's reach at that point and um and so she um you know she was able to sort of to to exert that sort of influence across that huge area and to sort of sort of drain out that story a little bit.
00:26:30.160 --> 00:27:43.920
And specifically it was it was a decree of the first of March 1755 and and it's it's very blunt like she basically says as you say you know priests can't be involved in the excamation of corpses anymore which means ordinary people don't drive stakes into corpses don't burn corpses don't behead corpses basically she was saying there's no such thing as vampires stop violating corpses like everyone settle down and it's I mean you're right that it does bring a I mean that's that's typically where we sort of cap off the the end of the the vampire craze of this period but as you say this stuff does not go away we've already mentioned that the the word vampire comes into the sort of Western lexicon from there from from a uh vampire uh Slavic word yeah at this time but there's there's other shifts I mean I mean in what way like culturally do you think that this this sudden spark of interest in the vampire in this period what are the knock on effects in in the West beyond that do you think culturally well we see a fascination for the for the image of the vampire and I think a lot of different things are going on one of them is romanticism and so as you go through the the 1700s and into the later part of the century and and I think partly there's a thing that when you believe that the monster might be there it's quite it's a bit too scary to actually tell stories about.
00:27:44.160 --> 00:27:48.000
Once you think it is just fictional then you're much more comfortable telling stories.
00:27:48.079 --> 00:28:05.519
So you a good example of that I think is witches in Germany where as soon as the um the witch the craze of the witch hunts that went on through the sort of 16 and 1700s as soon as that ends then the fairy tales about witches start to become and you can legitimately sort of try and terrify your kids by telling them stories about being gobbled up by them.
00:28:05.599 --> 00:30:00.000
But before that they're too they're just too too sinister too frightening you're worried that they might come into your home at any time so so it's only sort of later as those stories have been sort of sort of the as as that sort of initial phase has sort of drained away that then we see poets taking up the idea of the vampire um and a lot of um uh a lot of very well known poets like Goethe and and colorid and and and lord byron and Byron in in his 1813 poem uh the the the the Gyor he um he he he wrote about the the vampire in fact if if I can um if I can find the quote I'll just uh read it out to you but first on earth as vampire sent thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent then ghostly haunt thy native place and suck the blood of all thy race so very Byron yeah very Byron very Byron and the romantic poets they loved it because they were obsessed with death they were obsessed with with with with sex they were obsessed with the past and the vampire just so crushes all those things together um so they they were very very excited about it and of course it was it was it was Byron and his um his erstwhile friend and physician John Polidori who came up with a story about vampire in um uh on that famous famous storytelling night and in um on the banks of lake geneva at Villa Diodati when Mary Shelley told the story of Frankenstein and that story became then Polidori's novel or novella of the the vampire but by the time he published that story Polidori had been sacked as Byron's physician um you know generally people in Byron's employee usually didn't often didn't last very long um so he wanted to get revenge on him so he he um so he turned Byron into the model for his vampire Lord Ruth as anybody who's followed uh who who's followed Byron's biography will know you can't really make Byron into a more of a monster than he actually was but you know Polidori had a good crack at it and um you know put all his bitterness into it and but what what he did that was really important was that he created the model of the aristocratic vampire.
00:30:00.079 --> 00:30:03.599
And I think this is where the east and west versions of the vampire really diverge.
00:30:03.759 --> 00:30:12.240
That from then on the western idea of the vampire is very much that they are they are the lord sort of looking down on the Hoi Poloi below in their great castle.
00:30:12.400 --> 00:30:42.480
And we see that going through the 19th century through people like Sheridan Lefano's commina which brings the the uh idea of the lesbian vampire trope in as well um all the way through of course to Dracula where Bramstoker sort of reorientates the story in Transylvania and sort of goes back to the sort of the old medieval legends of Vlad the impaler who who wasn't a vampire but was certainly a monster in his own way and um and and sort of you know really kind of makes Transylvania the sort of the home of of vampire stories forever after.
00:30:42.960 --> 00:30:56.960
But that idea of the vampire as an aristocrat goes all the way through to Anne Rice's novels and you know Lestat and and you know that sense of you know the vampire always has to be classy and has to have a big collar and and where well dressed empowered moneyed.
00:30:57.279 --> 00:31:01.599
And there's got to be a certain sort of suave lordly sexiness about them.
00:31:01.759 --> 00:31:05.839
So all of that we we can see sort of going through that that western tradition.
00:31:06.079 --> 00:31:13.680
But meanwhile in in the Balkans the vampire is the sort of stayed as as they were that is this much more democratic.
00:31:13.839 --> 00:31:31.119
They could be the the tailor or the hay cart driver or or the miller um and one of the most exciting stories I've I've that I've come across and became really fascinated by is one from from Serbia from um a place called Zeroje which is the sort of one of the most iconic Serbian vampire stories which is about a man called Sava Savanovic.
00:31:31.359 --> 00:31:40.720
So so John Polidori's vampire is out in 1816 and that that iconic meeting the birth of Gothic basically on the shores of Lake Geneva is that same year.
00:31:40.880 --> 00:31:50.240
It's not until 1880 though that there's a writer called Mila Van Glisic who releases After 90 years which is the tale of Zavar Zavanovic.
00:31:50.400 --> 00:31:59.359
And this is often cited as kind of like a proto-dracular in some ways is how some people square it and the details of his story I think give us a clue as to why he's thought of that way.
00:31:59.440 --> 00:32:31.119
So as you say um Zarody I believe is how you pronounce it the the village it's close to the modern border of Serbia and Bosnia Herzegovina today it's sometime in the early 18th century I there doesn't seem to be a fixed date on when this guy lived but it's round about the time of the vampire panic there's different versions of the story but as you say he he's a miller so he he owns the local mill in one version he's a bachelor and he's a former hadjuk so that's an irregular soldier who who fights for the Serbians principally against the Ottomans.
00:32:31.359 --> 00:32:39.440
In another though it's interesting he's he's presented as a retired cattle merchant who has a bit of money which is an interesting twist on it.
00:32:39.599 --> 00:32:59.519
But regardless he's in the early 1700s he's a recluse who owns a mill on the outskirts of this village in a remote place and I'm seeing there already Dracula's in a castle right yeah so this guy's in a mill but we've got this recluse kind of mysterious person on the outskirts because there's a little village underneath Dracula's castle in the novel as well and interesting little things there.
00:32:59.680 --> 00:33:03.359
And there's also a tragic love story in there which is at the heart of the Dracula story.
00:33:03.440 --> 00:33:17.599
In in Zabanovich's case he falls in love with the young daughter of the males Zorodia um makes a move on her she recoils he then kills her in a fit of rage the villagers beat him to death or he shoots himself out of guilt.
00:33:17.839 --> 00:33:52.480
Again there's different versions either way he's a bad person who has died violently and dying violently is kind of it's it's at the base of a lot of explaining why people become vampires that's in in multiple uh uh myths uh across across the world he's buried outside the village but in the months and years that follow anyone who takes over running that mill is found dead same thing that we saw with the other Serbian vampires where there's mysterious illnesses and all that kind of stuff some of these people have bite marks on the sides of their neck uh Glisich writes that some had a crimson bruise around their neck as if strangled by a rope.
00:33:52.640 --> 00:34:00.160
Other stories have him emerging from fog and mist as a black dog which is something that happens in Dracula the sort of shape shifting elements.
00:34:00.319 --> 00:34:13.360
Eventually the villagers dig Zavanovich up stake him with the Hawthorn as you do presumably this is before Maria Teresa issues her decree banning this sort of activity or they're risking prosecution.
00:34:13.599 --> 00:34:34.719
After this staking though a yellow butterfly emerges from Zavanovich's mouth and flies away and that's the soul of the vampire leaving him and this is a you know peculiarly slavic part of the myth is that the butterfly and I was thinking about this again in relation to Dracula and I couldn't help but think that Dracula's offside a Renfield eats insects to get their life force.
00:34:34.880 --> 00:35:29.199
Yeah it is an interesting well the butterfly it makes sense butterflies are are attracted to to dead matter and um but it certainly uh yeah when you're walking along the uh you know the lovely sort of village country lanes of Serbia it definitely makes you look at the butterflies a little bit differently well this is what I wanted to ask so when you were doing your research for Monster Land this this mill this haunted mill um you you went there right so yeah how how is the mill uh uh how how was how is your time there and how is how is Savanovich still thought about in this area well yeah I wanted to focus in on on on a particular story and I thought you know obviously we we you we know our jaculas and and so on but I thought to to focus in on this on this particular Serbian story and the fact that it is a text that you can you can read the story through um that really intrigued me but I thought yes I'm I've got to go out there and I've got to see the setting for the story.
00:35:29.519 --> 00:36:14.079
Now along the way I'm along with visiting the places connected with stories I'm always interested in meeting people sort of locally who are who have been influenced by them and have have sort of retold the stories in their own way so I met a Serbian novelist called Mijana Novakovic who's written a wonderful novel called Fear and his servant which is mainly about uh sort of the a sort of devil figure in his antiques uh in 18th century um the sort of 18th century sort of Belgrade and various other places in the um Serbian Ottoman world um and Austrian world but um but it also involves um an episode that sort of adapts the story of Sava Savanovic and I talked to Miyana um before I went out to Zorozia about uh about what the story means to her and if it was she saw it very much as a sort of iconic sort of story within Serbian culture.
00:36:14.239 --> 00:37:16.800
It inspired a a film in the 70s called Lepterica which means a sort of she butterfly which slightly sort of alters the storyline um but uh but is very much inspired by that uh by that particular tale um and there's even um a sort of local Raki the sort of local sort of uh alcoholic beverage which has um the image of Savas Ivanovich on it to sort of feel his sort of selling point um although he's usually depicted as this very sort of ugly crusty sort of figure um so I don't know how much that would actually encourage you to to drink his his um his moonshine but you know there you go um so so I um I thought well I've I've I've got to visit the mill and um and I went out there and it's in a beautiful area Zorishia is a lovely place you know it's a sort of oak woods and and great sort um sort of mountains the Poblin mountains around them one of the peaks is known as the Vampire's teeth because it's so sharp and you've got the river running under the mill and you've got this sort of very old mill which you know it's parts of it I believe to date sort of back certainly to the 19th if not to the 18th century and has sort of been restored every so often over the years.
00:37:17.199 --> 00:37:50.000
So it's a lovely setting people go there and they have their picnics I met families there and I mean I didn't speak enough Serbian um but uh to to have a full conversation with them but they would they you know there was it was clear from the charades that were going on between us that they were telling me the story about Sava Savanovic and there were lots of sort of lots of sort of play around the sort of you know sharp teeth and um and there was a couple Miroslav and Yasmina who even got me to photograph them they they were sort of taking pictures of themselves pretending to stake each other outside the door of the mill so you know I think to sort of put up on their you know on their social media or whatever.
00:37:50.079 --> 00:38:04.480
So there was a sense of it being this sort of fun story that people are kind of you know you know kind of enjoy sort of engaging with but they did say to me get away from here when it gets dark you know which is of course the classic Hammer horror movie warning um but I couldn't because actually there was I couldn't find anywhere to stay.
00:38:04.559 --> 00:38:42.559
There were no budget hotels there was no Airbnb in the area and I thought well in the story there's a young man called Strahingja who goes and stays in the mill and his task is to try and sort of find something out about the vampire and he's put down a log by the cat's tub and he wakes up in the loft of the mill and waits for the vampire to come in the vampire comes in thinks the log is some kind of person sleeping by the cat's tub so he goes and bites it and sort of squeals out in pain and cries out Sava Safanovich tonight you've gone without your supper and although Stranger isn't able to destroy the vampire he fight he's found out his name which is the crucial information so the next day they're able to locate the grave and then stake the vampire and and and and and kill him for good.
00:38:42.719 --> 00:39:10.639
So I thought well Stranger stayed in the in the mill in the story so maybe I'll stay there too which I was one of those ideas that you you have before and you think yeah that would be great and um and then as you think I'm not so sure this is such a good idea I remember there was this moment it wasn't so much the dark coming as the sudden the bird stopped singing and everything went silent and then you could hear the undergrowth and you could hear the sort of rustling amongst the leaves and you know in this sort of this thick forest that I'd been sort of you know thinking was such a lovely beautiful forest.
00:39:10.719 --> 00:39:15.440
Now suddenly you're wishing it wasn't quite so sort of thick and lush and full everything in there is trying to kill you now.
00:39:15.760 --> 00:39:34.320
Everything there might be coming and so I was sitting inside this mill just sort of you know I wasn't going to sleep you know it was way too scary for that uh just sort of hugging myself you know counting the minutes by sort of wishing time would go a little bit faster and um sort of you know with my my back to the millstone um and just sort of you know you know my imagination going haywire.
00:39:34.400 --> 00:39:41.360
And that was sort of part of the reason for doing it actually because I don't believe in vampires and I thought well I want to stay in the in the mill and um see what it does to me.
00:39:41.519 --> 00:39:49.199
And I could tell you it didn't I wasn't quite necessarily believed in vampires but I believed there was something very bad out there and it was probably going to come and get me.
00:39:49.360 --> 00:40:12.400
So but the most frightening moment was when I heard the I heard the sound of motorbikes and it was around sort of a little bit after midnight and suddenly I could hear these motorbikes sort of going past and it was just that sort of my God who's coming to a mill late at night you know what are what are they going to do when they see the you know the the the you know city guy sitting there you know who knows you know my imagination sort of playing with all kinds of possibilities you know sort of sort of the lost boys coming here to shoot up or whatever.
00:40:12.559 --> 00:40:34.559
So um so I was really really quite frightened and quite relieved when they when they rode on but I think that was also a reminder of one of the powerful things about the vampire because I think the vampire is so important in history because it's when we start to move away from our fear of the sort of the wild creatures out there it's more these these beings who look like us and could be just they could be looking amongst us but they will they will mean us harm and they will do terrible things to us.
00:40:34.719 --> 00:40:37.039
So um so all of that stuff was sort of playing in my mind.
00:40:37.119 --> 00:40:55.760
But when um when the first glimmer of light came sort of over those sort of the vampires teeth at those mountain crests and um you know I could legitimately call it morning and I was able to go out of the mill and start making my way back sort of to which was quite a walk away I was um you know that the sense of relief went there was absolutely wonderful.
00:40:55.840 --> 00:41:00.639
It was you know just a feeling of the utter joy of you know being alive it's not undead.
00:41:01.599 --> 00:41:18.960
You can understand in in a microcosm your experience you can understand why this panic took hold in the 1700s so it's that idea to try and get my head into what it would be like to live in a time where you don't have all the barriers of safety that we have around ourselves and terrible things could happen.
00:41:19.360 --> 00:41:25.679
And you you know that that sense of fear and what that does to your imagination it really does you know bring all kinds of things out.
00:41:25.840 --> 00:41:39.360
The other thing that I thought was really interesting in that area of Serbia and I think it's common in other places in in the Balkans as well is that the that you saw a lot of graves in the gardens of people's homes.
00:41:39.519 --> 00:41:44.639
So there are a lot of homes that were sort of farm farmsteads and you'd have the graves sort of in in the gardens.
00:41:44.719 --> 00:41:58.000
So there weren't communal graveyards but the but these were sort of plots of land that had been passed down through the generations and so you had the graves and you had the the image of the dead sort of drawn onto the uh in in incised onto the gravestone.
00:41:58.159 --> 00:42:06.159
So it means that sort of over the centuries people have been living with the dead you know with their their their their their loved ones or maybe not loved ones.
00:42:06.400 --> 00:42:16.079
So if you've had difficult relationships with people who've gone who've passed on you're you're very close to them and that sense that they could you know they don't have very far to go if they want to come out.
00:42:16.400 --> 00:42:36.800
If they want to be vengeful spirits they've just got to roll out of the grave if maybe you you know did something to them you know there's you know it's not it's not a big walk for them to come out and and and and come to you in your bed so so so that I think could is something else that you can imagine sort of playing into the the the that's that overwhelming sense of fear.
00:42:36.880 --> 00:42:43.440
And so as as you hint at the the panic you know once it takes over it can just it can spread like wildfire.
00:42:43.760 --> 00:43:09.760
And that panic it it does continue to this day and it was interesting to note that in in 2012 the the mill or or part of the mill collapsed and there was and there were there were people going oh you know he's gonna he's gonna come out now he's lost his resting place and all this sort of stuff and and so you had that but then before that and this is in a this is in a different context this is in Romania but this I think speaks to the extent to which the vampire panic of the 1700s continues into the 21st century.
00:43:10.079 --> 00:44:00.320
2003 in Romania a drunken pensioner a guy 76 years old named uh Peta Thoma he died when he fell off a horse drawn wagon he was driving and his and the the horse trampled him and he he you know died quite brutally a few weeks later after his burial tomorrow's neighbors grew deathly sick with a mystery illness uh sort of wasting illness uh very on quick onset the villagers responded by concluding that like Zavanovich centuries earlier Toma was haunting the area sucking the neighbors' blood which made them ill so they dug up this guy's corpse they removed his heart with a pitchfork allegedly put stakes through the rest of his body sprinkled it with garlic and then burnt the heart for good measure and this is in 2003 Yeah.
00:44:00.639 --> 00:44:02.000
This is in 2003.
00:44:02.239 --> 00:44:06.400
And it's it's interesting that we've got that we've got that juxtaposition, don't we?
00:44:06.480 --> 00:44:18.719
Where there's still some people who uh be because the myths are so strong and they've been there for so long, that the that that that uh the the unexplained and the anxiety that we spoke of and how that engenders panic.
00:44:18.960 --> 00:44:20.880
That's obviously happening in this case.
00:44:20.960 --> 00:44:26.880
But then you've also got, as you mentioned, you can go to Zoroja and you can buy Zavanovich vampire branded Raki.
00:44:27.199 --> 00:44:29.199
You know, it's it's it's this weird.
00:44:29.519 --> 00:44:35.519
I think it's important to stress that that these things coexist and and I think that they're also that they're they're everywhere, they're all over the place.
00:44:35.679 --> 00:44:40.480
This is not something that uh you know that is particularly special to to Eastern Europe.
00:44:40.559 --> 00:44:51.519
You know, I I've been you know, I know people in Ireland who you know who who who who won't go near certain thorn trees and um you know all kinds of beliefs that you know and that that that explain terrible things that have happened to people.
00:44:51.599 --> 00:44:58.239
I know people in the West Country where I live, you know, who who've had who who who talk about encounters that they've had with with with with fairies.
00:44:58.400 --> 00:45:01.280
So these things, you know, these things do happen.
00:45:01.360 --> 00:45:04.239
And and at the same time, people are also making jokes about them.
00:45:04.400 --> 00:45:16.000
And the people who when when the mill, um when Savasvanovich's mill collapsed, I think there were people who who who who it was sort of, I think sort of broadcast really is a bit of a joke, you know, oh you know, the vampires out.
00:45:16.159 --> 00:45:33.360
In the same way that you know, there's a tomb near where I'd even dose it um of a giant, you know, if if that got um, you know, if you know, if if if if that got sort of destroyed, then I'm sure people would would would sort of you know make sort of that stomp on our house here around, watch out.
00:45:33.519 --> 00:45:43.280
Um, so um, but at the same time, there are always going to be people who who do who do believe in these stories because they can help to explain the extraordinary things that happen.
00:45:43.360 --> 00:45:46.719
You know, there are things that just seem to be beyond scientific explanation.
00:45:46.880 --> 00:45:51.679
Um, and I think that's um the where where that particular story that you mentioned really comes out.
00:45:51.840 --> 00:45:55.599
People were terrible things were happening and they were desperate, and that's panic, isn't it?
00:45:55.760 --> 00:45:57.840
And so, you know, they they need to do something.
00:45:57.920 --> 00:46:05.920
You want to do something to to allay these terrible things and you know, eat you know, to just anything to to try and sort of help you get through it.
00:46:06.000 --> 00:46:18.320
And that's something that obviously as we go back through history, people were doing a lot of that because they they were so many terrible things were happening to them, and um there were you know there weren't always explanations um sort of available to them.
00:46:18.480 --> 00:46:26.880
So um I think we you know we we can sort of look back on the on the on the vampire stories now and think, my god, how do they believe those things?
00:46:26.960 --> 00:46:46.880
But I think certainly from my experience of the of being in the mail, and I think also some of those sort of stories of things that happen now, I you know I can see why I can absolutely see why you why you would find that that that convincing and and you know and and and it and it provides a set of rituals that you can then try and do to to try and sort of get you through to safety.
00:46:48.079 --> 00:46:55.760
Have you um I I have to ask this as a as a kind of just a final question, uh, because this this really got to me when I was doing some research on this.
00:46:55.920 --> 00:46:59.679
There is a lot of AI slop out there about Zava Zavanovich.
00:46:59.840 --> 00:47:01.119
Have you seen any of this stuff?
00:47:01.280 --> 00:47:05.119
There's a lot of AI generated Zava material online.
00:47:05.599 --> 00:47:06.239
Oh, is there?
00:47:06.320 --> 00:47:10.079
No, I mean I've really just focused on the stuff that I saw when I was out there.
00:47:10.480 --> 00:47:11.920
The real things, yeah, yeah.
00:47:12.079 --> 00:47:13.599
I think I'd probably avoid that.
00:47:14.239 --> 00:47:38.400
Yeah, well, please, please avoid it because it's it's it's it is interesting though, because uh because the way a lot of this stuff is generated is it is that weird blend where you're trying to sort of create this, it's almost like a tongue-in-cheek touristy vibe, but at the same time, you've got the you've got this, you know, well, the yeah, but this is a real story, and this is something to be scared of, and you know, the mill today is haunted and all this, and it's that it is that it is that balance.
00:47:38.559 --> 00:47:45.199
So we've gone from you know corpse desecrating panic to 21st century tourist traps and AI slot.
00:47:45.280 --> 00:47:48.639
We've run a gamut of horrors on uh the show today.
00:47:50.000 --> 00:47:52.800
Thank you so much, Nick, for for running this gamut with me.
00:47:52.960 --> 00:47:54.800
Where can people find you on online?
00:47:55.119 --> 00:47:57.039
Where where can they get a copy of Monsterland?
00:47:57.360 --> 00:47:59.280
Uh well I hope in bookshops.
00:47:59.360 --> 00:48:02.159
Um the paperback is is is imminent.
00:48:02.320 --> 00:48:06.000
Um and uh you can follow me on Instagram at Nick Jubber.
00:48:06.079 --> 00:48:09.360
Uh my website is is www.nikjubber.com.
00:48:09.519 --> 00:48:11.440
And yeah, the book is the book is out there.
00:48:11.519 --> 00:48:30.480
So yeah, if if any of your listeners have it have enjoyed this and I think they'd like to hear more about some of the uh weird and wonderful monsters that I've sort of sought out and sort of encountered the the people and the stories of the people who've who've who've who've sort of been inspired by them or have their own stories about them, then um then yeah, please do seek out the book.
00:48:30.880 --> 00:48:32.079
Do that, people.
00:48:32.159 --> 00:48:44.480
It's an excellent book, and uh do continue to listen to History's Devils, and as you do, make sure to like and subscribe and leave comments and say nice things and share the podcast around and do all that business.
00:48:44.639 --> 00:48:48.320
And we will see you next time for another episode of History's Devils,