Why upiory don’t drink blood, though they do enjoy a nibble, a drink, or siring the occasional child. Stasia Budzisz talks to mediaevalist Łukasz Kozak.
Stasia Budzisz: Your book, Upiór. Historia Naturalna [The Upiór: A Natural History], is an iconoclastic work – you claim there’s no such thing as Slavic mythology, and that the creature known as the upiór doesn’t belong to demonology but to folk anthropology. That’s rather an individual approach, isn’t it?
Łukasz Kozak: Yes, it is iconoclastic, but only towards some outdated academic claims or the illusions they engendered, which still persist in our consciousness. When I started work on the book, I still thought about folk beliefs in terms of mythology. But when I investigated sources that have previously been ignored, I soon became convinced that so-called Slavic mythology is in itself a historiographic myth and construct.
For instance, Jan Długosz invented and described the ‘proto-Polish’ pantheon, because in his vision of history, shaped by reading Livy, something of the kind simply had to exist. This false assumption – that there must have been some sort of pan-Slavic ‘pre-Christian’ or ‘pagan’ religion, with its own pantheon and its own myths – is still held to this day and still feeds academic study, and pseudo-academic study even more so. Meanwhile, the figure of the upiór, or to put it simply, our prototype of the vampire, shows that we were dealing – and not so long ago! – with animism, sheer shamanism, rather than hierarchized polytheism.
Whenever we refer to any work whatsoever on ‘Slavic mythology’ or ‘Slavic religion’ we always see a distinct Indo-European, or plainly Graeco-Roman calque that imposes some sort of Olympus, with lesser divinities or demons beneath it. And these lesser creatures were to survive in folk beliefs as upiory (in the plural), płanetnicy or other ‘semi-demonic figures’. Meanwhile, this approach deprives the upiory of their individuality, but in fact they were people of flesh and blood, who had first names, surnames, families and homes.
We shall return to the subjectivity of the upiór later on, but first I’d like to ask you about Kashubia. In the introduction to your work you write that the Kashubian and Ukrainian sources are the ones that were scorned by the official historical narrative. How did you come upon them?
It started with my irritation with the classification of folk tales created by Julian Krzyżanowski. Under the entry strzygoń, which is the Lesser Poland name for an upiór, most of what I found was material from Kashubia about wieszcze and łopi, which are Kashubian upiory. This is a classic example of cultural appropriation of something Kashubian into the tradition of Lesser Poland, the blatant polonization of Kashubia as a way of creating an illusory, monoethnic Polish folk culture.
I was keen to investigate, but it’s not easy with Kashubia, because the source material was written mainly in Kashubian, and in various transcripts too, and I couldn’t cope with it at all. I decided I’d do something that ethnologists or historians haven’t done before: I’d ask my Kashubian acquaintances for a translation. It turned out to be exceptional material, if only because these are not actually religious legends, as Krzyżanowski would have it when he forced them into the folk-tale category, but true family stories.
Did you find some proof of that?
There’s a great deal of proof in the press and in courtroom sources. For a long time Kashubia was part of Prussia, so the administration there was very scrupulous. Thanks to court or police documents and the press, we know that in Kashubia upiory – in other words people regarded as wieszcze and łopi – most definitely existed. Moreover, thanks to the research of Jan L. Perkowski, we know that these beliefs persisted among Kashubian settlers in Canada right into the second half of the 20th century. It’s in Pomerania that the largest number of cases were recorded of graves being dug up and corpses decapitated, and also of apotropaic activities, either with regard to suspicious dead people, or to babies born with teeth or with a caul [part of the amniotic membrane wrapped around the head at birth – ed. note]. So it wasn’t to do with myths or legends, but reality.
In Kashubia, being born with a caul is nothing good or desirable. It doesn’t imply that a person has superpowers, but it’s an evident sign of the fact that after death he will become a wieszcz.
Originally in Kashubia being born with a caul must also have implied having some kind of superpowers. Curiously, this belief is not only connected with Slavic folklore – we find similar things in Siberia and in Africa. But at some point in Kashubia it must have changed. Aleksander Hilferding, one of the first people to study Pomeranian folklore, wrote that among the Kashubians being born with a caul was an ominous fate, a warning that after death this person would rise from the grave. At the same time, he noticed a salient point that tallies with the conclusion in my book, which is that a person who becomes a wieszcz after death was in life a wizard or witch. This also fits with the etymology of the word wieszcz, meaning someone who knows (wie), who predicts. I’d be happy to use the term ‘shaman’, although I know it’s a misuse, but it gives a good idea of the specific traits typical of such a person. At some point in Kashubia the figure who ‘knows’, instead of being good and helpful became malevolent. This change may be to do with the rise of a major commitment to Christianity. To this day, the Kashubians are known to be strongly attached to Catholicism.
So it’s the Catholic religion that forced us Kashubians to approach wieszcze and łopi with mistrust and fear?
We must return to the beliefs that are widespread in Lesser Poland and in Ukraine. In those places the upiór is a person who has two souls, and when he dies, one of them goes off to the world beyond, but the other one stays in the body and animates the corpse. But in Kashubia these days no one ever speaks of two souls, which in my view results from the influence of Catholicism.
Not entirely: in Kashubia when children are baptized according to the Catholic rite, they’re very often given two names, and according to one of the theories that’s in order to name both souls.
Yes, that is definitely a relic of this belief, like the caul, which was once a sign or simply a material manifestation of the second soul. I refuse to make remote comparisons, but in Scandinavia, for instance, there is a belief that a person can be born with two, or even three souls. The caul may actually be one of these souls. Originally in Kashubia too, this might have been in common currency. A person with two souls was like a wizard or witch, but there is another, church interpretation too, which – apparently – Kashubia adopted in the late 19th century. The Jesuits formulated it at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, because they couldn’t accept the idea of two souls. It’s heresy, after all, a denial of the basic dogma of faith. So they constructed the Christianized upiór: a person who is born with one soul, but whose body can be taken over after death by a devil. As if the devil had put on the body of the dead man. To be able to do this, three things are needed: divine permission, a witch-midwife and an unbaptized child. When the witch delivers the baby, she hands the child into the possession of the devil. Of course, straight after the child’s baptism the devil loses the right to its soul, but retains the right to its body. Such a person can even become a saint, but that doesn’t change the fact that after death his body will belong to the devil. There’s a problem with these bodies, which is that they’re not subject to decay. And here is another field for research because, as Czesław Miłosz wrote in The Issa Valley, only saints and upiory possess the characteristic of not decomposing after death.
So the question arises: saint or upiór?
We know of one highly representative case. It was the Bridgettine nun Anna Omiecińśka, who died in the odour of sanctity. Her body did not decay, but the Jesuits, in whose church she was buried, weren’t sure if she was an upiór or a saint, so they filled her coffin with holy water. Finally Anna appeared in a dream to one of the priests, asking: “How long will I be lying in this bath?” This dispelled their doubts, and Anna was soon the object of a local cult. The story of these efforts to deal with her body is so unusual and atypical for a hagiography as to be credible.
In one of your interviews you said that upiory exist when you believe in them. For me, a native Kashubian, it’s hard not to believe in them, because there’s even an upiór in my immediate family. When my adopted grandfather died in the 1980s, a handful of poppyseed was placed in his coffin, and so was a card with a prayer on it, but with the word ‘Amen’ torn off. He was born with teeth, and throughout his life he knew that after death he’d become a łopi and they’d have to groom or prepare him so he wouldn’t emerge from the grave.
That’s a wonderful story, and it shows the unusual and lasting nature of Kashubian culture. I only know of this sort of apotropaic way of ‘looping’ the upiór, programming it so that it keeps on performing a set procedure over and over, from Pomerania. It can’t finish the prayer on the card without the word ‘Amen’, so it reads it over and over, to the end of the world, and thus it cannot emerge from the grave. It’s the same with the grains of poppyseed or sand, thrown into the coffin in Poland and Ukraine too – the upiór was supposed to count them each night over again. In Kashubia this way of grooming the corpse was performed during the ritual of the ‘empty night’ before the burial, and in those days it was necessary to keep a close eye on the deceased. In On the Edge of Life and Death, Father Jan Perszon records that in one of the villages near Luzino during an ‘empty night’ the corpse went red, which was a patent sign that it was an upiór, so the relevant procedures were carried out.
That’s right, red and not pale.
The pallor we’ve grown used to expecting is a product of pop culture. We’re accustomed to vampires being pale since the days of Polidori’s Vampire, which was simply a portrayal of Lord Byron. Meanwhile, upiory are ruddy, like the one near Luzino. Of course, in Father Perszon’s story the corpse was suitably groomed, its ring finger was cut off, and a few drops of blood were poured out and served to the mourners in their coffee – it was to protect them. Additionally, a woollen sock was placed in the coffin for the upiór to unravel, which gave it something to do. The ring finger [in Polish literally the ‘cordial finger’ – trans. note] is of course the one associated with the heart, which may be analogous with driving a stake through the heart in other regions. I haven’t found any information to say that stakes were driven through the hearts of wieszcze in Kashubia.
You write that there’s not much to say that upiory drank human blood, but there is plenty of evidence that people drank the blood of upiory.
The upiory familiar from the sources are fundamentally different from pop-culture vampires. They do drink blood in some accounts, but not necessarily literally. Often it simply means they caused people fatal incapacity. In turn, the literal drinking of blood by alleged upiory happens often enough for it to be mentioned by Stanisław August Poniatowski. Although drinking the blood of a corpse may seem shocking nowadays, at one time it was a widespread practice, and still occurred in the 20th century. In the early 18th century, not far from Przemyśl, a group of peasants were condemned for digging up a dead woman suspected of being an upiór, and then “they cut off her head, soaked their scarves in her blood, removed the heart from the corpse and ate tarts baked with the same blood”. Drinking a small amount of the blood of a dead person dissolved in a beverage protected the Kashubians against the potentially harmful activity of the upiór. And because as a rule wieszcze and łopi put their closest relatives to death first, it was the family who were responsible for rendering them harmless. Hence there are plenty of reports about the exhumation and beheading of the corpses of people’s mothers, fathers, grandfathers and uncles, whose blood was either collected in a vessel, or at least had a handkerchief soaked in it. Things are slightly different where the Lesser Poland strzygoń is concerned: it never drank blood, but nor have I come across a statement to say that any living person ever drank its blood. Moreover, the strzygoń can, as distinct from other upiory, be pale.
Have you managed to establish if there’s a modus operandi that’s common to all upiory?
It’s hard to do that, though undoubtedly their common feature is that the upiór is a person or the body of a person who emerges from the grave after death, because either there was a second soul inside him, or the devil is sitting within him. But in Kashubia, the wieszcz (or person born with a caul) doesn’t have to emerge from the grave in order to kill. It can do that ‘remotely’, by eating its winding sheet or shroud. In Greater Poland, in turn, it shouts out people’s names, and those who hear it will die. But like a typical Cracovian, once it’s out of the grave the Lesser Poland strzygoń likes to eat and drink – it won’t turn its nose up at sausages or vodka, and is even known to steal apples.
Is there a way to pacify it?
You have to slap its cheek. The people who changed into a strzygoń after death were those who hadn’t received the sacrament of confirmation, which was regarded as the baptism of the second soul. So confirmation guaranteed peace after death. And why a slap on the cheek? Until the Second Vatican Council that was something the bishop would do during confirmation, and so it was possible to deal with a strzygoń in the same way.
The strzygoń is also sexually active – you write about their wives.
Yes, after death the strzygoń visits its wife, helps her on the farm, carries on a sex life and has children. Within a small society strzygoń wives and children were an excellent way of allowing widows to carry on an independent life. This is ideal material for gender studies – how to cope with social oppression by bringing the deceased into the picture and giving birth to children after the husband’s death.
These upiory are supposed to be scary, but they don’t sound all that dangerous.
The ethnographic material shows that the most dangerous were the Ukrainian ones, but we shouldn’t forget that Ukraine, just like Poland, is not a monolith. The ones from Southern Rus’ are the worst, and the ones from Volhynia are milder. From Ukraine too we have the best material on living upiory that sometimes helped society, and sometimes harmed it. These people are possibly one of the most interesting and convincing examples of ‘Slavonic shamanism’. They were capable of recognizing other upiory, both alive and dead, or wizards and witches, which often had dramatic consequences in the form of lynching, as evidenced by the sources.
You wrote your book at a special time, during the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve been living with it for a year now, but I remember some very strange things happening at the start of it. Suddenly the Catholic priests began organizing collections to pay for helicopter flights carrying a monstrance, a figure of the Virgin Mary or the pictures of saints, or for them to walk about cities carrying rosaries and reciting prayers. It was all quite like something out of the 18th century – it made you feel like quoting Goya: The sleep of reason produces…
Oh yes! Upiory often become active during a plague, or rather they are the source of it. In the 18th century whenever an epidemic or a cattle fever began, the first thing they did was to go to the graveyard and look for the upiór. People were not aware that a plague is caused by biological factors. Each disease was regarded as a supernatural effect, the work of magic. A time of crisis activates a desire in people to turn to magical spells, and flying a helicopter carrying a monstrance is exactly the same – it’s magic, not religion. These days I’m always finding analogies with the past, for instance drinking the blood of upiory, as described earlier, is comparable with last year’s use of the plasma of people who had recovered from COVID.
A bit like a vaccine.
We shouldn’t forget that the first vaccines emerged from folk medicine, from which nowadays alternative medicine draws inspiration. Now it has reached the point where alternative medicine questions the old alternative medicine, which has become conventional medicine.
What’s it like working on upiory? Do you often find yourself referring to common sense?
All the time, because common sense is nothing more than peasant sense. I try not to rationalize, but to approach microhistories with respect.
Parts of this interview have been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
Łukasz Kozak:
A mediaevalist, expert on technology and new media, and on the promotion of cultural heritage. He researches obscure topics in cultural history. He is joint producer of the radio programme Kryzys wieku średniego [Middle Age Crisis] on Polish Radio 2, and curator of an early music programme for Warsaw’s Nowe Epifanie [New Epiphanies] festival. He is the author of scholarly and popular works, he gives lectures and has worked with numerous cultural and academic institutions to create new technological solutions for their digital collections. His two books on Polish, Kashubian and Ukrainian living corpses and vampires have been published by Evviva l’Arte: Upiór. Historia Naturalna [The Upiór: A Natural History], and With Stake and Spade: Vampiric Diversity in Poland.
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
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