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Łukasz Kozak: Yes, it is iconoclastic, but only towards some outdated academic claims or the illusions they engendered, which still persist in our consciousness.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