Twilight of the Vampires by Téa Obreht

AS POSTED ON COURSERA FORUM: Much of the Harper's Magazine website is accessible by subscription only, but I had this typed copy of Obreht's article in my archives. It is absolutely brilliant and warrants a reading by anyone digging their teeth into Dracula.

I'm sharing this here in the spirit of open learning, and I hope I don't get in trouble because of it.

Twilight of the Vampires: Hunting the Real-Life Undead
by Téa Obreht
Harper’s November 2010


Three days before my flight to Serbia, the Devil intervenes: my mother. who is supposed to meet me in Belgrade, falls into a chasm on a Moscow sidewalk and shatters her ankle. That she has gone through life without ever having broken a bone before makes her, according to her own mother, a casualty of my intentions. It is a bad sign.


My grandmother, waiting for me in Belgrade, advises me to cancel my trip; her fears are reinforced the following morning by a phone call from one of my Serbian contacts – a journalist who was supposed to meet with me has gotten wind of my mother’s accident and pulled out of her agreement to help. “What now?” my grandmother asks, and fumes when she hears that I am determined to press on.

It may seem strange that I have returned to the Balkans to hunt for vampires when I get so many of them in my adoptive homeland. Since immigrating to the States in 1997, I have formed an uneasy acquaintance with the legion undead peopling the American imagination: Anne Rice’s beautiful, tortured ghouls, Buffy’s ridge faced villains and morally confused male leads; countless cinematic and literary variation on Bram Stoker’s nightwalker, from Elizabeth Kostova’s historical reinterpretation of Vlad Tepes to Francis Ford Coppola’s shape shifting, costume-changing warrior-beast. But the power of the newest trend is incredible: vampires of all shapes, sizes, convictions, and denominations are swelling the national bestiary. Mu undergraduate students at Cornell deny reading Stephenie Meyer, but whenever I ask them to compose lists of their favorite books, it seems like fully half include Darren Shan’s The Vampire’s Assistant. My office window looks over the Commons and into the living room of a young woman from whose walls Twilight’s Robert Pattinson leers up, his smile signalling with indecently little ambiguity that it is sexytime.

Two days later, when I call to tell my grandmother I’ve missed my connecting flight in Paris, she answers the news with silence. This latest cosmic setback has turned her worst fears – heretofore an unpleasant possibility – into something inevitable. When I finally arrive in Belgrade, I discover that she has placed an open pair of scissors under my bed, blades turned downward, to keep the Devil at bay.

Despite my immigrant’s success in acclimating to many thinks America – I too now buy fruit based on its appearance – I have never been able to reconcile myself to the domestic breed of vampire. Where is the figure of terror, the taloned monster, the walking corpse, the possessed animal? How are they vampires at all when they are so busy righting humanity’s wrongs and bewailing their ethical conundrums instead of mischieving and murdering like my grandmother seems to think they should?

Unlike his Western relation- that handsome, aristocratic, mirror-wary antihero – the Balkan vampire is typically confined to living and hunting among the laboring classes and is most accurately categorized as an evil spirit or demonically possessed corpse that frequents graveyards, crossroads, and other areas devoid of the protective power of domestic spirits. Also a Western conceit is the vampire’s pallor; whereas female vampires are beautiful and white-robed, most firsthand accounts indicate that male vampires are ruddy, corpulent peasants, whose affect – once unearthed – is that of a freshly gorged mosquito. In animal form, the vampire is not strictly limited to the bat but can appear to its victims as a cat, a dog, a rodent, or even a butterfly. These manifestations are not to be confused with vampires that were never human in the first place, which may even assume a vegetal guise (among numerous indignities through history, the Roma suffered the obscure nuisance of vampire watermelons). to further complicate matters, and despite recent trends that have marketed the werewolf as his archenemy, the Balkan vampire is often conflated with his lycanthropic cousin, since both share more or less the same agenda; in Croatia, both vampires and werewolves are known by the term vukodlak.

Vampir is probably the only Serbian word used the whole world over, and its significance in the lexicon of former Yugoslavian nations is evidenced by its derivatives, among them vampirisati: to engage in vampire-like behavior, an accusation directed at drunk husbands returning home at dawn, teenagers hovering over drug deals in doorways, or anyone caught stealing leftover cake from the fridge at 2 a.m. This is not to be confused with the more specialized povampirisati se: to turn oneself into or become a vampire, a process that is unnervingly easy, and that does not require a sanguinary exchange with another vampire. If a man’s life ends abruptly, unexpectedly – if he is murdered or accidentally killed, if he commits suicide, if he falls victim to a sudden illness, if his last rites or burial are improperly conducted – he becomes more susceptible to the influences of demons that can possess and reanimate him. That is not to say that evil spirits in southern Europe have nothing better to do than float disembodied through the field, waiting for a cat to jump over a newly buried corpse so that they can dart into it. Whether a spirit will revisit the living is above all influenced by the dead man’s own character and by how he was regarded in society: if a man is known to be a sinner, an alcoholic, unneighborly in any way; if his like is marked by conflict or degeneracy, then he is, in those villages where public perception and gossip are as goof as truth, predisposed to vampirism.

Once risen, the vampire makes his way to the nearest village – this is sometimes his hometown, or the place of his death, and almost always a community sufficiently isolated so as to demand the combined effort of all residents in order to stake him. His mission is to visit sundry misfortune upon the locals. This rarely involves the consumption of blood; he prefers to enter villagers’ homes and asphyxiate then by sitting on their chests while they sleep. A less malevolent spirit will indulge in simple mischief – flinging dinnerware, inducing uncharacteristic behavior in domestic animals.

Whereas garlic, holy water, and crucifixes are commonly accepted apotropaics across the Balkans, scissors under the bed are also popular, as is the black-handled knife buried in the doorstep to cleave incoming evil in half. None of these methods cause the vampire’s flesh to burst into flame; nor is there any indication that direct sunlight poses a lethal threat to vampire, although vampires do tend to be nocturnal and recoil from the crowing of roosters. Methods for destroying vampires are many – some, such as the boiling and disposal of vampire vegetables, are fairly simple, while others necessitate complex, clerically assisted rituals – but the most reliable weapon against vampires has always been glogov kolac, the blackthorn stake. The vigilant vampire hunter must find the vampire’s grave, open it, and, having determined that the body shows the appropriate signs – the absence of rank odor and rigor mortis, a vibrant flush to the cheeks, the growth of “new” hair or fingernails, a quantity of fresh blood welling in the mouth – plunge the blackthorn stake through the heart, at which point the corpse lets out a blood-curdling shriek. Afterward, depending on the region, the head or limbs may be severed, the body turned over, the mouth filled with garlic. In some instances, the entire corpse is burned and the ashes scattered in the nearest body of water to carry whatever may be left of the spirit on its way.

The village of Kisiljevo lies some seventy-five kilometers east of Belgrade, where the Danube borders western Romania. Its name did not appear on any map of Serbia I had been able to find, nor does it hold an impressive position in the country’s political or religious history; but three hundred years ago, its fiends and streets were the stage for a vampire drama of unprecedented international significance. The attacks at Kisiljevo probably would not have warranted a mention had the village and its troubles not fallen under the watchful, disbelieving eye of Austria following the Peace of Pozarevac in 1718. Austrian accounts of the case, detailed in the newspaper Wienerisches Diarium, tell the story of Petar Blagojevic, a peasant who began appearing to Kisiljevans in their sleep ten weeks after his death in the summer of 1725. Those he visited – a total of nine villagers in seven days – reported that they awoke to find Blagojevic strangling them, and later died of what witnesses called a twenty-four-hour illness. Blagojevic’s widow, who fled Kisiljevo in the aftermath of these tragedies, claimed to have encountered her dead husband in their home, where he demanded his shoes. In an attempt to regylate mounting hysteria in the region, Austrian authorities intervened, sending a delegation of priests to investigate.

We strike out for Kisiljevo in the early morning. At the wheel: Goran Vukovic, our driver, who moonlights as a fountain builder. In the back seat: Masa Kovacevic – seventh-year medical student at the University of Belgrade; lifelong friend and token skeptic – who has requested that we wrap her in a bloody shawl and turn her loose in the village to inspire the locals if things start off too slowly.

We take dusty one-lane roads through wheat fields and sprawling vineyards yellowing in the sun. Beside the chicken-wire fences and staved-in roofs of derelict farms, the vacation homes of Belgrade families are slowly coming together, their yards littered with bricks, coils of wire, chunks of doric columns, marble lions, upended flowerpots. We almost miss the Kisiljevo turnoff, indicated by an unspectacular arrow affixed to a lamppost; I am a bit surprised, having expected to find the village name chiseled into a roadside boulder by a quivering hand, or a beflowered shrine of the Virgin to turn back evil spirits, or perhaps a little blood smeared across a sign as a warning to us. Instead, the road tapers past bright white houses and window boxes of red carnations brimming with such welcing Riviera charm that I find myself wishing the town would invest in a fog machine.

The village square is empty except for three shirtless old men sitting on a low wall in the shade; but here, at last, we catch a hint of something otherworldly: opposite the community center – where the death certificates of recently deceased villagers hang in the window – stands a blood-red house. We sit in the car staring at it, the silence around us – which has, until that moment, felt disappointingly like the silence of a lazy day in the hot country side rather than the silence of a haunted village – tightening. The paint looks newly applied, thick and shining, and to the left of the door, above a shuttered window in shivers of black, hangs an enormous, spread-winged bat, its profile sharp and maniacal. I am raising my camera to document it when Masa explains, “That’s the Bacardi bat. This must be the bar.”

We obtain the cell-phone number of Mirko Mogicic, the town’s headman, from the convenience store on the corner, and Mirko, without being forewarned of our arrival, drives down to accommodate our quest, abandoning preparations for the summer fair in nearby Pozarevac. He is a potbellied, strong-jawed man, and he takes us to his house, where his wife serves us homemade zova juice, made from elderberries, in flowered cups. The walls are adorned with pictures of spaniels – Mirko, in addition to being a village headman and full-time farmer, is employed as a dog-show consultant.

He is also working on a book about Petar Blagojevic. In 1725, at the height of Kisiljevan hysteria, when the Austrian officials supervised the exhumation of Petal Blagojevic’s body, it was acknowledged by everyone present that it was entirely undecomposed. His hair, beard, and nails had continued to grow, and a new layer of skin was emerging from beneath toe old one. “Mind you, this was forty days after the burial,” says Mirko. “And when they ran the stake through his hear, fresh blood rushed from his ears and nostrils.”

Mirko has clearly rehearsed this story; but he does not laugh it off, and the authenticity of the vampire is a point about which he is adamant: Petar Blagojevic is the genuine article, the first vampire to be officially certified by the Austrian government. “Here, just across the Danube, is Transylvania and the Romanian Dracula,” Mirko says, gesturing toward the river. “but we know him to be merely a legend. They made of him a profitable business.”

Kisiljevo has had less success with the salability of their ghoul, but this has not kept the town off the radar of true vampire aficionados. The previous year, two German students came to interview Mirko; that same summer, a paranormal researcher came to sweep the graveyard above town with a detector that led him to an “enhanced energy fiend” around one of the oldest headstones. In fact, Mirko gets so many visitors asking the same questions that he has the whole itinerary preplanned: he gives me a photocopied page from the legendary Serbian almanac of all things supernatural, which I have been unable to find in Belgrade, and takes us to see Dade Vlastimir, who is said to have encountered an actual vampire.

“Not Petar Blagojevic,” Mirko says, assuring us that, once disposed of, a Kisiljevam vampire stays dead.

Vlastimir Djordjevic – affectionately known as Deda Vlastimir – is a ninety-two-year-old Kisiljevan with whiskered cheeks and kind, sleepy eyes, who greets us delightedly in the garden. While we arrange ourselves around the patio table, his white-haired daughter fusses over us, bringing our day’s second round of homemade zova juice. A great-great-grandson hovers in the kitchen doorway in his pajamas.

“Hear, now, how is was,” Deda Vlastimir says, obliging us with high Balkan oratory. “In this village much was said about these vampires, and every once in a while there was something to be seen as well. It is 200 years since that vampire, that Petar Blagojevic – and thus he is practically a legend – 300 years since they found him fresh in his grace and he cause much grief here. And some people believe, and some people do not believe – but there was another vampire, this Baba Ruza, whom I myself met one night. I had been visiting a friend and was returning home when suddenly before me appeared a woman, a tiny little woman, whose face I did not see. She appeared before me, and I said, ‘Who is this?’ and she turned to me and vanished.”

I am disappointed that he does not say anything about pursuing Baba Ruza with a blackhorn stake, so I ask: “Did you believe?”

“Well, hear me,” he says. “I was afraid. My friend’s father had to take me home, And there is something in that belief, because three days later, in the house in front of which I saw her” – he taps the table with his knuckles as he says this – “there was a murder. A father killed his son-in-law. Three days later. And right away around the village it was said that these vampires were responsible.”

“Evil forces,” Mirko cuts in, “evil spirits. Things like that never happen on their own, we must accept that.” Deda Vlastimir agrees. “These beliefs,” he tells us, “are not written down – but this makes them stronger.”

A few months before my expedition, I finally got around to watching Djordje Kadijevic’s legendary 1973 film, Leptirica. The film is based on a short story by the celebrated Serbian writer Milovan Glisic, and, due to the communal nature and rarity of film premieres in the former Yugoslavia, immediately became, upon its airing on national television, a cultural touchstone of my mother’s generation. The film was something she used to tell me about when late-night conversations turned toward the horrific and the bizarre – which, in my family, happened on a weekly basis. In some regards, Leptirica (The She-Butterfly) is a love story. Its plot follows Strahinja, a young shepherd from Zarozje, who, in an effort to prove himself a worthy husband for the beautiful Radojka, volunteers to spend the night in the village watermill, where the vampire Sava Savanovic has supposedly been strangling millers. Accustomed as I am to American vampire films – especially those that combine love stories with Gary Oldman dropping from the ceiling dressed as an oversized green bat or Hugh Jackman shooting Dracula’s snake-jawed brides out of the air with an improbable crossbow – I scoffed at my mother’s warning. How scary could it really be, this Servian throwback to the campy Hollywood monster flicks of the 1950s?

As it turns out, the success of Leptirica – shot on a shoestring with a cast of ten actors who, combined, have a total of some ninety lines – hinges on the power of suggestion, palpable even from behind the sofa cushions, where I spent the majority of the film’s runtime. Whether with the steady pulse of the mill wheel at night or the simple but unforgettably odious black hand in the flour, Leptirica paralyses by holding forth the possibility of a glimpse, never completely revealing what the victims face. In what it does reveal, however, the film overcomes its budgetary and technological limitations by leaving absolutely no room for romantic notions of redemption: Radojka, corrupted by the butterfly carrying Sava Savanovic’s spirit, changes before the viewer’s eyes from a delicate-featured ingenue into a gasping, razor-toothed creature with a hairy face, something much closer to a werewolf that a vampire. The result is both tragic and obscene; the viewer feels tainted simply by having witnessed her ghastly transformation.

Whereas such imagery evokes the southern European vampire’s status as an ineradicable spiritual plague, capable of wiping out entire villages, the Western tradition has always, and especially recently, treated vampirism as a source of provocatively desirable sexual power and physical prowess, a force that, with the correct application of human affection, can be overcome. the model for this elegant revenant was perfected on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816, during the Year Without a Summer, when persistent rain drove Lord Byron and his guests indoors, forcing them to amuse themselves by composing ghost stories: Byron wrote the apocalyptic “Darkness”; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; and John Polidori, “The Vampyre” – which blazed the trail for Bram Stoker’s more enduring Dracula (1897).

In their brutally single-minded pursuit of sustenance and lack of remorse for their own monstrous compulsions, both Polidori’s Lord Ruthven and Stoker’s Count Dracula are faithful to their origins. But whereas the original vampire desires seclusion and anonymity to pursue his bloodlust, recast as a figure of nobility he ventures into society – suggesting loneliness, a desire to rejoin the living, a touch of self-reflection. Add to this various other liberties, and 150 years later vampires are sleeping in canopy beds, refrigerating sheep’s blood, and breeding armies of little vampire-lings to infiltrate the world’s most exclusive guestlists.

As for old-school Sava Savanovic, there is no desire for redemption, nor evidence of his having been slain; at the end of the film, his butterfly-guised spirit flutters away, presumably to generate more black-clawed blood-suckers elsewhere. Moreover, research into his origins suggests that his water mill still exists. If Petar Blagojevic, whose fate at the hands of all those stake-wielding Austrians was well documented, continues to haunt contemporary Kisiljevans beyond the grave – indeed, beyond beyond the grave – then surely, I reason, the presence of an undefeated vampire must be that much more palpable in the community he once terrorized.

Zarozje, like Kisiljevo, is of no particular importance to cartographers. But to properly explain the degree of its godforsakenness, I must fall back on an old Serbian idiom – vukojebina, which translates roughly as “wolf’s fuck,” suggesting a location so isolated that its inhabitants, lacking even sheep for sexual companionship, turn to comforts lupine.

Two and a half hours out of Belgrade, the road to Zarozje climbs into bright green hills dotted with farmhouses, their pastures ending in steeply sloping pine forests that gird the bare mountaintops. Just past the sign for a thirteenth-century monastery, a fogbank rolls onto us suddenly, clinging to the windows, smothering the sun as we slow to a crawl. From the back seat, Masa’s voice is increasingly enthusiastic. “Extra,” she says, using an English-ism that’s become Serbian slang for “awesome.” Ambience at last.

The absence of road signs makes us nervous, so we stop the next person we see, a rail-thin man who materializes out of the fog in the vanguard of a flock of sheep. I roll down the window and Goran shouts: “Pardon, good shepherd, but is this the way to Zarozje?”

The man leans on the car and swings his head inside. He is middle-aged, but his face is furrowed with the lines of outdoor labor, and he smells heavily of lanolin. His three remaining teeth are yellow. “Are you looking for that vampire?” he asks us. When we say nothing, he tells us those are stories, just stories, then points us forward into the mist. “That way.”

Once we’ve left him behind, Masa offers that Sava Savanovic may be the may be the only reason anyone comes up here; the road has been empty for miles, and we are winding past houses where the dead are buried in front yards, their marble headstones wreathed in roses and fenced off with chicken wire. These houses seem deserted, but then we see a woman bent over a tub of laundry on a cottage porch. I roll down the window to ask for directions. “Pardon!” I call to her. “Is this the way to the water mill?” She looks up, then lifts the tub and moves indoors.

“Pardon!” we shout to one household after another, but everything about the locals’ demeanor indicates that we will not be earning any invitations for zova, that we are on our own. Standing ankle-deep in the runoff from a sty teeming with massive pink hogs, we yell at a house whose TB we can hear through the screen door. “Pardon!” Masa and I shout in unison, but when a man comes out, belly bulging beneath a white undershirt, shuffling across the porch in oversized and uneven green socks, he only grumbles at us unintelligibly and turns his back.

At the next cluster of houses, the residents have recently slaughtered some goats. The skins are stretched out, drying on a line is the sun. Goran says, “Let’s not ask these people, “ and guns the engine.

Then there appears from around the next bend a figure who looks like someone to whom you would surrender your last biscuit if you were a character in a Hans Christian Andersen tale: he has a feathered cap and a walking stick and a suspiciously cheerful air for a white-haired man crutching his way up a fifty-degree incline. “About seven more kilometers, and you’ll reach the big church,” he says. “Go past it, and then keep going until you get to the trail that leads to the river. You’ll find a chapel, and then the water mill in 200 metres away.” At the church we find, side by side on the doorstep, a fifty-dinar bill and a severed squirrel’s tail. Goran, who was born in a small village, can explain the money – if worshipers are moved by fear or despair while the church is closed, they sometimes leave offering on the threshold. He has not theories about the tail.

Our tires, after braking on gravel for fifteen downhill kilometers, are beginning to smoke. We leave the car and follow the sound of the river that rises from the trees below us, down a slippery footpath through the undergrowth and into the field at the bottom of the valley. The chapel, a squat white hut with shuttered windows, sits at the field’s edge, gray granite cliffs looking up behind it. On the other side of the river at the bottom of the slope, we find what we’ve been looking for.

Sava Savanovic’s water mill is a low wooden building that stands amid thickets of kopriva (nettles) with its back to the river, door yawning wide. We wade through the river and then the nettles, the leaves clinging to our pants, fluorescent grasshoppers diving into our faces. The lintel and sides of the watermill are covered in graffiti, evidence of decades of visitors who have beaten us to the vampire’s lair. I am discouraged by the defacements: in Serbia, popular haunts tend to double as garbage heaps, and the more rancid the trash, the more legitimate and desirable the hangout.

But the interior of Sava’s water mill is pristine. The river whispers along the walls, and picturesque cobwebs hang from the rafters, thick and shining in the light that filters through the cracks in the roof. The milling implements are laid out neatly by the rusted mill wheel, and in the corner sits a small, tidy mound of ashes and sticks. Goran notes that the sticks have been sharpened into points. Someone has been here, and recently.

On the highway at the top of the mountain, after our car has suffered the drive back up the gravel track, we come across a burnt-brown old man wearing a traditional sajkaca cap and woolen vest, sitting at the roadside, keeping an eye on the flock grazing across the road.

We pull up to him: “Pardon. Do you know anything about the vampire?” He peers into the car and says: “You mean from the water mill?”

“Yes,” we say.

“Have you been to the water mill?”

“Yes.”

“That’s my water mill!”

The man’s name is Vladimir Jagodic, and his family has for many generations owned the land on which the water mill sits. Standing by the highway, his hands behind his back, he assures us that there’s nothing to the stories about Sava Savanovic. “There was a great famine in those days,” he says. “And this man – a very clever man – would go into the water mill at night and throttle the millers a little and then steal their flour. You see?” His smile is full of satisfaction. “But noboby died, nobody was killed here. I had a grandmother of ninety years who would tell me these stories – but she knew, too, that nobody was killed.”

He tells us that when he was a little boy his father would make him spend the night in the water mill to make him brave, and that in all the years he slept there, all the nights he walked home in the darkness, he has never once seen anything.

Then he says: “This isn’t even the right water mill. There is a much, much older water mill not too far from here, a lone water mill, where those attacks happened. But there’s nothing left of that one, only a ruin. So when they come to take pictures, they photograph mine.” When we ask him why, in that event, his father forced him to spend the night in the wrong watermill, he changes the subject and tells us that these fears did not exist during the days of Tito.

There is, he insists, no vampire on Zarozje. For the potential victims of the campfire who does not exist, Zarozans have built a lonely little chapel in a field below a goat-horned, granite peak, kept within running distance of a water mill barricaded by thorns in case the stakes inside it fail. Pay no mind, the locals tell us, to those stories about Sava Savanovic. But we leave feeling that we just missed him.

The scholar Paul Barber offers a straightforward, anthropological explanation of vampirism, attributing the etiology of the Balkan vampire to ignorance regarding disease and the decay of bodies. He draws parallels between vampirism and medieval myths surrounding contagion. He reasons that peasants, evaluating the body of a suspected vampire in the grave, misinterpreted the effects of different soils and climates on decomposition rates; misunderstood the normal deterioration of skin and nails as new growth. the shriek of the vampire following a staking is easily understood if you know that the human body, after weeks in the grave, lets out a moan if the gases that have been building in the lungs are suddenly forced out.

This direct route from coffin to creature leaves out one element crucial to understanding the regional pervasion of vampirism: Balkan religion rests on tradition rather than belief, superstition rather than faith, and despite the propagation of Islam and two branches of Christianity, the influence of the occupying religions was never particularly deep; scratch the surface, and you find a reservoir of shared pagan influence, which all comes down to the same thing: faith in God, whether shrined by a cathedral, basilica, or mosque, takes a back seat to fear of the Devil. (My grandmother, a Bosnian Muslim, would rather protect me from him with an icon of St. George than with nothing at all.)

This is not the Devil as Antichrist or distant source of temptation or maitre d’ of a posthumous fire pit. The Balkan Devil is a walking pestilence, an organic household entity, and his hands are on everything that is dear or fragile; so we spit on newborns and call them ugly; we avoid staking a claim to good health or publicly discussing the pleasures we most look forward to in our lives; we shroud even our suffering, for fear he will enhance it. He sits at the shoulders of all our most certain plans, ready to upend them, a full-time Olympian troublemaker. The saints protect us from him, but only if we embrace a prescribed etiquette of daily rituals and protective tchothkes, and then only maybe. “God willing,” we say, but God is just a buffer.

Indeed, God’s absence from the mind-set of Communist Yugoslavia seems to have been one of the key reasons why the reign of Josip Broz Tito, however corrupt and iron-fisted, has retained its widespread reputation as a golden age. It is no surprise, then, that when God made his trifurcating comeback following the dissolution of Tito’s regime, the Devil – appearing, as always, in a hundred guises: some vampiric, some idolized, some despotic, and some more newsworthy than others – followed him back into the region’s life, and remained there.

The resurgent vampires secured a particularly firm bite on Serbian political theatre. In 1987, a pivotal moment for the Socialist Party’s increasingly destabilizing post-Tito government came in its unexpectedly fierce denunciation of the editors of Student magazine at Belgrade University, who had mocked the national observance of the Marshal’s birthday as “The Vampire’s Ball.” During the war years that soon followed, one of the more histrionic talking heads on national television repeatedly promised viewers that vampires would arise from their graves to vanquish enemies of the state (lest the undead minions fail to discriminate between friend and foe, the prognosticator went so far as to advise keeping on had plenty of garlic.) As for Solbodan Milosevic – who had sat at the helm as Tito’s age of gold fell apart; who died in 2006 while on trial in The Hague; and who is buried in the vampire-rich locale of Pozarevac – in advance of the one-year anniversary of his death the media-savvy local artist, later claiming to have acted in an abundance of caution, hammered a four-foot blackthorn stake into his coffin.

For a week after Zarozje, Masa makes a show of piling garlic onto everything I eat, and then packs me off the Croatia. Her bloodletting, brain-sampling duties at the University of Belgrade preclude her from joining me, but Veljko, a painter who lives in the Dalmatian fishing village of Zaostrog, agrees to act as guide, provided his name is changed in order to prevent any supernatural retribution for his involvement (several other names have been changed with this same precaution in mind). He is a lanky, loose-limbed man with a ponytail of gray hair who has cultivated the art of living simply, and who fills me in on an important local vukodlak which his little car clings to the tight curves of the coastal highway that will lead us to Potomje, the beast’s lair. Two hundred years ago, he tells me, a sailor from Zaostrog, having left the mainland to seek seasonal work at the vineyards across the bay, arrived in Potomje to find the villagers there in a state of great distress. For several months, the village had been marauded by a sinister vukodlak, who would knock on people’s doors at night and strangle those who answered. It is unclear why the villagers did not think to stop answering their doors after dark. At any rate, the village priest said to the sailor, “Your house is next, beware tonight.” So the brave sailor resolved to stay up, hiding behind the door, and when the vukodlak came knocking, the sailor chased him through the vineyards and across the fields, where he disappeared into a blackberry thicket. The sailor hurled his knife after the ghoul, and the following morning returned with a priest and some villagers to burn down the brambles. The fire revealed a stone mound, which the sailor struck with his knife, in turn revealing a tomb inside of which the vukodlak was sitting. He looked up at his pursuers and said: “As I could not kill you, now you must kill me.”

No two ways about how this story ends; however, before they killed the vukodlak, the villagers asked him whether he had accomplices. Unlike his Serbian counterparts, this Croatian vampire was not a solitary mischief-maker; nor was he particularly loyal to his fellow-ghouls, because he divulged their hideouts without even leveraging the information to bargain for his un-life. The first of the two remaining vukodlaks is said to have been staked under a non-specific oak tree on the island of Mljet; the other, also long-forgotten, was dispatched in a potato field outside the fishing village of Trpanj.

Potomje’s current village priest, whom we accost outside the church, knows nothing about the vukodlak. The oldest man in town – whom we ambush as he is walking home from church with an armful of decapitated flowers – will not give us his name, and also claims to know nothing of the vukodlak; but he, too, declares that nothing would have come of our line of questioning in Tito’s day. And Barba Niko, at ninety-five an also-ran for the oldest man, also professes ignorance of the village’s vampire son; but, he says as his wife and daughter usher us in for lunch, he does know something, something that suggests the vampire’s legend has survived only by undergoing an unusual transformation.

“For many years in this village,” he tells us, “it’s been said that there is a curse. Carry anything into or out of the stable between Christmas and New Year’s, and vermin will come from the vineyards to pluck the eyes from your livestock.” It happened to the two spinster sisters living across the road from him forty years ago, and it happened to Barba Niko himself. A neighbor once brought his family a gift of wheat, which they foolhardily stored in the stable on a day between Christmas and New Year’s. “We had a beautiful lamb back then,” he says, “just one, a lovely thing. The next morning, my mother called me into the stable to see it fallen dead, with both eyes plucked out.”

“Nobody breaks the curse,” he says.

The villagers all swear that the creature who gnaws on their livestock and keeps them out of their storehouses in early winter is unaffiliated with anything as laughable as a vukodlak, but this does not explain why the rodent with uncanny timing arises from the very fields in which the vukodlak met his end, or why many blackberry parches outside Potomje bear signs of recent scorchings. The fields are rife, too, with Iron Age Illyrian burial mounds, shining piles of white rock that dot the hills all the way to the mainland. These tombs are sacred, and even the Dalmatian people – in whose homes, gardens, and church foundations you will find enough Greek and Roman sarcophagary to rival the storerooms of the Vatican – will not touch the ancient graves.

Veljko’s father is Barba Nenad, a fisherman who, in addition to having lived on the Adriatic for more than five decades, also raises livestock and makes his own rakija and wine, the stongest in town. Over lunch late that afternoon he is amused, but not surprised, by my near misses in Kisiljevo, Zarozje, and Potomje, and is unconvinced that the rest of my journey will result in the desired encounter. He tells me about the evening he heads the guitar in his room play itself in the dead of might, how he sat up three times and three times it stopped, only to start up again once he’d turned off the light.

“Who knows what it would have meant to me if I hadn’t sat up and had a look at that guitar,” he says. “Would you believe it? There was a mouse inside.”

In the tiny Croatian village of Otric-Seoci lives Zivko, a respected headman renowned for his fluency in regional lore. His threshold is the last stop on our vampire itinerary, his well of tales the final reservoir from which, Veeljko assures me, I will acquire the esoteric knowledge I seek.

We call on Zivko in the early evening, but he is not at home. His house sits at the far end of the village, in the shade of an ancient walnut tree, looking out over olive groves and vineyards. The spot is so close to the Bosnian border that my mobile telephone lights up every five minutes to alert me that my carrier and rates have changed, as some distant cell tower struggles to make the distinction between Croatia and its eastern neighbor. The two women sitting on the veranda in black dresses and slippers tell us that Zivko has asked us to wait for him. As we linger through sundown, the goats come back from pasture – first we hear their bells tinkling on the hill above the house, and then they appear, shaggy and slit-pupiled, clustering together on the trail. The herd dog on their heels, a sleek black mongrel whose paralyzing stare means business, considers me from a distance as he drives the goats down the slope and into the stables below. He calls the stragglers, and when an uncooperative, blaze-faced buck shows defiance by making a determined charge at me, the dog intercepts it, urging it through the gate.

One of the women, who has seen my awkward dive out of the path of the oncoming boar, laughs knowingly. “No goats in the Nativity,” she says.

With the darkness comes Zivko in his yellow van. He has been out buying a rakija still, he says, and I am unsettled by him from the beginning; perhaps it is his portly stature and red face, or the fact that he is not nearly as old as I expected, or the thick hoarseness of his voice, which betrays his having just eaten a large meal, or the moonlit circumstances of his arrival.

He tells us about what people believe, about ghosts in a neighboring home, about the spells necessary to cast an evil spirit out of the house. He tells us about a scorned woman who would come to his bedside to throttle him in his sleep. and how he would awake to find his house empty, a cat staring at him from the open doorway. Zivko’s brother, an elderly man who has caned his way out of the house and is offering us grape juice, chuckles at this, and says something about his Zivko’s amorous attentions turn women into cats. Undeterred, Zivko describes his ability to commune with the dead, a gift with which he was born but discovered only as the result of his uncanny experiences with a children’s game; about the communications he has made on behalf of friends, of family, of the loved ones who tend to be far more restless than those who are already gone.

He tells us about the vile, Croatian mountain sirens, jealous spirit-women whose whims range from seducing men to fomenting war to playing girlish tricks on the villagers. “You come into the stable in the morning,” says Zivko, “and the horse’s mane and tail have been braided tight, like the braid of a girl.” He has seen it himself: no human hands, can untangle a braid a vila has made, and cutting the hair will kill the horse.

Night has fallen, and the generator across the street has gone quiet. The village is empty, and there is barely enough light for me to see Zivko’s face. It take me a while to realize it, but his arrival by night was carefully orchestrated to create the atmosphere for this interview. The moment this occurs to me, the goats in the stable let loose a chorus of shrill, vein-stiffening screams.

“Ungodly, aren’t they?” Zivko says, laughing and patting my arm as he pulls me back down to my chair, from which I have leaped without realizing it. “No goats in the Nativity, you know. They are the Devil’s beast.”

The Balkan vampire consistently arises as a product of hard times. As so many people in Serbia and Croatia grumbled at me, the reign of Josip Broz Tito was a time in which the primitivism of ancient fears had no place. For a region as war-ravaged and unstable as the former Yugoslavia, it is no wonder that the devastation and disillusion of recent decades precipitated a return to the mainstays of tradition, and especially to supernatural stories in which evil, if indefatigable, is always easily identifiable. Villages overcome their vampire plagues as they would more secular hardships: the story becomes in its own way a narrative of hope, a throwback to the surety of old beliefs, old customs – to tiny, frightening truths that stabilize a community against the world. The vampire is an agent of chaos, a self-inflicted spiritual trauma, but nevertheless manifests the Devil in a form that society can, occasionally, defeat.

If we consider the vampire a cultural necessity, an adaptable product of a society’s fears and obsessions, then his role in the Western world is not so different. Here, too, the story of the vampire offers hope. Refined and beautiful – and stapled into his obligatory leather pants – he is a far cry from that dirty, bloated wanderer of graveyards, that product of a people for whom the desolation of the dead cannot surpass the cruelty of the living. He is too well-travelled now to linger at crossroads, too hygienically inclined to dig his way out of coffins; having spent eternity studying art, literature, philosophy, he is no longer confounded by a crucifix; as a lover, he has worked hard to overcome his cadaverous locomotion, his ungainly South Slavic diction, and his indirect Victorian fumbling, so that the mere sight of his fangs now inspires young maidens to bare their throats of their own accord. The Americanized vampire is the ultimate fantasy for a nation in decline: the person who has been able to take it all with him when he dies, who has outlived the vagaries of civilization itself.

Having abandoned the culture that forged him, moreover, he deceives us into thinking that he has moved beyond what he always has been – a disease. Now the plague he spreads is a therapeutic fantasy in which an embarrassment of wealth and youth and hedonism is acceptable as long as its beneficiary is equipped with the right intentions. We have forgotten to be afraid because, as long as he protects his loved ones, as long as he is conscious of his own dangerous nature, as long as he pits himself willingly against others who share his wrath but not his noble motivations, we are willing to believe that a weapon of evil, in the right hands, can be transformed into an instrument of good.

In the early fall, three months after my departure from Croatia, I receive a hesitant email from Veljko. He writes with information he’s restrained himself from sharing until my journey was over and I was safely home. The morning of my departure from Otric-Seoci, he says, he stood by and helped load my belongings into the bus having already learned, from village gossips, that Zivko’s brother – cheerful alcoholic, generous host, mocking unbeliever – had died suddenly the previous night, a few hours after we left Zivko’s house. In some ways, as Veljko sees it, the suddenness of the death is a good thing, because liver failure is a slow and excruciating process. But something about it still leaves him unsettled, and he has spent months wondering whether he should tell me about this, weighing anew the consequences of explicit communication. Is it possible that our conversation with Zivko loosed some internal force that night, upset the delicate balance of something unseen, and felled Zivko’s poor brother as a warning to the rest of us? Veljko isn’t certain. But he is, he tells me, entitled to his superstitions.