732a Vampires of Eastern Europe; Supernatural Ireland; Haunted Europe

Travel with Rick Steves

This Halloween-themed Travel with Rick Steves episode explores how European folklore shaped ideas of the undead, ghosts, and supernatural places. Historian Jacob

Key takeaways

• Jacob Michanowski says Eastern European vampire beliefs were not originally about fangs or blood-drinking, but about the dead returning to trouble the living.
• The Slavic terms upir or upior describe unquiet dead, and 18th-century doctors near the Habsburg-Ottoman border helped carry the idea into Western Europe.

Main topics

• Eastern European vampire folklore
• Slavic beliefs about the unquiet dead

Notable quotes

Those walls between living and dead get a little thinner, get a little easier to traverse.

Conclusion

The episode offers a useful cultural lens for understanding why Europe's

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Once upon a time, when people in certain villages of Eastern Europe wanted to figure out what was the cause of their misfortune, they'd turn to the cemetery for a possible answer. Speaker 1 (0:09) They would unearth people. Speaker 3 (0:11) Coming up, Jacob Michanowski tells us what he's learned about the traditions of Slavic Europe this time of year. Speaker 1 (0:17) Those walls between living and dead get a little thinner, get a little easier to traverse. In Speaker 3 (0:22) Ireland, they've also long thought of the changing season at Halloween as an open portal between this world and the next. Speaker 2 (0:28) The undead, the ghosts, the spirits, they come alive that night. Speaker 3 (0:33) Fintan O'Toole explains. Speaker 2 (0:35) We're still haunted by, but also accompanied by, all the people who've gone before us. It's a very important part of Irish culture. Speaker 3 (0:42) Plus, listeners share their scariest encounters in Europe. Take my hand as we journey through a shadowy realm. It's a spirited Halloween edition of Travel with Rick Steves in the Hour Ahead. Come along. Speaker 3 (1:00) I'm not sure what 12-foot-tall skeletons and inflatable pumpkins on the lawn say about American culture, but there are some interesting Halloween traditions and stories from the Old World that feed into superstitions and into the characters of Gothic horror novels. In just a bit, we'll hear how supernatural creatures have a long history in Celtic Ireland. Today, no one says they actually believe in them, but you wouldn't dare do anything to upset them, either. and listeners tell us about some of their most disconcerting moments when their European vacations took them closer to the netherworld than they had expected. Let's start today's Travel with Rick Steves with a look at how the undead have long been a part of the legends and lore of Eastern Europe. Jacob Michanowski examines the history of the lands his Polish and Lithuanian ancestors come from in his book Goodbye Eastern Europe, an intimate history of a divided land. Where, it turns out, vampires have been found for centuries. Jacob, thanks for joining us. Speaker 1 (2:02) Thank you. It's great to be here. Speaker 3 (2:03) So, yes, there's stories of vampires, but Dracula is not what we're talking about. What's the bigger picture about vampires in the context of Eastern Europe? Speaker 1 (2:13) Dracula was actually a man. He was a Romanian ruler and a very violent and tough ruler, but there's a wider set of beliefs. That kind of got fused onto him, really fused on by a Western writer. But there are ideas of spirits of the dead that come back to haunt the living, bodies of the dead that come back to prey on the living. And that is a very Eastern European set of concepts. Speaker 3 (2:38) So the dead are everywhere. You find them in the countryside, you find them under your house. Speaker 1 (2:43) If something's going wrong, maybe something's going right, but if something's going wrong in a lot of this part of the world, traditionally, you want to ask... Are the dead involved? Usually the answer might be yes. There were cases where the plague would hit, even Yugoslavia, and it would be like, well, we have Speaker 3 (2:59) to Speaker 1 (2:59) find the dead body that's doing this, where they would unearth people. This is how the idea of vampires came to the West, is that doctors in the 18th century, on that borderland between the Habsburgs, the Austro-Habsburgs, and the Ottomans, they moved that border down a little bit, and there would be plagues, and when there would be a plague, the villagers would freak out. and dig up all the bodies and look for the culprit, look for the vampire. And the word in Slavic is upir or upior. And then when they found a body that seemed too well preserved, too alive maybe, too full of blood, you would stake it through the heart and try to neutralize that. But there was part of a whole wider set of beliefs. When people from outside saw this, your German, your Dutch doctors, they'd be like, this is strange. And they started writing about it. and writing pamphlets about it, and people would be like, this is really odd. This is really unusual. What is this about? What is this word, upir? And that's how the West started hearing about this set of beliefs about vampires. That wasn't a codified thing. Different villages would have their different ways of thinking about it. So at this Speaker 3 (4:02) point, no fangs, no blood drinking, no harmed by the sun. Speaker 1 (4:06) No, and none of that is really traditional. All of that is more or less invented by a set of mostly English writers and French writers taking... that basic template of spooky dead coming back. Some of the idea of the feeding on or preying on the vitality of living people. Some of that's true, but not fangs, not draining. Okay, so historically, Speaker 3 (4:26) we'll forget about Vlad Dracula for now. Long before Dracula, there was this idea of the dead who wouldn't die. Speaker 1 (4:34) That's right. Speaker 3 (4:35) And they just did their best to keep on living as they did before. Speaker 1 (4:39) That's right. For whatever reason, if they were buried improperly, If they maybe died in childbirth, if they were just really wicked or angry or somehow too much life force, they couldn't, death wasn't enough to kill them. They would just, you would die and then they would come back and they would kept bothering you. People who had such a, sometimes just jerks, people were like, oh, you can't put this person down. And then they're dead and something's going on. Something's happening. And it's like, well, maybe, maybe Vlad, maybe Jan is back. We have to go back, we have to check in the ground, make sure that he's really dead. We have to maybe kill him twice. And you can do that with a stake, you can do that with a nail through the head. And you find this, you find this in archaeologists will find bodies that have been ritually killed, that were killed a second time. Decapitated or staked. Speaker 3 (5:30) These are dead people that are haunting their loved ones after they're supposed to be gone. That's right. According to your book, you talk about how... Certain times, these ghosts are more present than others. Speaker 1 (5:42) That's true. There are parts of the year when those walls between living and dead get a little thinner, get a little easier to traverse. Christmas-ish, that time when days are really short, when days are really, when it's really dark and when you're not sure if you're going to successfully get from winter to spring. That's Speaker 3 (6:01) a Speaker 1 (6:01) dangerous time. The Day of the Dead, which is a big thing in Mexico, that's a big thing. It's a huge thing. All Souls Eve. All Souls Speaker 3 (6:08) Eve. November 1st, right? Speaker 1 (6:10) In Poland, November 2nd will be the day. Ah, okay. You do the day, not the eve so much. But that whole week actually is a huge bit. Now, everyone goes to the cemetery. Everyone will take care of the grave. It's a huge thing in Poland, incredible how it's like Super Bowl for cemeteries, how much that cult is present. I've Speaker 3 (6:29) seen cemeteries where on certain days of the year they'll light candles on all of the Speaker 1 (6:32) tombs. And All Saints Day is such a big holiday. It's such an outpouring, but very different from that. It doesn't have quite that celebration that it does in Mexico. It has a much more somber day, but a much more powerful day. And so that goes back to that Catholic version of that older folklore. So Speaker 3 (6:49) this is something that does characterize Eastern Europe more than Western Europe. Speaker 1 (6:53) Absolutely. And these are really Slavic word, upur, and an idea that is part of folk culture. Somehow it goes down into Greece and it doesn't quite get up to Estonia, but it's basically that whole part of the world had ideas of unquiet dead. The unquiet Speaker 3 (7:10) dead, that's a great term. And it's different from country to country. In your book, Goodbye Eastern Europe, you wrote how in Bulgaria it's a shadow and in Macedonia it's a wineskin filled with blood. Speaker 1 (7:22) Yeah, the idea there is that if you poke it, you poke a vampire, all that blood will drain out because they're just kind of a... like a blood balloon in some places will believe that even inanimate things can act as vampires, can suck or drop things out of people. But it was a very pervasive, at least before kind of 1900, a very pervasive way of looking at the world that things that are going wrong, things that are bad, things that are mysterious, forces from the dead have something to do with it, especially in the Balkans. But all the way, Poland had a lot of this, and it's not called vampire, it's called upur, but those words come back to the same source. Speaker 3 (7:58) Jacob Michanowski is filling us in on travel with Rick Steves on the creatures and customs found around Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls Day in the eastern countries of Europe. Jacob examines the region's history from several angles in his book Goodbye Eastern Europe, An Intimate History of a Divided Land. His website is jacob-michanowski.com, and that's M-I-K-A-N-O-U-S-K-I. We have just a couple minutes to... to discuss this, but I do want to hear a little more about Dracula because he was a historic character. What's your take on Dracula? Speaker 1 (8:33) Oh, Vlad Dracula was a powerful warlord, a strong king, fought one of these countless border wars against the Ottoman Empire, and those were brutal wars, and you would have to show off how brutal you were to scare off the enemy. So he was known as the Impaler because he impaled all these defeated soldiers. And so a very... A real person, a person who fits in that history of Ottoman-Christian conflict, but not a supernatural figure. And, you know, cruel on purpose. And Speaker 3 (9:02) that was a persona he created, to be a more effective military leader. To be Speaker 1 (9:06) a more effective leader and to be a more imposing leader and to frighten off actually a stronger army. But then that has nothing to do with the supernatural. It has nothing to do with these beliefs that are all village beliefs, that all have to do with people you know. And after they die, you wonder what they're thinking. Sometimes you wonder, are they jealous of me for being alive? Are they jealous? Are they in the ground? Or they resent the fact that I've taken over their business? Are they going to come back and harm me? And those beliefs about people who are in your orbit, and when they die, they're still in your orbit. They're still in your imagination. You're still thinking about them. So Speaker 3 (9:39) let's talk for a few minutes just then about how death is treated across Slavic Europe, across Eastern Europe, because... It is a reoccurring thing that there are unique ways for people to honor the dead. I was in Romania as a kid traveling, and I'll never forget, Grandpa's skull was on the mantle next to the fireplace. And I don't know what, can you imagine what that was all about? Speaker 1 (10:03) Not really. That's very unusual. Because that was Speaker 3 (10:06) just an odd family then. Speaker 1 (10:08) Well, Romania's an odd place. Romania is not Slavic, but they have a lot of Slavic beliefs, and they have, they used to have... a church that would have a Slavic liturgy. They get stuff from all over. But generally, you want to be very careful how you bury people. You want to be very sure that you bury people the right way. And sometimes it's very important how you get them out of the house. For instance, if you get them out through the front door, that's bad. Get them out through the window, get them out some other way to make sure that the spirit follows them the right way. I would love to know why they kept the skull around. That is so... Speaker 3 (10:40) I wonder about that. But in Romania, I remember there's a graveyard which is famous. All the tombstones are painted blue, and they've got stories of that person, how they died and what they were famous for and what they were beloved for in their life. And it's full of humor. It's a joyful place, the cemetery, as you remember people. Speaker 1 (10:57) I think that's Chepant. That's up in that very traditional northern part that's such a beautiful part of Romania. And the dead are so present in people's lives in all those traditional societies. Yeah, Speaker 3 (11:07) they really are. In Estonia, there's a wonderful tradition of using a forest as a graveyard. Speaker 1 (11:15) Yeah, and I'll often go, and in new cities, I'll go and have some clues in Romania, the beautiful cemetery in Vilnius. And Lviv, when you could visit Lviv, you can still visit Lviv, has an extraordinary cemetery that's Polish and that's Ukrainian and that's German, and everyone's together in this giant hillside park. extraordinary to kind of go through. They are the city parks in a way because people have that idea that going to the cemetery should be like going to a park. Speaker 3 (11:41) So all of this attention on graveyards and the living dead, what about cremation? Speaker 1 (11:47) There's one place in Eastern Europe that loves cremation and it's the Czech Republic. People get cremated, people, it's the dominant way of getting buried and people often even not. claim the ashes. And it is maybe the most secular place in Eastern Europe. But just in Poland is maybe the most Catholic place you can go to. Czech Republic, which speaks a very similar language, it's almost kind of a mirror image of Poland. People are so secular. It's almost kind of a post-Christian society. And they, on the absolute opposite spectrum, Poles love cemeteries, love burial, love that whole pomp and circumstance around it. Czechs, not at all. And it's a very different society, very different relationship. to the dead. Speaker 3 (12:27) Jacob Michanowski, thank you so much for joining us. Best wishes with your book, Goodbye Eastern Europe, An Intimate History of a Divided Land, and appreciate having a better understanding of what vampires are all about. Speaker 1 (12:37) Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. Speaker 3 (12:56) Have you ever gone somewhere and