Allacci, in his treatise De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus, Cologne, 1645, discusses many traditions, and amongst others he deals at some length with the vampire, concerning whom he says: “The vrykolakas is the body of a man of wicked and debauched life, very often of one who has been excommunicated by his bishop. Such bodies do not like other corpses suffer decomposition after burial nor fall to dust, but having, so it seems, a skin of extreme toughness become swollen and distended all over, so that the joints can scarcely be bent; the skin becomes stretched like the parchment of a drum, and when struck gives out the same sound, from which circumstance the vrykolakas has received the name τυμπανιαῖος (‘drum-like’).” According to this author a demon takes possession of such a body, which issues from the tomb, and, generally at night, goes about the streets of a village, knocking sharply upon doors, and summoning one of the household by name. But if the person called unwittingly answers he is sure to die on the following day. Yet a vrykolakas never cries out a name twice, and so the people of Chios, at all events, always wait to hear the summons repeated before they reply to anyone who raps at their door of a night. “This monster is said to be so fearfully destructive to men, that it actually makes its appearance in the daytime, even at high noon,[58] nor does it then confine its visits to houses, but even in fields and in hedged vineyards and upon the open highway it will suddenly advance upon persons who are labouring or travellers as they walk along, and by the horror of its hideous aspect it will slay them without laying hold on them or even speaking a word.” Accordingly a sudden death from no obvious cause is to be regarded with the gravest suspicion, and should there be any kind of molestation, or should any story of an apparition be bruited abroad they hasten to exhume the corpse which is often found in the state that has been described. Thereupon without any delay “it is taken up out of the grave, the priests recite the appointed prayers, and it is thrown on to a fiercely blazing pyre. Before the orisons are finished skin will desquamate and the members fall apart, when the whole body is utterly consumed to ashes.” Allacci proceeds to point out that this tradition in Greece is by no means new nor of any recent growth, for he tells us “in ancient and modern times alike holy men and men of great piety who have received the
