A vampire is a being from folklore that
subsists by feeding on the vital force
(generally in the form of blood) of the
living. In European folklore, vampires were
undead beings that often visited loved
ones and caused mischief or deaths in the
neighborhoods they inhabited while they
were alive. They wore shrouds and were
often described as bloated and of ruddy or
dark countenance, markedly different from
today's gaunt, pale vampire which dates
from the early 19th century.
Vampiric entities have been recorded in
most cultures; the term vampire was
popularized in Western Europe afterreports of an 18th-century mass hysteria
of a pre-existing folk belief in the Balkans
and Eastern Europe that in some cases
resulted in corpses being staked and
people being accused of vampirism.[1]
Local variants in Eastern Europe were also
known by different names, such as shtriga
in Albania, vrykolakas in Greece and strigoi
in Romania.
In modern times, the vampire is generally
held to be a fictitious entity, although belief
in similar vampiric creatures such as the
chupacabra still persists in some cultures.
Early folk belief in vampires has
sometimes been ascribed to the of the body's process of decomposition
after death and how people in preindustrial societies tried to rationalize this,
creating the figure of the vampire to
explain the mysteries of death. Porphyria
was linked with legends of vampirism in
1985 and received much media exposure,
but has since been largely discredited.[2][3]
The charismatic and sophisticated
vampire of modern fiction was born in
1819 with the publication of "The
Vampyre" by the English writer John
Polidori; the story was highly successful
and arguably the most influential vampire
work of the early 19th century.
[4] Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula is
remembered as the quintessential vampire
novel and provided the basis of the
modern vampire legend, even though it
was published after Joseph Sheridan Le
Fanu's 1872 novel Carmilla. The success
of this book spawned a distinctive vampire
genre, still popular in the 21st century, with
books, films, television shows, and video
games. The vampire has since become a
dominant figure in the horror genre.
The Oxford English Dictionary dates the
first appearance of the English vampire (as vampyre) in English from 1734,
in a travelogue titled Travels of Three
English Gentlemen published in The
Harleian Miscellany in 1745.[5] Vampires
had already been discussed in French[6]
and German literature.
[7] After Austria
gained control of northern Serbia and
Oltenia with the Treaty of Passarowitz in
1718, officials noted the local practice of
exhuming bodies and "killing vampires".[7]
These reports, prepared between 1725
and 1732, received widespread publicity.
[7]
The English term was derived (possibly via
French vampyre) from the German Vampir,
in turn derived in the early 18th from the Serbian vampir (Serbian Cyrillic:
вампир).[8][9][10][11]
The Serbian form has parallels in virtually
all Slavic languages: Bulgarian and
Macedonian вампир (vampir), Bosnian:
vampir / вампир, Croatian vampir, Czech
and Slovak upír, Polish wąpierz, and
(perhaps East Slavic-influenced) upiór,
Ukrainian упир (upyr), Russian упырь
(upyr'), Belarusian упыр (upyr), from Old
East Slavic упирь (upir') (many of these
languages have also borrowed forms such
as "vampir/wampir" subsequently from the
West; these are distinct from the original
local words for the creature). The etymology is unclear.
[12] Among the
proposed proto-Slavic forms are *ǫpyrь
and *ǫpirь.[13]
Another less widespread theory is that the
Slavic languages have borrowed the word
from a Turkic term for "witch" (e.g., Tatar
ubyr).[13][14] Czech linguist Václav Machek
proposes Slovak verb "vrepiť sa" (stick to,
thrust into), or its hypothetical anagram
"vperiť sa" (in Czech, the archaic verb
"vpeřit" means "to thrust violently") as an
etymological background, and thus
translates "upír" as "someone who thrusts,
bites".[15] An early use of the Old Russian
word is in the anti-pagan treatise "Word ofSaint Grigoriy" (Russian Слово святого
Григория), dated variously to the 11th–
13th centuries, where pagan worship of
upyri is reported.[16][17]
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