Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/392

 So too another well-informed Greek writer, who has published a series of monographs upon the Cyclades, says in one of them :

'The ignorant peasant of Andros believes to this day that the corpse can rise again and do him hurt; and is not this belief in vrykolakes general throughout Greece?'

To that question I might without hesitation answer 'yes,' even on the grounds of my own experience only; for the places in which I have heard vrykolakes mentioned, not merely in popular stories such as are told everywhere, but with a very present and real sense of dread, include some villages on the west slopes of Mount Pelion, the village of Leonidi on the east coast of the Peloponnese, Andros, Tenos, Santorini, and Cephalonia.

The wide range and general prevalence of the superstition in modern times being thus established, it remains only to record a few recent cases in which the peasants, in defiance of law and order, have gone the length of exhuming and burning the suspected body.

Theodore Bent states that a few months before his visit to Andros (somewhat over twenty years ago) the grave of a suspected vrykolakas was opened by a priest and the body taken out, cut into shreds, and burnt. In January of 1895 at Mantoúde in Euboea a woman was believed to have turned vrykolakas and to have caused many deaths, and the peasants resolved to exhume and burn her—but it is not stated whether the resolve was actually carried out. In 1899, when I was in Santorini, I was told that two or three years previously the inhabitants of Therasia had burnt a vrykolakas, and when I visited that island the incident was not denied but the responsibility for it was laid upon the people of Santorini. In 1902 there was a similar case of burning at Gourzoúmisa near Patras. These are certain and well-attested instances of the continuance of the practice, and, regard being had to the secrecy which such breaches of the law necessarily demand, it is not unreasonable to suppose that even now a year seldom passes in which some village of Greece does, p. 56.], 590 sqq.],  p. 577.]