Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/401

 interpretation of it be right, is certainly a word of Greek origin no less than the others which I have enumerated.

Now all these dialectic Greek names are found, it will have been observed, only in certain of the Greek islands, while on the mainland vrykolakas has come to be universally employed. But it was the mainland which was particularly exposed to Slavonic immigration and influence, while islands like Crete and Cyprus were practically immune. Hence, while the mainland gradually adopted a Slavonic word, it was likely enough that some of the islands should retain their own Greek terms, even though in the course of their relations with the mainland they became acquainted also with the new Slavonic word. These insular names for the vrykolakas may therefore be regarded as survivals from a pre-Slavonic period, and, though they are now merely dialectic, it is reasonable to suppose that one or more of them formerly held a place in the language of mainlanders and islanders alike. But the existence of such words presupposes the existence of a belief in some kind of resuscitated beings denoted by them. In other words, the Greeks when first brought into contact with the Slavs already possessed a belief in the re-animation and activity of certain dead persons, which so far resembled the Slavonic belief in vampirism, that the Slavonic vampire could be adequately denoted by some Greek word or words already existing and there was no need to adopt the Slavonic name.

I claim then to have established two important points: first, that the word vrykolakas was originally borrowed by the Greeks from the Slavs in the sense of 'were-wolf,' though now it is almost universally employed in the sense of 'vampire'; secondly, that, whatever ideas concerning vampires the Greeks may have learnt from the Slavs, they did not adopt the Slavonic word 'vampire' but employed one of those native Greek words, such as [Greek: tympaniaios] or [Greek: katachanas], which are still in local usage; whence it follows that some superstition anent re-animated corpses existed in Greece before the coming of the Slavs.

These points being established, I am now in a position to trace the development of the superstition in Greece from the time of the Slavonic immigrations onward, and to show how it came to pass that, whereas in the tenth century, let us say, when the Greeks had had ample time to imbibe Slavonic superstitions,