Interesting that they use the word "post-medieval" instead of "modern"... And they mention 17th century, well after the middle ages ended.
In fact, such superstitious practices were almost non-existent during middle ages: they're one of the natural consequences of de-christianization, which happened at a faster pace after the middle ages.
I know I need to assume good intentions, but "post-medieval" seems just misplaced and an attempt to associate these practices to the middle ages. I thought we were finally past the times in which we demonized the middle ages. At least in Italy, several historians are finally talking about how great and important that time was.
Look for "Alessandro Barbero" on YouTube for more.
I feel you are overstating your point. There was belief in vampires in medieval Europe too. And the origin is likely from pagan pre-Christian beliefs in Eastern or South Eastern Europe.
The article mentions as much, the phrase 'vampire' is only been in vogue in the past 100 or so years; the article mentions upiór, strzyga and strigoi. Which I learned about thanks to the Witcher (the video games moreso than the books / TV show); its lore feels new because it uses older and lesser known in western Europe creatures.
The article writes: “Apotropaic graves of this sort date back to the Early Middle Ages and have also appeared in Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, and Romania.” So even the 17th-century phenomenon is but a late attestation of a practice found already in the medieval era.
It is curious that you claim that such practices could only be a result of de-Christianization. In the Balkans, fears of vampires, incubi, and succubi have always co-existed happily with a Christianity that deeply permeated all levels of society.
The Christian practices here in the Balkans had (maybe still have) a lot of Manichaeism involved in them which people further West might not call that Christian to begin with.
It's a very peculiar type of Christianity, that's for sure, and even the local high-placed Christian men are quite hesitant to talk about it. Bogomilism is, of course, its most famous form, but it has circulated in one form or other for many hundreds of years, no matter the official repressions it has faced (ever since the 10th century [1], maybe even earlier).
Back to the article, the strzyga and strigoi which are mentioned there are basically Romanian words, and Romanian most probably took them from the Latin strix [2]. In fact a local species of owl is called strigă.
And now back to the local Manichaeism present here, a grand-father of a friend of mine (in fact, his corpse) was unearthed at some point after his death (I think it was 7 years) and a spike was put through its (the body's) chest, so that his spirit would stop wandering among the living. Granted, that was happening in a Romanian region a little bit on the more traditional side, you won't find that in Bucharest or Cluj anymore. Also, up until very recently there was a tradition at the church in my parents' village where the most "wealthy" family in the village would have to bring a black rooster on Easter inside the church, let it loose, people would catch it and then give it to one of the poor families, so that that poor family would cook it as an Easter meal. Black roosters are, of course, not that Christian to begin with.
As I said, lots and lots of Manichaeism beliefs around these parts of the continent (in many, many folk tales the Devil is on the same level as God), Middle Ages or not, it's quite fascinating.
Completely incorrect, the practices were in general not very present in middle-aged Poland compared to the Western Europe. The reason for emerging anti-vampiric practices in the 17th and the 18th centuries were epidemics and folktales from Balkans, and it had nothing to do with de-christianisation which never happened (Poland has been and is predominantly Christian with rate of catholic church members being >90% even today).
Yup, I'd even say in medieval period Poland was less christian than in 17th/18th century :)
In 1500s at one point majority of nobility went protestant, and there was still a lot of orthodox nobles from Lithuania. Peasants were orthodox or pagan in the east, catholic in the west with some protestants, muslims and jews mixed in. In the cities there was a lot of german immigrants who were protestant or catholic depending on the city they immigrated from. Whole towns and villages were created by importing people from the west and giving them religious freedoms and tax benefits for a few years.
By 1700s it was mostly gone, because the country kept fighting muslims, orthodox and protestant countries. So kings turned to catholicism and counter-reformation as uniting factor. So religion got a lot of influence.
> de-christianization, which happened at a faster pace after the middle ages.
This doesn't really agree with my understanding of things. The late medieval and early modern period was a time of increasing religious control due to the reformation and counter-reformation.
This was a new kind of problem, since during most of the medieval period the biggest threat was external in the form of Islam during the crusades and reconquista, but you could send armies to deal with that problem.
Heretics from within, like Jan Hus, John Wycliffe, and eventually Luther and Calvin and later the protestants were much harder to defeat with armies, since they'd crop up anywhere and erode the power of the church from within. To hold against the protestants, you needed to control what people thought, paying lip service to the church wasn't enough anymore. This is when you get the inquisition and so on.
A mirror image of things were happening along the protestants since it was very important that everyone held the line when the jesuits came a'knocking. There was also a fairly strong impetus to enforce protestantism from the temporal powers-that-be, since it was basically what allowed them to cut free from the pope.
Closet papists among the population was as bad thing for a protestant king as closet protestants were for a catholic pope (or catholic king).
Before you scoff and dismiss this as silly, superstitious nonsense, know this: there have been ZERO vampire incidents in Poland since this practice was adopted.
If this is not a satirical comment, can I ask you to justify this position? What is disturbed by having a bit of humor alongside our intellectual curiosity? I could have missed it, but don't see anything discouraging humor (referential or otherwise) in the HN guidelines[1] or FAQ[2] with regard to commentary.
The keyword is "alongside intellectual curiosity". If you can make a point in a funny manner, do it. But if just making jokes becomes accepted, jokes drown out everything else, simply because they are infinite. Like all those gaming subreddits that consist 99% of "funny thing that just happened" or "this reference to a thing that occurs in the game, which you can recognize as occurring in the game to confirm that you have, indeed, played that game". You can call that socializing but to me it's just turning everything into everything/nothing forums. If HN becomes soft on that, we need a new HN.
Nothing wrong with humor, but on a completely personal level, it does frustrate me when the top comment is entirely superficial, since it adds nothing to the conversation. And subjectively, it feels like there's been an uptick in joke / meme / information-free comments and their ranking in the wake of recent Twitter and Reddit turmoil.
But hey, I've been here for 15 years, and forum cultures change over time. I wouldn't overindex on my feelings.
What's ironic is the tangential threads complaining about humor on HN throw far more noise and entropy into these threads than the jokes themselves. People could have just ignored it, or downvoted it and moved on, but no, someone made a joke and now we need to stop the car and have discourse about how HN is turning into Reddit. Knuckles must be rapped. Fingers wagged and pearls clutched. Again.
There’s a 16+ comment discussion on whether or not an innocent, on-topic and factually correct comment is appropriate. HN is not becoming Reddit, it’s becoming more HN than ever.
Personally I think it’s a little suspicious that there are HN users who appear to be attempting to discredit or silence comments praising the efficacy of a proven anti-vampire technology.
As if HN is some sort of intellectual silver snowflake and apparently better than Reddit. It's actually not. But I guess it's not worse either. Isn't that nice?
As for on-topic - HN starts talking about Kotlin and Swift and pretty soon it’s discussing relatively theory and Madam Curie and what not on the same thread. And no, that’s not better and that’s not on-topic unless HN tries to define its own “on-topic” and it’s own “better” and then applies it to Reddit.
> Define 'better'
No, I won’t. Because yours would ne different from mine.
1) You're making a category error; comparing HN to Reddit makes as much sense as comparing a scalar to a vector.
2) People have been saying this since approximately day one of HN; it's this site's equivalent to social decay / "kids these days", which is a sentiment that dates back to antiquity.
Ha, it's BI-toof (bi like in bit) and in Kashubian Bëtowò. Their city website has some nice multimedia* BTW, the songs (Bytów w piosence) is particularly great. They commissioned some Pomeranian artists (not the dogs, though that would be even cooler, the region) to record them, many are written especially for this page. Some are even pò kaszëbe. Anyway, it's a really nice place that had an unfortunate occupant. Now try to pronounce Bydgoszcz ;)
They mention the coin placed in mouths - but as far as I know, this has nothing to do with protection against vampires. It's to pay Charon to cross the river :)
Not that I know the details of medieval vampire lore, but doesn't it sort of follow that if the deceased has crossed to far side of Styx they'd be much less eligible for walking/flying/crawling/whatever around as one of the restless dead?
It seems like the practice could well share inheritance with ancient Greece, but I'd be surprised if the motivating mythology would be quite the same. Wonder what the story was in ancient Poland..
You probably want to cover your bases, IMO. If they're a vampire, ok no worries we have the little sickle over their neck. If they're not - a couple of złoty to help them on their journey in the afterlife.
It's like anticonception; more measures means a lower chance of the undead running amok. I mean they're already consecrated and buried, it won't hurt to also add padlocks, stakes, coins, sickles, and (another thing I haven't seen in the article) a cage around the grave.
As far as I'm aware, the common understanding is that a vampire doesn't have a soul anymore, they are undead. This is why they supposedly can't see themselves in mirrors.
I just want you to know, you’re not getting downvoted by the “woke mob”, you’re getting down voted for making an idiotic joke and insisting on making some random conversation on history about “woke politics”.
What's the use of karma points if not spending them to make fun of the dogma? Those points don't buy bread, and you can't even put them on your resume.
Some vampires may even be as old as the 14th century, which is when people first started using "they" as a gender neutral third person pronoun.
Some 18th century people didn't like it because they thought it was too colloquial but its been a part of English for a fairly long time, roughly 10 times as long as the "Internet age".
Another common thought for how the not-seeing-in-mirrors thing came about is that silver was seen as something that harmed or warded off evil, hence its use against werewolf and such in many myths. Way-back-when, the reflective backing of mirrors, at least those owned by the rich or well-to-do, was often achieved with a thin coat of silver. Of course that doesn't explain other evil creatures having a reflection in the same mirrors, but as the various mythologies have different mixed sources we can't expect an awful lot of consistency.
I heard its due to the silver. vampires are weak to silver and silver was used in both in the reflective backing of old mirrors and photographic emulsion.
Bear in mind that prior to Bram Stoker and Universal Studios basically codifying the modern vampire archetype, what "vampires" were (vaguely, any demonic or malevolent spirit that drank blood) and how they behaved was a matter of folklore and might differ greatly from place to place. All of these beliefs and more were probably true at the same time.
It seems that this practice didn't spread to Slavic Europe, with the possible exception of Ukraine around the Black Sea. This region had been under Greek/Byzantine influences for millennia. Also, back then this area was partly Turkish, for example Crimea was controlled by the Crimean Khanate. The wild steppes of Zaporizhia separated it from "proper Slavic civilization". Ironically this is exactly where the current ruso-ukrainian frontline is.
> Ironically this is exactly where the current ruso-ukrainian frontline is.
I think it's quite common to see front lines and new borders form around ethnic or cultural borders, instead of existing / established country borders. Or that there's clear cultural differences on old borders, like for example where the Roman empire's borders were, or the borders between England, Wales and Scotland in the UK.
Wallsend (where Hadrian's Wall stopped) is about 100km South-East of Berwick-upon-Tweed where the border between England and Scotland has been for a long time.
There has been a lot of history since the days Roman empire.
If you haven't already, listen to Chris de Burgh's sublime Don't Pay the Ferryman: 3 minutes and 44 seconds of sublime high-octane pop-rock music which conjures up images
of this very nugget of folklore.
Poland is not right next to Romania on any current maps that I have found.
Poland is bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukraine to the east, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the south, and Germany to the west.
Romania does border Ukraine, however if you were to travel from Ukraine to Romania the best route is actually through Slovakia and Hungary.
Fun fact, you can see Romania from Poland on a good weather! [1]
Also before the WWII, the Second Polish Republic shared a border with the Kingdom of Romania. Before the partitions in late 18th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth overlapped with some territories making up modern day Romania and Moldova and the Principality of Moldavia was a vassal of Poland and PLC for a time.
This is to say it is reasonable to imply Poland's close proximity with Romania, both in geographical and cultural sense, even though the borders have shifted.
Last time I read about exorcism in the media here was in the end of 90s when people were crazy about end of the world due to end of 20th century and approaching new millennium. Those were times when such fringe things were all around us on a daily basis, next to skinheads, sects and circles in the crop.
Exorcisms aren't blooming here nor are popular, or gained any widespread attention in last years.
You can go back much further in time than 1600s with corpses in prehistory found buried with their hands and legs tied. We dont know exactly why but the fear that the dead may rise may be a thing.
If you don't know the specifics about how corpses decay, it can superficially give evidence that they can rise from the dead and turn into monsters or feed on the living - spasms, vocalizations from expelled gas, gums receding to look like fangs (often dripping with blood,) hair and nails appearing to grow (when really the skin is shrinking,) etc.
There are theories that a vampire panic in early New England was attributable to misinterpreting the symptoms of tuberculosis[0].
There is a Polish writer Andrzej Pilipiuk and he introduced a concept in his fantasy-parody historical-fiction books, that all communists were actually vampires, and there was a squad eliminating them since 1920s.
So maybe this is an indication, that communist movement started already in the XVII century... and the smart village guys tried to prevent it from spreading already at that time... huh
PS. It is a joke. (the idea, not the writer & the books).
If anyone is interested in the subject I can suggest "Vampires, burial and death" by Paul Barber. It's repetitive but good. In fact I have discovered this book on HN.
Ha, a few of my archeologist friends worked on this!
I remember one detail regarding the decapitated (17th century IIRC) bodies they found: one would put a sickle between the head and the rest of the body. Some of the local construction site workers hired to help with digging were quite upset/scared by the view.
Also, I think we can thank Austro-Hungarian civil servants and bureaucracy for the amount of documentation we have on the subject. Central Europe was much luckier in that regard than the regions farther east.
Tangentially related: the WoD (World of Darkness, esp. Vampire: the Masqureade) scene in Poland was relatively big in 2010s, compared to the rest of Europe IIRC. I used to run one of the biggest bi-weekly LARPs in the region, called Totentanz, with 25 regular bloodsuckers joining the game every Sunday.
Krakow, my hometown is an excellent setting for that: the medieval city moved up by one floor, so we have a tonne of old dungeons/cellars to dress up as vampires, plot against each other, and pretend we like smoking clove cigarettes.
> archaeologists working on a 17th-century cemetery
Maybe it is just me, but 17th century seems way too recent to be digging people up. I’m into family history and I know who a lot of my ancestors were back to the 1500s and even into the 1400s. There are surely people alive right now who could trace their family lines back to some of the people being dug up.
> but 17th century seems way too recent to be digging people up
My SO recently visited her family tomb in France. It was gone. Lease lapsed, no more tomb. Last person was buried there some 40 years ago. Church didn’t know who to contact to renew the lease, good bye.
I think this is fairly standard practice in much of Europe where space is scarce. Moreso in larger towns and cities than rural villages. It’s also why family tombs are common in the first place.
My grandpa’s family, for example, has shared the same cemetery plot since before ww1. That’s how you fit a whole village into one little tiny church cemetery.
I listen to their podcast. I'm just a little skeptical of the information they publish ever since they relocated Hayward WI to MN (episode on the lumberjack competition.) It was still interesting and mostly true but I wondered how someone could (purportedly) visit Hayward WI and think they were in Minnesota.
I’m thinking about this in the context of marking nuclear waste dumps. We want to leave a message saying “this is dangerous; stay far away!” to last 10,000 years. Meanwhile, the ghosts of our ancestors from just 400 years ago are screaming “do you think we did that for giggles?!”
It makes me appreciate how hard it’d be to craft messaging that can survive hundreds of generations without merely piquing the interest of that day’s archaeologists.
> Bastide and Fabbri came to the conclusion that the most durable thing that humanity has ever made is culture: religion, folklore, belief systems. They may morph over time, but an essential message can get pulled through over millennia. They proposed that we genetically engineer a species of cat that changes color in the presence of radiation, which would be released into the wild to serve as living Geiger counters. Then, we would create folklore and write songs and tell stories about these “ray cats,” the moral being that when you see these cats change colors, run far, far away.
10,000 - Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty):
> They proposed that we genetically engineer a species of cat that changes color in the presence of radiation, which would be released into the wild to serve as living Geiger counters.
This would seem to fail as a long-term plan due to genetic drift and natural selection.
Presumably, there is no reproductive advantage to the cat in expressing fur color that indicates radiation. In the absence of selective pressure, the phenotype will gradually disappear as the radiation expressing cats mix with non-expressing cats. Since humans won't be actively maintaining the phenotype in the population against genetic drift (the opposite, in fact, since they avoid the cats) then over hundreds or thousands of years there will be no indicator cat phenotype.
Not arguing against your point, just clarifying: the idea is that you’d want to have a ray cat around. When your ray cat changes color, you’d leave the area and take it with you.
If we take the metaphorical view of vampires as those that feast on the blood of the young to extend their own lives then as a planet (or at least in the West) we have never been more infested - how many people are dying young, through overdose or suicidal hopeless, or otherwise having their life force drained through sky high rents and stagnant wages so that boomers can carry on living the high life? How many young people killed themselves during pandemic lockdowns, lockdowns that were in place mainly to save boomer lives? There’s also the related zombie concept - how many dead, uncompetitive and mismanaged companies, banks and pension funds are we keeping alive through government bailouts, which are again, essentially draining the life force of the living to feed the dead?
I also like “What We Do In The Shadows” (tv show version) extension of the metaphor to the “energy vampire”, which is essentially a criticism of bloated bureaucracy which is another one of the modern monsters draining the life out of us all.
I don’t think these terms were ever meant to be taken literally by those who created them but as platonic ideals to describe personalities and systems, but the education level and lifestyles of the time were so barbaric, primitive and rooted in physicality that the majority struggled to comprehend them as such.
This is also the origin of the "stake through the heart" trope. The stake was originally meant as a way to hold a vampire in place, just like these instruments.
130 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadI mean I don't think they care per se if they're actually dead?
That said, there were things like bells on wires as well for cases like that.
In fact, such superstitious practices were almost non-existent during middle ages: they're one of the natural consequences of de-christianization, which happened at a faster pace after the middle ages.
I know I need to assume good intentions, but "post-medieval" seems just misplaced and an attempt to associate these practices to the middle ages. I thought we were finally past the times in which we demonized the middle ages. At least in Italy, several historians are finally talking about how great and important that time was.
Look for "Alessandro Barbero" on YouTube for more.
> the natural consequences of de-christianization
Poland in middle ages was less catholic than Poland in 17th century. If anything it was over-chrisianized not de-christianized in that period.
It is curious that you claim that such practices could only be a result of de-Christianization. In the Balkans, fears of vampires, incubi, and succubi have always co-existed happily with a Christianity that deeply permeated all levels of society.
It's a very peculiar type of Christianity, that's for sure, and even the local high-placed Christian men are quite hesitant to talk about it. Bogomilism is, of course, its most famous form, but it has circulated in one form or other for many hundreds of years, no matter the official repressions it has faced (ever since the 10th century [1], maybe even earlier).
Back to the article, the strzyga and strigoi which are mentioned there are basically Romanian words, and Romanian most probably took them from the Latin strix [2]. In fact a local species of owl is called strigă.
And now back to the local Manichaeism present here, a grand-father of a friend of mine (in fact, his corpse) was unearthed at some point after his death (I think it was 7 years) and a spike was put through its (the body's) chest, so that his spirit would stop wandering among the living. Granted, that was happening in a Romanian region a little bit on the more traditional side, you won't find that in Bucharest or Cluj anymore. Also, up until very recently there was a tradition at the church in my parents' village where the most "wealthy" family in the village would have to bring a black rooster on Easter inside the church, let it loose, people would catch it and then give it to one of the poor families, so that that poor family would cook it as an Easter meal. Black roosters are, of course, not that Christian to begin with.
As I said, lots and lots of Manichaeism beliefs around these parts of the continent (in many, many folk tales the Devil is on the same level as God), Middle Ages or not, it's quite fascinating.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Treatise_Against_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strix_(mythology)
[3] https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strig%C4%83
In 1500s at one point majority of nobility went protestant, and there was still a lot of orthodox nobles from Lithuania. Peasants were orthodox or pagan in the east, catholic in the west with some protestants, muslims and jews mixed in. In the cities there was a lot of german immigrants who were protestant or catholic depending on the city they immigrated from. Whole towns and villages were created by importing people from the west and giving them religious freedoms and tax benefits for a few years.
By 1700s it was mostly gone, because the country kept fighting muslims, orthodox and protestant countries. So kings turned to catholicism and counter-reformation as uniting factor. So religion got a lot of influence.
Nowadays that's on paper mostly, especially that apostasy is difficult and not really worth the trouble for most.
The pandemic especially revealed that many people were attending only because everyone else was.
This doesn't really agree with my understanding of things. The late medieval and early modern period was a time of increasing religious control due to the reformation and counter-reformation.
This was a new kind of problem, since during most of the medieval period the biggest threat was external in the form of Islam during the crusades and reconquista, but you could send armies to deal with that problem.
Heretics from within, like Jan Hus, John Wycliffe, and eventually Luther and Calvin and later the protestants were much harder to defeat with armies, since they'd crop up anywhere and erode the power of the church from within. To hold against the protestants, you needed to control what people thought, paying lip service to the church wasn't enough anymore. This is when you get the inquisition and so on.
A mirror image of things were happening along the protestants since it was very important that everyone held the line when the jesuits came a'knocking. There was also a fairly strong impetus to enforce protestantism from the temporal powers-that-be, since it was basically what allowed them to cut free from the pope.
Closet papists among the population was as bad thing for a protestant king as closet protestants were for a catholic pope (or catholic king).
It depends on hystorians. In our school was thought that middle ages ended around 1848.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
But hey, I've been here for 15 years, and forum cultures change over time. I wouldn't overindex on my feelings.
I'm rooting for the fediverse, hopefully it (and youtube) can contain the effect.
Yea, because YouTube comments are famously a bastion of intelligent, relevant discussion.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
Personally I think it’s a little suspicious that there are HN users who appear to be attempting to discredit or silence comments praising the efficacy of a proven anti-vampire technology.
The evidence provided for this is example comments from 10+ years ago complaining that HN was becoming Reddit way back then.
However, Reddit 10+ years ago was very different from Reddit today. It is arguably(?) much worse today.
HN may be turning into Reddit continuously, it's just that Reddit keeps moving the goal posts.
As if HN is some sort of intellectual silver snowflake and apparently better than Reddit. It's actually not. But I guess it's not worse either. Isn't that nice?
The average HN discussion is more substantive and on-topic than the average reddit thread, especially a default one.
As for on-topic - HN starts talking about Kotlin and Swift and pretty soon it’s discussing relatively theory and Madam Curie and what not on the same thread. And no, that’s not better and that’s not on-topic unless HN tries to define its own “on-topic” and it’s own “better” and then applies it to Reddit.
> Define 'better'
No, I won’t. Because yours would ne different from mine.
2) People have been saying this since approximately day one of HN; it's this site's equivalent to social decay / "kids these days", which is a sentiment that dates back to antiquity.
How would you otherwise recognize a vampire incident it one were to happen?
(That's also historically the first recorded incident of organizational rage-quit after losing the game to a cheese strategy.)
Have you considered a career with Homeland Security?
Well - now they no longer need to hide themselves away, they are hiding-in-plain sight...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_blood_transfusion
* https://www.bytow.com.pl/Multimedia,27
Almost. I'm Polish, so I know how to pronounce "Bytów", but I got confused for a moment if maybe I didn't know hot to say "bit" in English…
Wiktionary says "bit" is pronounced as [bit] using IPA.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bit
Wiktionary also says "Bytów" is pronounced as IPA: [ˈbɨtuf], AS: [bytuf].
You can listen to it here:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Pl-Byt%C...
London, South African, Southern American "lip" is one example of this vowel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_central_unrounded_vowel
Anyway I was born in Gdańsk so now I'll be self conscious about yet another thing I mispronounce in English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon%27s_obol
It seems like the practice could well share inheritance with ancient Greece, but I'd be surprised if the motivating mythology would be quite the same. Wonder what the story was in ancient Poland..
I suspect this one may have more to do with countering external threats.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/38468
This would imply that helping the soul cross the river doesn't prevent "vampirification".
Some 18th century people didn't like it because they thought it was too colloquial but its been a part of English for a fairly long time, roughly 10 times as long as the "Internet age".
I think it's quite common to see front lines and new borders form around ethnic or cultural borders, instead of existing / established country borders. Or that there's clear cultural differences on old borders, like for example where the Roman empire's borders were, or the borders between England, Wales and Scotland in the UK.
There has been a lot of history since the days Roman empire.
Poland is bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukraine to the east, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the south, and Germany to the west.
Romania does border Ukraine, however if you were to travel from Ukraine to Romania the best route is actually through Slovakia and Hungary.
Also before the WWII, the Second Polish Republic shared a border with the Kingdom of Romania. Before the partitions in late 18th century, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth overlapped with some territories making up modern day Romania and Moldova and the Principality of Moldavia was a vassal of Poland and PLC for a time.
This is to say it is reasonable to imply Poland's close proximity with Romania, both in geographical and cultural sense, even though the borders have shifted.
[1] - https://dalekieobserwacje.eu/rumunia-widziana-z-tarnicy-most...
Exorcisms have been booming in Poland for quite some time: https://www.dw.com/en/why-exorcism-is-booming-in-poland/a-36...
We already have to pay respects to the WHO God so religious beliefs may come back in strength
Exorcisms aren't blooming here nor are popular, or gained any widespread attention in last years.
It is being driven by the Church in Poland which has a powerful connection to the Government.
There are theories that a vampire panic in early New England was attributable to misinterpreting the symptoms of tuberculosis[0].
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_vampire_panic
So maybe this is an indication, that communist movement started already in the XVII century... and the smart village guys tried to prevent it from spreading already at that time... huh
PS. It is a joke. (the idea, not the writer & the books).
I remember one detail regarding the decapitated (17th century IIRC) bodies they found: one would put a sickle between the head and the rest of the body. Some of the local construction site workers hired to help with digging were quite upset/scared by the view.
Also, I think we can thank Austro-Hungarian civil servants and bureaucracy for the amount of documentation we have on the subject. Central Europe was much luckier in that regard than the regions farther east.
Tangentially related: the WoD (World of Darkness, esp. Vampire: the Masqureade) scene in Poland was relatively big in 2010s, compared to the rest of Europe IIRC. I used to run one of the biggest bi-weekly LARPs in the region, called Totentanz, with 25 regular bloodsuckers joining the game every Sunday.
Krakow, my hometown is an excellent setting for that: the medieval city moved up by one floor, so we have a tonne of old dungeons/cellars to dress up as vampires, plot against each other, and pretend we like smoking clove cigarettes.
What does that mean? How did it come to be?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground
Maybe it is just me, but 17th century seems way too recent to be digging people up. I’m into family history and I know who a lot of my ancestors were back to the 1500s and even into the 1400s. There are surely people alive right now who could trace their family lines back to some of the people being dug up.
My SO recently visited her family tomb in France. It was gone. Lease lapsed, no more tomb. Last person was buried there some 40 years ago. Church didn’t know who to contact to renew the lease, good bye.
I think this is fairly standard practice in much of Europe where space is scarce. Moreso in larger towns and cities than rural villages. It’s also why family tombs are common in the first place.
My grandpa’s family, for example, has shared the same cemetery plot since before ww1. That’s how you fit a whole village into one little tiny church cemetery.
It makes me appreciate how hard it’d be to craft messaging that can survive hundreds of generations without merely piquing the interest of that day’s archaeologists.
> Bastide and Fabbri came to the conclusion that the most durable thing that humanity has ever made is culture: religion, folklore, belief systems. They may morph over time, but an essential message can get pulled through over millennia. They proposed that we genetically engineer a species of cat that changes color in the presence of radiation, which would be released into the wild to serve as living Geiger counters. Then, we would create folklore and write songs and tell stories about these “ray cats,” the moral being that when you see these cats change colors, run far, far away.
10,000 - Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty):
http://emperorx.bandcamp.com/album/10000-year-earworm-to-dis...
This would seem to fail as a long-term plan due to genetic drift and natural selection.
Presumably, there is no reproductive advantage to the cat in expressing fur color that indicates radiation. In the absence of selective pressure, the phenotype will gradually disappear as the radiation expressing cats mix with non-expressing cats. Since humans won't be actively maintaining the phenotype in the population against genetic drift (the opposite, in fact, since they avoid the cats) then over hundreds or thousands of years there will be no indicator cat phenotype.
They are not able to do this for High Voltage lines.
I also like “What We Do In The Shadows” (tv show version) extension of the metaphor to the “energy vampire”, which is essentially a criticism of bloated bureaucracy which is another one of the modern monsters draining the life out of us all.
I don’t think these terms were ever meant to be taken literally by those who created them but as platonic ideals to describe personalities and systems, but the education level and lifestyles of the time were so barbaric, primitive and rooted in physicality that the majority struggled to comprehend them as such.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37144560
https://onlinecampus.fcps.edu/media2/Social_Studies/WHGII_20...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/MotelOfThe...