The entire world has adopted a Serbian word “vampire” for an evil and immortal mythological creature that drinks human blood and has superhuman powers.

Vampire, an immortal creature with superhuman powers, brilliantly played, among others, by Gary Oldman in “Dracula”, a movie directed by Francis Ford Coppola, comes from Serbian language and is generally accepted in that form all over the world. In different parts of the Slavic world terms like werewolf, lampir, lapir, vjedogonja and upir can also be heard.

Vampire is a creature from the myths and legends of Slavic nations, especially those living in the Balkans and Ukraine. It is thought to be a spirit of a deceased or a corps brought back to life by an evil spirit or the devil.

The oldest case of a “vampire encounter” was recorded in Serbia, and the oldest Serbian vampire was a certain Petar Blagojević, who was considered about 300 years old.

Petar Blagojević was the first “official” vampire of the modern world, and lived in Serbia in the early eighteenth century. It’s probably his merit that “vampire” is the only Serbian word generally accepted in all world languages.

The first encounter with vampires in Western Europe is connected to a peculiar event that took place in Serbia in 1725, and Austrian newspapers of the time wrote about it. They wrote about a man called Petar Blagojević who lived in a village near Požarevac, and has allegedly risen from the grave and started killing people and drinking their blood.

A team of doctors came from Vienna to investigate this case.

According to their report, Blagojević’s tomb was opened and his corpse found completely preserved, as if he was still alive, with fresh blood in his mouth. The villagers stabbed the corpse with a hawthorn stake and burned it. After that the killings had stopped.

During the centuries a few more vampires were “discovered” in Serbia. Austrian sources mentioned a certain Pavle Arnaut attacking people around the city of Kruševac, and the water mill of Sava Savanović, also considered a vampire, can still be visited in the village of Zarožje near Bajina Bašta.

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LegendsTriviaVampire

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