Literature, movie theatres, TV shows, and anime are infected with vampires nowadays, and have turned the vampire theme field into a popular cultural phenomenon. Most of the world’s population has heard, and many of us have even been fans of TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), and movies like Interview with the Vampire (1994), Dracula 2000 (2000), Underworld (2003) and lately the Twilight series. Most of these fashionable TV and movie characters were born in books and have moved on to the movie screens afterwards. But who stole vampires from the dark and mysterious legends and brought them into the daylight of the modern literature?
The first classical vampire ever mentioned in documented records was Jure Grando (?-1656). In his native Istria, that is part of today’s Croatia, he was referred to as a strigon – the native word for vampire.
According to the native legend Jure Grando was a peasant who lived in Kringa, a small town in the very heart of the Istrian peninsula. He died in 1656 but apparently came back as a vampire to terrorize his village. He had a successful vampire career for sixteen long years after his death. His job description was to walk around the village at night and knock on people’s door. Whichever door got knocked on, a member of that household would die shortly after. When he was in the mood for the overtime work, he’d visit his widow and sexually assault her. She described he looked like he was smiling and gasping for breath.
Even though these stories sounded surreal, the village priest Father Giorgo eventually faced the vampire itself. In that special occasion he held a cross in front of Jure and said: “Behold Jesus Christ, you vampire! Stop tormenting us!” and, according to his testimony, tears started falling from the vampire’s eyes. Shortly after that event, the village prefect Miho Radetic gathered the bravest of the villagers, then chased and tried to kill the vampire by piercing his heart with a hawthorn stick. Due to the fact that the stick just bounced off of Grando’s chest, the mission failed. Next night, nine people from Kringa went to the graveyard with a hawthorn stick and crosses in their hands. Digging up Jure’s coffin revealed his perfectly preserved corpse that was smiling at them. Father Giorgio said: “Look strigon, there is Jesus Christ who saved us from hell and died for us. And you strigon, you cannot have peace!” They tried to pierce its heart again but the stick could not penetrate its flesh once again, so one of the villagers, Stipan Milasic, took the saw and sawed the vampire’s head off. As soon as the saw tore his skin, the vampire started screaming and blood started flowing from the open cut. Shortly after the decapitation the whole grave flooded full of blood. According to this legend, peace finally returned to the region after Jure Grando’s decapitation.
The first document mentioning Jure Grando, dating back to the 17th century, was written by his contemporary Janez Vajkard Valvasor, a Slovenian travel writer and historian. In his 15-tome work The Glory of the Duchy Carniola, which was first published in 1689 in Germany, Valvasor told the story he had heard while visiting Kringa.
In modern times, Croatian writer Boris Peric has been investigating the issue for many years and wrote a book The vampire that was inspired with the story that Valvasor had written down.
During his research Peric discovered that Herman Hesse, a German born Swiss poet, novelist and painter, took over the legend about Jure Grando in the 1924 from the Rhine’s Antiquarius. That is exactly the same publication that George Gordon Byron, his doctor John Polidori, and Mary and Percy Shelley were reading during their summer vacation in 1816 on the Lake of Geneva. Inspired with those stories, one stormy evening they decided to start a contest among themselves to see which one of them can write the most horrifying story. While Mary Shelley sketched her, later worldwide known bestseller, Frankenstein that night, Lord Byron started to write a story about vampires, but was unhappy with it and tossed it in the trash. By doing that he gave an opportunity to a lot less talented Polidori who took the writing, finished it and published under his own name as a short story called The vampire. That very Polidori’s story had tremendous effect on the later achievements of the vampire literature – the novels Camilla written by Joseph Sheridan and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Even though we will never be able to tell with certainty whether or not the legend about Jure Grando was a part of the applied literature on that fruitful stormy night on the Lake of Geneva, because a huge part of Rhine’s Antiquarius editions ended up being destroyed or lost, nothing can stop us from assuming so due to the fact that at the time the case of Jure Grando had already gotten the attention of German journalists and historians. And on top of that, the science nowadays does agree that the vampire literature, in the modern sense, has appeared with no one else but George Gordon Byron.
With that being said and while waiting on the end results of further researches, Grando’s native Kringa has embraced the story about their strigon and have opened up a vampire themed bar aimed at attracting tourists to the town. The library consisted of books inspired by vampires is also a part of the bar, so while you enjoy getting lost in one of numerous stories that can be found there, you can also try vampire cocktails created especially for the promotion of the legend about Jure Grando or get handmade souvenirs that will protect you from a possible attack of the Croatian vampire. That same bar is also a scene for the literature happenings such as “Vampire nights” where numerous of authors that use vampire characters in their work had already been represented to the audience. So, even if Jure Grando is only a product of human imagination, fun is guaranteed to anyone who decides to put Kringa on their travel map.
Ivana Watkins
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