yesterday's enthusiast

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

jensen-ackles-booty-curve:

prokopetz:

keepingupwiththekhaleesi:

prokopetz:

You can discover the weirdest things digging into your family history.

For example:

• Apparently, I have a great-great-uncle who was cursed by a witch after stiffing her on the repayment of one-dollar loan. (Why he borrowed a dollar from a witch in the first place is not recorded.)
• I also have a great-grandfather, a beekeeper by profession, who’s alleged to have spontaneously combusted one day while tending his bees.

As far as I can tell, these events are completely unrelated - the two men are on different branches of the family tree, and never met - but I can’t help but imagine that somewhere out there, there’s a witch with unbelievably bad aim.

How did you find all this out????

We’re Ukrainian - we write down everything.

I don’t even know what to say

Oh, that’s not the half of it. I also have a paternal great-great-grandfather who was reputed to be a vědmák - a sort of semi-benign shapeshifting sorcerer - of no small skill, a cousin-several-times-removed who knifed so many people his nickname was actually “the Knife” (there’s no record that he actually killed any of them, but he sure did love to stab), and at least one certified vampire (yes, apparently there was a legal certificate for that).

Basically, what I’m saying is that the Old Country was a really fucked up place.

Okay, I’ve had a whole bunch of folks ask me about the vampire certificate thing, so I thought I’d explain. It’s totally not what y’all are thinking, but it’s still pretty awesome. Apologies in advance for the length; this requires a lot of cultural context, and while I’ve tried to keep it to the bare bones (no pun intended), there’s no getting around a certain amount of rambling.

Like most of Eastern Europe, the Ukraine’s vampire folklore is a bit different from how the beastie is depicted in Western popular culture. A Ukrainian vampire is basically a very sneaky zombie: an afflicted corpse would come alive at night, dig itself out of its grave, and creep about in the dark preying on the blood of the living. As the dawn approached, it would stealthily return to its gravesite and re-bury itself, leaving no obvious sign that it had ever been gone.

As you might imagine, the biggest challenge in dealing with a vampire was often locating its grave in the first place. However, that wasn’t the only obstacle: it was usually against the law to dig up a properly consecrated gravesite, and it was definitely illegal to mutilate a corpse that had received a proper Christian burial - these folks didn’t mess around when the immortal soul was involved. Consequently, due process was a big deal in a vampire hunt.

The first step in a vampire hunt was thus to fetch a magistrate to oversee the ordeal. In the magistrate’s presence, various rituals would be carried out to determine the location of the suspected vampire’s gravesite. If the magistrate was satisfied that the investigation had been properly performed, he’d grant permission to dig up the grave.

Once the corpse was exhumed, the magistrate would examine it for signs of vampirism. These signs might include elongated teeth and fingernails; the presence of bloody discolouration about the face and mouth; hair that seemed to continue growing after death; and so forth. Should such signs be found, the magistrate would produce a legal document certifying that the corpse was, in fact, a vampire. With this certificate in hand, the vampire hunters were then legally authorised to neutralise the vampire.

(I say “neutralise” rather than “destroy” because there was no known way of preventing a vampire from reanimating itself; even burning the body wouldn’t necessarily work. The procedures thus revolved around preventing it from successfully emerging from its grave. These steps might include cutting off and hiding its head, breaking its arms and legs and arranging the shattered limbs into holy symbols, or even simply nailing the bastard into its grave by means of a six-foot wooden spike driven through its chest and into the earth below. That last one is where the stake-through-the-heart element of the Hollywood vampire mythos comes from, incidentally.)

So yeah. Certified vampires. I’ve got one of those in my family tree. Possibly two, though the second one might be a coincidence - it involves a guy with a reasonably common name.