The Witness at Mykonos
Greece (the Cyclades, the island of Mykonos) · Early modern, the winter of 1700 to 1701
The peasant had not been a man of standing. The records do not name him. They record that he was killed in a tavern dispute, that the wound was given by a stranger from another island, and that he was buried, in the proper manner, in the cemetery of his parish. The burial was on the second day of Christmas, in the year 1700.
Within the week the household reported him.
The reports were of small disturbances. Doors opened where they had been latched. Cooking pots were taken from their hooks and set upon the steps of the house in which the deceased’s widow lived. A neighbour’s hen was found, throat opened, in the room in which the deceased had slept in life. The reports moved through the small streets of the chora, the town at the centre of the island, in the way reports moved on Mykonos. By the ninth day, the day on which the Greek custom of the time required the disinterment of the body for the rite of the tritomerizon, the island was at the door of the parish priest.
The peasant was disinterred.
The records of the witness who would later write down the case agree that the body, when brought up, was as it had been laid down: not corrupted, not slackened, the cloth in which it had been wrapped intact. The villagers said this was the proof. The body had been buried. The body was returning. The island had begun to mark its doors.
On the rite the islanders performed
The butcher of the chora was called.
The records describe the order of the rite. The body was laid upon a board at the door of the parish church. The breast was opened with a knife, and the heart was taken out. The heart was placed upon a brazier of charcoal that the butcher had set down upon the stones of the courtyard. The villagers stood at the perimeter, the women at the back, the men at the front, the priest reading from the book in which the vespers of St. George were entered. The smoke of the heart, the records say, was thick. The villagers said the spirit had been bound. The body was returned to its grave.
Within three days the disturbances were greater than they had been before.
The records, by this point, are kept by a stranger. The stranger had not, until the second disinterment, intended to keep the dates. He was a Frenchman, a naturalist of the household of Louis XIV, sent to the Levant on the king’s commission to record the flora and the antiquities of the Aegean. He had landed at Mykonos in the late autumn of 1700 and had remained over the winter. His name was Joseph Pitton de Tournefort.
On the witness
The witness was thirty-four years old, a doctor of medicine of the Sorbonne, professor at the Jardin du Roi at Paris, a man of the new philosophy and an instinctive sceptic. He had not gone to Mykonos to record a haunting. He had gone to record the islands. He recorded the haunting because, as he wrote, the haunting was what the islanders would not let him fail to see.
He attended the second disinterment. He made notes that night. He wrote that the body had been kept too long out of the ground, that the heart had been taken without a physician, that the procedure had been performed by men who could not distinguish between corruption deferred by cold and corruption deferred by the supernatural. He wrote that the islanders were in a state, by the close of the second week, in which the small noises of any household were construed as the deceased’s, and the cattle of any pasture were construed as harassed, and the women of any street were construed as visited. He recorded, with the dryness of his profession, the names of the witnesses who came to him in the inn at which he was staying to ask his judgement.
He recorded that he gave none.
On the second burial
The body was disinterred a third time. By this point the accounts had reached a pitch the parish priest could no longer regulate. The body was placed in a boat. The boat was rowed, by four men of the chora, to a small islet at the edge of the harbour. The boatmen lit candles of beeswax at the bow and at the stern. The body was placed upon a pyre of dry brush gathered the day before. The pyre was lit. The records of the witness say the body burned at length, that the islanders watched from the cliffs of the chora until the smoke had thinned to nothing, and that the burning was on the first of January in the new year.
The disturbances ceased.
The witness, returning to Paris in the next year, prepared his papers for the voyage record. He set the case down at length in the second volume. He gave it as he had observed it. He did not interpret it. He noted only that no other case in the ten months of the voyage had so demonstrated to him the difficulty of measuring, in the islands of the archipelago, where a custom ended and where a credulity began.
The archive holds no position on whether the peasant returned. The archive observes only that the body was buried, and that the islanders, by the second week, were marking their doors, and that the witness had not been one of them, and that the witness, after the burning, did not write the case down again.
- Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de. A Voyage Into the Levant, Volume II. London: D. Browne, A. Bell, J. Darby, et al., 1718. The first-hand account of the Mykonos case, recorded in residence by the king's naturalist.
- Lawson, John Cuthbert. Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals. Cambridge: University Press, 1910. The standard ethnographic survey of the vrykolakas tradition into the twentieth century.
- Allatius, Leo. De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus. Cologne, 1645. The earliest formal treatment of the vrykolakas as a class, cited by Tournefort and by Lawson alike.