Peter Plogojowitz

Peter Plogojewitz (* in the 17th century; † 1725 probably at the age of 62 in the village of Kisilova near Požarevac , perhaps today's Kisiljevo); Serbian Petar Blagojević , was a Serbian farmer who was believed to have returned as a vampire after his death .

After his death, several people died in his village after a brief, unknown illness. Some of them claimed before they died that Peter looked them up at night and choked them. The villagers opened his grave and found that his body had not decayed and that there was fresh blood on his lips. A stake was then pushed through the heart and the body burned. An official of the imperial Austrian administration , provisional camera Frombald, allowed this procedure, albeit reluctantly, because the villagers were frightened and believed that the whole community could be exterminated by the vampire - as they claimed, this was already “in Turkish times “Happened (ie when the village belonged to the Ottoman Empire before 1718 ). The report of the imperial officials was one of the first documented evidence about the vampire belief in Europe of modern times and was in the vampire mania of the 18th century Germany , England and France at.

The event was very similar to the later case of Arnold Paole , when official representatives of Austrian authorities testified personally about the characteristics of vampirism, i.e. H. an allegedly non-decomposed body with "new" skin, hair and nails, from whose mouth fresh blood appeared to be leaking and other things. These phenomena, or the appearance of them, are now known as a natural process in the decomposition of a deceased body.

literature

• Frombald: Copia of a letter from the Gradisker District in Hungary. from the Wienerisches Diarium of July 21, 1725, Kayserliche Hof-Buchdruckerey 1725, pp. 11–12
• Michael Ranft : De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis. Leipzig 1728, German a. d. T. treatise on the chewing and smacking of the dead in graves, in which the true nature of those hungarian vampires and blood-suckers is shown, also all writings that have come to light on this matter are reviewed . 1734, Teubner's bookstore (UBooks-Verlag 2006, ISBN 3866080158 )
• Montague Summers: The Vampire in Europe 1929. Kessinger Publishing 2003, ISBN 0-7661-3576-4
• Augustin Calmet: Scholarly negotiation of the matter of the apparitions of spirits, and of vampires in Hungary and Moravia. Edition Roter Drache 2007, ISBN 978-3939459033 ( digitized UB Kiel ).