Through the long history of vampirism in folklore, particularly in the Slavic regions of eastern Europe, there are numerous references to those rare individuals who possessed the mysterious knowledge to detect and dispatch suspected vampires. Although there's a common belief, particularly in our relatively “informed” modern age, that those who purported to have the ability to see and kill vampires were simply charlatans bent on earning a few kopecks through the fears and ignorance of their neighbors, there's little evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that this was the case.

A significant aspect of vampire hunting is that there was little visible evidence that slayers had indeed been successful in their efforts. Slavic vampire hunters were seldom expected to destroy a vampire that was actively on the prowl, and virtually all suspected vampires were terminated as they slept in their graves. While it's physiologically improbable that any of the human remains thought to be lost souls wandering about searching for midnight snacks in the moonlight were anything more than a pile of decomposing flesh, the fact remains that the services of vampire hunters were regularly called upon.

With the common belief that vampires were a part of everyday life, and that hired vampire hunters could do something about them, the obvious implication is that something was being accomplished, whether it was the eventual end of strange maladies, an epidemic, or the more common result that physical mischief, such as banging on walls, nervous livestock creating nighttime ruckuses, or any number of other odd happenings, ceased to occur.

Most modern psychological interpretations of this phenomenon lean toward assertions of various forms of mass hysteria, as with the infamous Medvegia Vampires of the 1720s, where frightened villagers would begin a contagion of rumor and gossip that resulted in virtually every normally uncomplicated but inexplicable happenstance being attributed to the workings of the undead (see Chapter 11). By hiring a professional vampire hunter to drive a stake into the corpse of the most likely, and usually the most recently deceased suspect, fears would abate, odd sounds were just the wind, life would return to normal, and the hunter's mission was accomplished.

Healing the Dead

Given the powerful undercurrents of religious conviction, literary and scientific ignorance, and social dogma that pervaded the culture of early eastern Europe, there's every likelihood that the vampire hunter was the equivalent of a healer. It's thought that ancient medicinal healers were actually the forefathers of designated vampire hunters and performed the same tasks in much the same way. In dealing with the inherently disturbing issues of staking, decapitation, or setting rotting corpses alight, the vampire hunter performed a duty that was generally far too gruesome for the average individual, and the rituals of dispatching the body of a revenant were specific to local traditions and had to be carried out in perfect order. This was no job for the novice or the uninitiated, and bringing in the services of a professional vampire hunter was the equivalent of hiring a pest control company to rid your home of an infestation of creepy crawlies.

A Symbiotic Relationship

In Slavic cultures, the vampire hunter was usually “marked” in some fashion to differentiate him from the rest of society, and the most common of delineations was the sabotnik. Sabotniks are quite simply those people born on a Saturday, the traditional Jewish Sabbath, and a day that is rife with taboos. Although the Christian Orthodox Church differentiated itself early on from Judaism by declaring Sunday the Sabbath, the taboos of Saturdays became entrenched in tradition and spread throughout much of eastern Europe. In effect, sabotniks were considered to be tainted with associations to demonic forces and therefore held supernatural powers to detect evil.

The Fall Guy

Another common “marking” of the destined vampire hunter, or seer, was attributed to the individual born of sexual union between a widow and a deceased husband who had become a vampire. Such individuals were regionally known as glogove, vampirdzii, vuperari, or vampirovici, and they were attributed with much the same abilities to detect and destroy evil as the sabotniks, and for the same reasons — they shared supernatural powers with the undead.

The concept of the glogove's birth as the bastard child of a woman and a “vampire” illustrates a significant point in vampire lore. In scientifically ignorant eastern Europe, and indeed in educated modern times, inexplicable occurrences require explanation to pacify a nervous population, quell hysterias, and to maintain social unity. Culturally, women who lost their husbands were expected to remain chaste until they remarried. Should a recent widow become pregnant, her most effective line of defense was to blame her dead husband, who had clearly become a vampire and forced her into sexual relations. Through the ages, there has been a cultural requirement to seek out and exterminate suspected perpetrators of misdeeds, and that need placed the equally stigmatized vampire hunter in the unique position of having the ability to perform a distasteful, but necessary, function.