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Petar Blagojevic.
1662 -1725
The Vampire of Kisiljevo Village 🦇
Soon after a series of unexplained deaths occurred.
A short time after his funeral, several villagers died suddenly under mysterious circumstances
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He became known as The Vampire of Kisiljevo and was also one of the first documented cases of vampire hysteria in 18th-century Europe.
After his death, a series of mysterious deaths in the village led to the exhumation of his body, which villagers found to be unnaturally preserved, with blood on his teeth and mouth. This led to fears that Blagojevic had returned from the dead as a vampire, resulting in his body being staked and burned.
The case was reported by Austrian authorities and published in a Viennese newspaper, contributing to the global circulation of the word "vampire" and helped further the belief of vampires.
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People suddenly dieing soon after Petar raised suspicion in the village leading to them exhuming his body only to find it still very well-preserved, with signs of fresh blood on his teeth and mouth.
Now convinced he was in fact a vampire, the villagers drove a wooden stake through his heart and burned his remains.
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Petar Blagojevic is one of the first well-documented instances of vampire hysteria.
Officials from the then-Habsburg monarchy, who administered the area, documented the events.
The report on this event was one of the first documented testimonies about vampire beliefs in Eastern Europe. It was published by Wienerisches Diarium, a Viennese newspaper, today known as Die Wiener Zeitung. Along with the report of the very similar Arnold Paole case of 1726–1732, it was widely translated in West and Northern Europe, heavily contributing to the vampire craze of the eighteenth century in Germany, France and England.
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The village of Kisiljevo is now a modern tourist destination for people interested in supernatural/ vampire lore and history.
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According to a Belgrade newspaper Glas javnosti, which cites local official Bogičić, the villagers are unable to identify Blagojević's grave and don't know whether the local family with the same surname are in fact related to Petar.
One person recalled stories of a female vampire by the name of Ruža Vlajna, who was believed to haunt the village in more recent times, in the lifetime of her grandfather. She would make her presence felt by hitting pots hanging from roofs and was seen walking on the surface of the Danube, but it is unknown whether she was ever staked or not.
In De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (1725), Michaël Ranft attempted to explain folk beliefs in vampires.
He writes that, in the event of the death of every villager, some other person or people most likely a person related to the first dead who saw or touched the corpse, would eventually die either of some disease related to exposure to the corpse or of a frenetic delirium caused by the panic of merely seeing the corpse.
These dying people would say that the dead man had appeared to them and tortured them in many ways. The other people in the village would exhume the corpse to see what it had been doing. He gives the following explanation when talking about the case of Petar Blagojević.
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This brave man perished by a sudden or violent death. This death, whatever it is, can provoke in the survivors the visions they had after his death. Sudden death gives rise to inquietude in the familiar circle. Inquietude has sorrow as a companion. Sorrow brings melancholy. Melancholy engenders restless nights and tormenting dreams. These dreams enfeeble body and spirit until illness overcomes and, eventually, death.
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Other accounts on this case.
After Blagojević died in 1725, and his death was followed by a spate of other sudden deaths (after very short maladies, reportedly of about 24 hours each). Within eight days, nine people perished. On their death-beds, the victims allegedly claimed to have been beaten by Blagojević at night. Blagojević's wife had even stated that he had visited her and asked her for his opanci (shoes); she then moved to another village for her safety In another version, it's said that Blagojević came back to his house demanding food from his son and, when the son refused, Blagojević brutally murdered him, probably via biting and drinking his blood.
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