Hungary, Bela Lugosi’s native country, has
a special place in the history of vampires. Vampire historian Montague Summers
opened his discussion of the vampire in Hungary by observing, “Hungary, it may
not untruly be said, shares with Greece and Slovakia the reputation of being
that particular region of the world which is most terribly in fested by the
Vampire and where he is seen at his ugliest and worst.” Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1897) opened with Jonathan Harker’s trip through Hungary. Harker saw Budapest
as the place that marked his leaving the (civilized) West and entering the
East. He proceeded through Hungary into northeast Transylvania, then a part of
Hungary dominated by the Szekelys, a Hungarian people known for their fighting
ability. (Dracula was identified as a Szekely.) In the face of Stoker and
Summers, and before Dom Augustin Calmet, Hungarian scholars have argued that
the identification of Hungary and vampires was a serious mistake of Western
scholars ignorant of Hungarian history. To reach some perspective on this
controversy, a brief look at Hungarian history is necessary.
The
Emergence of Hungary
The history of modern Hungary began in the
late ninth century when the Magyar people occupied the Carpathian Basin. They
had moved into the area from the region around the Volga and Kama rivers. They
spoke a Finnish- Ugrian language, not Slavic. Their conquest of the land was
assisted by Christian allies and, during the tenth century, the
Christianization of the Magyars began in earnest. In 1000 C.E., Pope Sylvester
crowned István, the first Hungarian king. Later in that century, when the
Christians split into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox branches, the
Hungarians adhered to the Roman church.
István’s descendants moved into
Transylvania gradually but had incorporated the area into Hungary by the end of
the thirteenth century. The Hungarian rulers established a system by which only
Hungarians controlled the land. A Magyar tribe, the Szekleys were given control
of the mountain land in the northeast in return for their serving as a buffer
between Hungary and any potential enemies to the east. The Romanian people of
Transylvania were at the bottom of the social ladder. Above them were the
Germans, who were invited into cities in southern Transylvania. In return for
their skills in building the economy, the Germans were given a number of
special privileges. By the fourteenth century, many Romanians had left
Transylvania for Wallachia, south of the Carpathians, where they created the
core of what would become the modern state of Romania. Following the death of
the last of István’s descendants to wear the crown of Hungary, it was ruled by
foreign kings invited into the country by the nobles. The height of prosperity
for the nation came in the late fifteenth century when Matthias Corvinus
(1458–1490), a Romanian ethnic and contemporary of Wallachian prince Vlad the
Impaler, ruled. He built his summer capital at Visegrád one of the most
palatial centers in eastern Europe. Hungarian independence ended essentially at
the battle of Mohács in 1526, which sealed the Turkish conquest of the land.
During the years of Turkish conquest, while Islam was not imposed, Roman
Catholic worship was forbidden. The Reformed Church was allowed, however, and
remains a relatively strong body to the present. Transylvania existed as a land
with an atmosphere of relative religious freedom, and both Calvinist
Protestantism and Unitarianism made significant inroads. Unitarianism made
significant gains at the end of the sixteenth century following the death of
Roman Catholic Cardinal Bathory at the Battle of Selimbar (1599). The Szekelys
were excommunicated and as a group turned to Unitarianism.
The Turks dominated the area until 1686
when they were defeated at the battle of Buda. Hungary was absorbed into the
Hapsburg empire and Roman Catholicism rebuilt. The Austrian armies would soon
push farther south into Serbia, parts of which were absorbed into the Hungarian
province.
The eighteenth century was characterized by
the lengthy rulerships of Karoly III (1711–1740) and Maria Theresa (1740–1780).
Hungarian efforts for independence, signaled by the short-lived revolution in
1848, led to the creation in 1867 of Austria-Hungary. Austria-Hungary survived
for a half century, but then entered World War I on Germany’s side. In 1919
Austria-Hungary was split into two nations and the large segments of Hungary
inhabited by non-Hungarian ethnic minorities were given to Romania, Serbia, and
Czechoslovakia. Most importantly, Transylvania was transferred to Romania, a
matter of continued tension between the two countries. Hungary was left a
smaller but ethnically homogeneous land almost entirely composed of people of
Hungarian ethnicity but with a small but measurable number of Gypsies. After
the wars, Hungary was ruled by Miklós Horthy, a dictator who brought Hungary
into an alliance with Hitler and Germany as World War II began. After the war,
in 1948, the country was taken over and ruled by Communists until the changes of
the 1990s led to the creation of a democratic state.
The
Vampire Epidemics
Following the Austrian conquest of Hungary
and regions south, reports of vampires began to filter into western Europe. The
most significant of these concerned events during 1725–32, their importance due
in large measure to the extensive investigations of the reported incidents
carried on by Austrian officials. The cases of Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold
Paul especially became the focus of a lengthy debate in the German universities.
Different versions of the incidents identified the locations of the vampire
epidemics as Hungary rather than (more properly) a Serbian province of the
Austrian province of Hungary. The debate was summarized in two important
treatises, the first of which, Dissertazione sopre I Vampiri by Archbishop
Giuseppe Davanzati, assumed a skeptical attitude. The second, Dom Augustin
Calmet’s Dissertations sur les Apparitiones des Anges des Démons et des Espits,
et sur les revenants, et Vampires de Hingrie, de Boheme, de Moravie, et de
Silésie, took a much more accepting attitude.
Dom Augustin
Calmet
Calmet’s work was soon translated and
published in German (1752) and in English (1759) and spread the image of
eastern Europe as the home of the vampire. While Calmet featured vampire cases
in Silesia (Poland), Bohemia, and Moravia (Czechoslovakia), the “Hungarian”
cases of Paul and Plogojowitz were the most spectacular and best documented.
The image of Hungary as a land of vampires was reinforced by Stoker and
Summers, and later by both Raymond T. McNally and Leonard Wolf, who suggested
that the Hungarian word vampir was the source of the English word vampire. That
theory has more recently been countered by Katerina Wilson, who argued that the
first appearance of the word “vampir” in print in Hungarian postdates the first
published use of the term in most Western languages by more than a century
(actually by some 50 years). The question remains open, however, in that it is
highly possible that someone (for example, a German-speaking person in Hungary
in the early eighteenth century) might have picked up the term in conversation
and transmitted it to the West.
Meanwhile, Hungarian scholars confronted
the issue. As early as 1854, Roman Catholic bishop and scholar Arnold Ipolyi
assembled the first broad description of the beliefs of pre-Christian Hungary.
In the course of his treatise he emphasized that there was no belief in
vampires among the Hungarians. That observation was also made by other
scholars, who wrote their articles and treatises in Hungarian destined never to
be translated into Western languages. In current times, the case was again
presented by Tekla Dömötör, whose book Hungarian Folk Beliefs was translated
and published in English in 1982. He asserted, “There is no place in Hungarian
folk beliefs for the vampire who rises forth from dead bodies and sucks the
blood of the living.” The conclusions of the Hungarian scholars have been
reinforced by the observations of Western researchers, who have had to concede
that few reports of vampires have come from Hungary. Most also assert, however,
that in Hungarians’ interaction with the Gypsies and their Slavic neighbors,
such beliefs likely did drift into the rural regions.
Vampire-like
Creatures in Hungary
Having denied the existence of the vampire
in Hungarian folk culture, the Hungarian scholars from Ipolyi to Dömötör also
detailed belief in a vampire-like being, the lidérc. The lidérc was an
incubus/succubus figure that took on a number of shapes. It could appear as a
woman or a man, an animal, or a shining light. Interestingly, the lidérc did
not have the power of transformation, but rather was believed to exist in all
its shapes at once. Through its magical powers, it caused the human observer to
see one form or another. As an incubus/succubus it attacked victims and killed
them by exhaustion. It loved them to death. Defensive measures against the
lidérc included the placing of garters on the bedroom doorknob and the use of
the ubiquitous garlic. Hungarians also noted a belief in the nora, an invisible
being described by those to whom he appeared as small, humanoid, bald, and
running on all fours. He was said to jump on his victims and suck on their breasts.
Victims included the same type of person who in Slavic cultures was destined
for vampirism, namely the immoral and irreverent. As a result of the nora, the
breast area swelled. The antidote was to smear garlic on the breasts.
Sources: Calmet, Dom Augustine. The Phantom World. 2 vols. London: Richard
Bentley, 1746, 1850. Dömötör, Tekla. Hungarian Folk Beliefs. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1982. Kabdebo, Thomas. Hungary. Santa Barbara, CA:
Clio Press, 1980. 280 pp. McNally, Raymond T. A Clutch of Vampires. New York:
Bell Publishing Company, 1974. 255 pp. Summers, Montague. The Vampire in
Europe. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1961. 329 pp. “Vampires in
Hungary.” International Vampire 1, 4 (Summer 1991). Wilson, Katherine M. “The History
of the Word ‘Vampire.’” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, 4 (October–December
1985): 577–83.
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