Arnold Paole: The Vampire Case That Made Europe Believe

On January 26, 1732, in Belgrade, a military surgeon named Johann Flückinger signed a document titled Visum et Repertum (“Seen and Discovered”). Four Austrian officers countersigned as witnesses. The document reported that a commission had opened seventeen graves in a Serbian village called Medveđa, examined the bodies with scalpels and protocols, and found twelve of them “quite complete and undecayed,” their chest cavities filled with fresh, liquid blood. The commission had ordered the bodies decapitated, burned, and their ashes scattered in the West Morava river.

Within months, the report had been reprinted in over a hundred gazette articles from Vienna to London. It introduced the word “vampire” to the English, French, and German languages. It forced Enlightenment Europe to confront an uncomfortable question: what does it mean when Imperial Army surgeons, signing under oath, confirm the existence of the undead?

The Medveđa case is a bureaucratic document. The Habsburg Empire’s administrative machinery produced it, archived it, and left it where anyone could check. Folk tales fade. Paperwork stays.

The Man They Called Arnaut Pavle

The Habsburg clerks spelled his name “Arnont Paule.” In Serbian, he was Arnaut Pavle. The nickname is revealing. Arnaut was the Ottoman-era term for Albanians, and more broadly for soldiers from the Albanian-inhabited frontier regions where Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Albanians had clashed for centuries. He was Pavle the Albanian, a man from the borderlands, carrying a name that marked him as an outsider even among outsiders.

He arrived in Medveđa in the early 1720s, one of many hajduks, outlaw fighters who were part bandit, part folk hero, who settled the depopulated Habsburg frontier after the Treaty of Passarowitz (1718). That treaty had transferred large parts of Serbia and Bosnia from the Ottoman Empire to the Habsburgs, creating the Militärgrenze, the Military Frontier, a buffer zone where former outlaws were resettled as border guards in exchange for land and tax exemptions. Military command ran these communities. They carried their languages, their Orthodox faith, and their beliefs about the dead with them into a new political order.

Paole was different from his neighbors. He spoke of things that unsettled them. In a place called “Gossowa,” almost certainly referring to Kosovo, something had attacked him. Something dead. He claimed to have survived through remedies that belonged to the folk-magic traditions of the region he came from: consuming earth from the creature’s grave, anointing himself with its blood.

Around 1726, Paole fell from a hay wagon and broke his neck. The villagers buried him and tried to forget his unsettling stories.

They could not.

Within thirty days of Paole’s burial, four villagers reported nighttime visitations: pressure on their chests, paralysis, a figure resembling the dead hajduk at the foot of their beds. The symptoms match what the Mora tradition describes across the Balkans, the crushing weight of a nocturnal spirit. All four died within weeks.

Forty days after Paole’s death, the village hadnack, the elected headman of the frontier community, made his decision. They would open the grave.

What they found has been preserved in the clinical language of later reports. The corpse was “undecomposed.” Fresh blood pooled at his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. His veins bulged with “fluid blood.” The shroud, coffin, and clothes were soaked crimson. Old nails had fallen from his hands and feet, and new ones had grown in their place.

They drove a stake through his heart. The corpse, according to witnesses, let out a “frightful shriek as if he were alive,” groaning as blood gushed from the wound. They cut off his head. They burned the body. Then they disinterred his four victims and subjected them to the same treatment.

For five years, it seemed to have worked.

The Second Wave

Then came the winter of 1731. In six weeks, at least thirteen people died. Some lingered for months, others collapsed and were gone in three days, complaining of stabbing chest pains and unshakable fevers. Infants, children, young mothers, old women. The deaths cut across the village without pattern.

The villagers already knew the source. They traced the contagion through a logic that was internally consistent and, within their framework, perfectly rational.

Milica, a neighbor, had once mentioned eating meat from sheep killed by vampires before emigrating from Ottoman lands. Stana, a twenty-year-old woman dead in childbirth, had confessed to anointing herself with vampire blood as a prophylactic, a folk practice she had learned across the border. Her unbaptized infant, buried outside the fence of the churchyard, had also died. By local reasoning, both women were contaminated. Both would rise.

But the villagers traced the infection further back. Arnold Paole had not merely killed four people in 1726. He had also slaughtered several oxen. Those oxen had been eaten. The contagion had passed through their flesh into new hosts, dormant for five years. The vampire was a disease vector. The dead fed the living, and the living became the dead.

This was the contagion model that later fascinated European intellectuals: infection passing from host to host through blood, flesh, and contact. In a world without germ theory, the logic was structurally identical to epidemiology. The mechanism was supernatural, but the reasoning was empirical.

The Imperial Commission

Word reached the Austrian military command. Oberstleutnant Schnezzer faced a strategic problem: if the villagers panicked and fled, a section of the Military Frontier would collapse. The frontier existed to protect the Habsburg Empire from Ottoman incursion. Empty villages meant open borders.

He dispatched Dr. Johann Friedrich Glaser, the Imperial Contagions-Medicus, the military physician responsible for epidemic diseases. Glaser arrived on December 12, 1731, expecting plague or typhus. He found nothing that matched any disease in his training. The villagers told him plainly: the deaths would continue until the vampires were destroyed. If the authorities refused to act, the people would leave.

Glaser opened several graves. Most corpses showed no decay: bloated, swollen, mouths stained with dark fluid. He was shaken. He recommended that the authorities permit the villagers to “execute” the vampires. It was the only way to restore order. He also noted, with a physician’s instinct, that the strict Orthodox fasting practices of the community might be contributing to their weakened physical condition, a detail largely ignored in the sensation that followed.

Vienna’s response was unprecedented. On January 7, 1732, a formal commission descended upon Medveđa: military surgeon Johann Flückinger, officers Büttner and J.H. von Lindenfels of the Alexandrian Regiment, and two additional military surgeons, Siegele and Johann Friedrich Baumgarten. They came armed with scalpels and protocols.

They opened seventeen graves.

Flückinger’s report reads like a medical document from a parallel world. Five bodies had decomposed normally. But twelve were “quite complete and undecayed.” Their chest cavities were filled with fresh, liquid blood that, Flückinger noted with precision, had “not coagulated as is usual.” Internal organs appeared healthy. Skin was “red and vivid.” In several cases, old nails had fallen away and new ones had apparently grown.

The hajduks assisting the commission remembered old Milica as thin and dried-up in life. In death, her body was plump, as though she had been feeding.

The commission recorded its diagnosis: the twelve corpses exhibited the Vampyrenstand, the vampiric condition. Under the commission’s supervision, Roma from the surrounding area decapitated the bodies, burned them on pyres, and scattered the ashes in the West Morava. Flückinger signed his report in Belgrade on January 26, 1732. Four officers countersigned as witnesses.

The document was filed. Then it escaped.

What the Surgeons Actually Saw

Modern forensic taphonomy explains every phenomenon that disturbed Glaser and Flückinger. Not one detail in the Visum et Repertum falls outside the range of normal postmortem processes.

The preserved bodies. The Morava river valley has alluvial Fluvisol soils: clay loam, dense, poorly draining, waterlogged. These soils create anoxic conditions that dramatically slow decomposition. Without oxygen, aerobic bacteria cannot thrive. Casper’s Law, established in forensic science, states that decomposition in open air to water to buried soil follows a ratio of approximately 1:2:8. One week of decay in open air equals roughly eight weeks in earth, at the same temperature. Bodies buried in cold, clay-rich soil during autumn or winter, with ground temperatures near or below 4 C, could remain in remarkably intact condition for months.

This also explains the puzzle that the commission itself noticed: why some bodies were preserved while others were not. The answer is burial season. Bodies interred during cooler months entered the ground when bacterial activity was minimal. Bodies buried in summer had been exposed to peak decomposition temperatures (21-38 C) and were already well into advanced decay by January. The variable decomposition states that Flückinger interpreted as evidence of vampirism were simply the result of different Accumulated Degree Days, the forensic metric that tracks temperature exposure over time. The “vampires” were the winter burials. The “normal dead” were the summer ones.

The bloating. Putrefaction produces gases: hydrogen sulfide, methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia. These gases accumulate in body cavities, inflating the torso and limbs. Thin Milica appeared plump in her grave because anaerobic bacteria had been feeding on her. The pressure is substantial enough to produce putrefactive rigor, an apparent stiffness in the limbs caused by gas distension rather than muscle contraction.

The blood. What the surgeons saw at the mouths, noses, and ears of the corpses was not blood in the living sense. It was purge fluid: a complex mixture of hemolyzed blood (red blood cells that have ruptured, releasing hemoglobin), liquefied soft tissue, gastrointestinal contents, and bacterial metabolic byproducts. As hemoglobin degrades, it produces methemoglobin and sulfhemoglobin, giving the fluid its characteristic reddish-brown to almost black appearance. Gas pressure in the abdomen and thorax forces this fluid upward through the esophagus and trachea, out of every available orifice. The reason it had “not coagulated as is usual” is that postmortem blood does not clot normally: the enzyme fibrinolysin breaks down clotting factors after death.

The new nails and fresh skin. This is not keratin growth, which is biologically impossible after death (cell division requires glucose and oxygen delivered by blood circulation). What happens is skin slippage, technically called desquamation. Enzymes break down the bonds between the epidermis and the dermis. The outer skin peels away in sheets, often taking the nails with it, in a process sometimes called “degloving.” What remains is the underlying dermis, which appears pinkish, reddish, and disturbingly “fresh” because it was never exposed to the environment. Meanwhile, as skin dehydrates, it retracts from nail beds and hair follicles, making nails and hair appear to have grown longer.

The scream. Compressed putrefaction gases, trapped in the chest cavity, are suddenly released when a stake punctures the thorax. The gas rushes upward through the trachea and past the vocal cords. The sound is uncannily like a human groan. Forensic biologist Mark Benecke has documented that this occurs two to three weeks after death, precisely the timeframe in which most vampire exhumations took place. The “copious bleeding” when staked is the same purge fluid, ejected under gas pressure through the puncture wound.

There is one additional factor that may have been at work in the Morava valley: adipocere formation, sometimes called “grave wax.” In waterlogged, oxygen-poor soil, body fat can undergo saponification, a chemical conversion into a waxy, soap-like substance that encases the body and preserves external features for months, years, or even centuries. The clay loam soils of the Morava valley are precisely the type that promote adipocere formation. A documented case from the Tomasica grave site in Bosnia-Herzegovina showed adipocere formation in similar Balkan clay soil, with bodies remaining recognizable after twenty-one years of burial.

None of this would have been known to an eighteenth-century surgeon. Flückinger saw precisely what local folklore predicted: corpses that had not died, bodies sustained by the blood of their neighbors. He recorded what he observed and signed his name, a competent professional producing an honest account of phenomena his training could not explain.

Paul Barber, whose 1988 study Vampires, Burial, and Death remains the definitive forensic analysis of historical vampire cases, made the essential point: folklore vampires look nothing like their literary descendants. The original vampire is a bloated, ruddy-faced peasant corpse. The folklore description matches decomposing bodies precisely, because that is exactly what it describes. Communities that buried their dead and occasionally exhumed them observed the same processes and generated the same explanations, independently, across cultures, because the decomposition process is the same everywhere.

The Report That Changed Europe

The Visum et Repertum entered European consciousness through multiple channels simultaneously. Dr. Glaser’s father, who served as a Viennese correspondent for the Nuremberg medical journal Commercium Litterarium, transmitted his son’s account. The report was published as a pamphlet in Nuremberg in 1732. By March 11, 1732, it appeared in the London Journal. The Grub-Street Journal reprinted it later that month. A Nuremberg pamphlet of the same year bore the title Dissertationem De Hominibus Post Mortem Sanguisugis, Vulgo Sic Dictis Vampyren. By the Leipzig Easter book fair of 1733, as one observer noted, it was impossible to enter a bookstore without seeing something about bloodsuckers.

The word “vampire” itself entered the major European languages through this event. Vampir had appeared in German by 1725, in Austrian reports on the Blagojević case. Vampyre entered English the same year, carried by the London newspaper reports of Flückinger’s investigation. French adopted vampire by 1737. The deeper etymology remains debated: Serbian vampir, possibly from Hungarian vampir, possibly from a Turkic root (ubyr, meaning “witch”), though the phonetic link is doubtful. What is clear is that the word, like the creature it named, escaped the Balkans through a bureaucratic document.

The Medveđa case was not the first. Seven years earlier, in 1725, a man named Petar Blagojević had died in the village of Kisilova (modern Kisiljevo). Within eight days, nine people died of short illnesses, each claiming on their deathbed that Blagojević had throttled them in the night. His widow reported that the dead man had come to the house and demanded his opanci, his traditional leather sandals. She fled to another village. His son refused to give him food on a second visit and was found dead the next morning. The Imperial Provisor Ernst Frombald, a reluctant civilian administrator who participated only because the villagers threatened to abandon the settlement if he refused, oversaw the exhumation. The body was “completely fresh.” They staked and burned it. Frombald’s report, published in the Wienerisches Diarium on July 21, 1725, contains the earliest known published use of the word “Vampyri” in a Western European source.

But the Blagojević case was a single newspaper report by a single civilian bureaucrat. No medical professionals were present. One body was examined. The Medveđa case was something else entirely: a formal military-medical commission with named surgeons, systematic autopsy of seventeen bodies, and a signed, countersigned, official document. When five Austrian officers confirmed under oath that they had personally observed bloated, blood-seeping corpses in a Serbian graveyard, it became state evidence.

The reaction was both swift and complex. It split into three currents.

The Benedictine scholar Augustin Calmet published his Dissertations sur les apparitions in 1746, later expanded as the Traité sur les apparitions (1751). Calmet’s position has been widely misrepresented, largely because Voltaire caricatured him as a gullible believer. In fact, Calmet’s first edition was already critical. He wrote that he had read and reread the reports and found “no shadow of truth or even probability.” He identified logical problems: the impossibility of vampires exiting and re-entering their graves without disturbing the earth. By the 1751 edition, his position had hardened: “I doubt that there is any other party to take in this matter than that of absolutely denying the return of the vampires.” Calmet was a compiler, not a credulous priest. Voltaire’s distortion stuck because it served his anti-clerical agenda.

Voltaire himself, writing in the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1772), used the vampire panic as ammunition. He noted that from 1730 to 1735, nothing was spoken of but vampires. Then he delivered his most famous pivot: the real vampires, he wrote, were not the dead peasants of Serbia but stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight. They were not dead, though corrupted, and did not dwell in cemeteries but in very pleasant palaces. It was brilliant polemic. It was also a refusal to engage with what the reports actually contained.

The theological debate was more substantive. Could a corpse actually be animated by a demon? Catholic positions ranged from demonological (demons caused it), to exorcist (confession and penance, not staking, were the remedy), to rationalist. The Orthodox Church’s institutional position was hostile to vampire belief. The Pedalion, the major Orthodox canon law collection edited by Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, contains the entry: “Vampires, that they do not exist and how people who burn them ought to be punished.” Nikodemos called vampire belief “a delusion and childish and stupid thoughts” and stated that he had investigated carefully and never met someone who had actually seen a vampire, only heard secondhand reports. Pope Benedict XIV, in his treatise De servorum Dei beatificatione (second edition, 1749), declared that beliefs about vampires “still today lack secure evidence and are considered by the most reasonable people as fallacious fictions of the imagination.”

The definitive response came from the top. In 1755, Empress Maria Theresa ordered her personal physician Gerard van Swieten to investigate vampire reports from Moravia. Van Swieten dispatched physicians to examine the case of Rosina Polakin, who had died on December 22, 1754 and been exhumed on January 19, 1755, declared a vampire because her body showed minimal decay. His analysis pointed out she had been buried only four weeks, during an extraordinarily cold winter. He characterized the vampire myth as a “barbarism of ignorance” and identified the real problem: two barber-surgeons without dissection experience serving as expert witnesses. On March 1, 1755, Maria Theresa issued her decree. All anti-vampire practices were banned: staking, beheading, burning. Grave desecration under the pretext of vampire defense became a punishable offense. Reports of vampirism were placed under censorship.

The official vampire epidemic was over. What it had created outlasted the decree.

From Serbian Grave to English Novel

The path from Medveđa to the literary vampire runs through a traceable chain, and the links are documented.

Heinrich August Ossenfelder published Der Vampir in 1748, the earliest known vampire poem in a European language, a direct response to the 1730s panic. Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) contained the first vampire in English literature, supported by ten pages of footnotes citing Habsburg reports and travel narratives. Lord Byron’s The Giaour (1813) included a vampire passage alluding directly to Balkan folklore.

The critical link is John Polidori. His The Vampyre, published in the New Monthly Magazine on April 1, 1819, included a historical introduction surveying vampirism and specifically citing the Arnold Paole account as reported in the London Journal in March 1732. Polidori had read the Medveđa report. He transformed the grotesque rural revenant into Lord Ruthven, an aristocratic predator. Sheridan Le Fanu drew on Calmet’s treatise for Carmilla (1872), set in Styria. Bram Stoker was influenced by Le Fanu and set Dracula (1897) in the Carpathians, drawing on the body of Balkan vampire literature that traced back to these reports.

The transformation the literature performed is striking. The original Serbian vampir was a bloated, ruddy-faced peasant corpse, something repulsive. By the time it reached Stoker, it had become an immortal aristocratic seducer in evening dress. The Vroucolaca of Mykonos, Tournefort’s 1701 account of a Greek revenant, describes something closer to what the Medveđa surgeons actually found: a swollen, discolored body that terrified an entire island. The cinematic vampire, from Murnau’s Nosferatu to the present, is a fiction built on a document built on a decomposing body in a Serbian grave.

What the Evidence Holds

The Medveđa case sits at the intersection of several things that do not usually meet: military bureaucracy and folk belief, forensic observation and supernatural diagnosis. It is tempting to resolve the tension by choosing one framework. The rationalist reading is clean: natural decomposition, misinterpreted by ignorant villagers and incompletely trained surgeons, amplified by a media system hungry for sensation. The Balkan reading is equally consistent within its own terms: a contaminated man brought a curse into a frontier village, and the curse spread through flesh and blood until the community destroyed the vectors.

Both readings account for the evidence. Neither fully accounts for the other.

What we know: the deaths were real. At least thirteen people died in Medveđa in the winter of 1731, and more had died five years earlier. The epidemic was genuine, whatever its cause. Typhus, tuberculosis, or other crowd diseases endemic to impoverished frontier communities are the most likely candidates. Dr. Glaser himself suspected that the strict Orthodox fasting practices, observed in an already malnourished population, may have contributed to the deaths.

What we also know: the belief system was not random. It was internally coherent, consistent across a vast geographic area, and shared by communities that had no contact with each other. The vukodlak tradition mapped the same conceptual territory: the dead who do not stay dead, the boundary between human and animal, the contagion that passes through flesh. The returning souls of the Balkans operated within a folk taxonomy of the dead that classified visitations by type, timing, and remedy. The Kozlak of Dalmatia, the vampires of Hungary, the revenants of Moravia: these were not isolated panics but expressions of a shared belief system that covered the entire Habsburg frontier zone and beyond.

The forensic explanation accounts for what was in the graves. It does not fully account for why communities across an enormous geographic area, speaking different languages and practicing different variants of Christianity, generated structurally identical explanations for the same phenomena. Paul Barber’s answer, that the same decomposition processes produce the same observations produce the same folklore, is elegant and largely convincing. But it describes a mechanism. It does not explain why the mechanism produced narratives so detailed and internally consistent, durable across centuries.

Arnold Paole is the most documented vampire in European history. Physicians investigated his case. A formal commission examined it under oath. Medical journals published it, philosophers debated it, novelists adapted it. An empress shut it down. Every element of the modern vampire myth traces back to this Serbian village on the West Morava: the blood at the lips, the nails that grow, the scream when the stake pierces the heart.

The Folk Logic Behind the Graves

The Visum et Repertum captured the clinical facts but left out what the villagers believed, because that fell outside the surgeons’ mandate. Friedrich Krauss, the Austrian ethnographer who spent decades collecting South Slavic folk beliefs firsthand, filled in what the military doctors left out. His 1908 Slavische Volksforschungen preserves the internal logic of the vampire belief as the communities themselves understood it.

A person became a vampire through moral failure or contamination. Murderers, perjurers, and habitually cruel men were suspected. Women rarely became vampires, with two exceptions that the Medveđa case itself illustrates: Milica had eaten meat from sheep killed by vampires, and Stana had smeared herself with vampire blood. Both had contaminated themselves through contact, and both had said so publicly before they died.

The contamination could also be accidental. If a magpie or a hen (never a rooster) flew over a laid-out corpse, the dead might rise. If a cat or dog jumped over the body, the same risk applied. Even a human shadow falling across the corpse was enough. The vigil held over the dead between death and burial existed to prevent these accidents. Watchers stayed up all night, keeping animals away and candles burning.

Prevention at the grave was elaborate. In the Sava river region, mourners placed a clod of earth on the corpse’s chest and stuck a hawthorn thorn under its tongue. For anyone over twenty, Serbs covered all hairy parts of the body except the head with tow and lit it with the death candle, burning the hair to prevent transformation. If the community suspected a villain had died, old women circled the grave on burial evening with hemp and linen tow, then sprinkled sulfur or gunpowder and ignited it. Then they drove five old knives or four hawthorn points into the grave, so the vampire would impale itself if it tried to rise.

The destruction ritual matched what the Austrian commission performed, but with one detail the surgeons did not record. When the community staked and burned a suspected vampire, watchers scanned the flames for a butterfly or moth. If one escaped the pyre, everyone chased it. If they caught it and threw it on the fire, the vampire was destroyed. If the moth escaped, the vampire would take revenge until its seven years expired. In the Cengić case near Zvornik, a snake crawled from the grave when diggers began work. Pero, the farmer who had confronted the popadija’s ghost, killed it on the spot.

The most surprising element in Krauss’s material is the power of the widow. Muslim folk belief held that every dead person returns to their home on the evening of burial day. If the widow fed the vampire, disaster followed for the village. But a clever wife could redirect it. She told the vampire she had nothing to give, then commanded him to eat fish in the sea, dogs in the village, or wild animals in the mountains. The vampire had to obey. A proverb preserved the principle: Pametna žena more zapriječiti, da vampir k njoj ne dolazi i da svijeta ne tare. “A clever wife can prevent the vampire from visiting her and murdering the people.”

The ashes of twelve bodies were scattered in the river nearly three hundred years ago. The river carried them to the Danube and out to the Black Sea. The document those ashes left behind has proven far more durable than the flesh that produced it, or the empire that investigated it.

Recommended Reading

• Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires by Augustin Calmet
• Vampires, Burial, and Death by Paul Barber

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Flückinger, Johann. Visum et Repertum. Belgrade military commission report, 7 January 1732. Reprinted in facsimile and German transcription in Klaus Hamberger, Mortuus non mordet (1992)
• Wienerisches Diarium, No. 12, 9 February 1732. First public Vienna press notice of the Medveđa events, drawing on the Flückinger report
• Commercium litterarium ad rei medicae et scientiae naturalis incrementum institutum. Nuremberg, 1732
• Glaser, Johann Friedrich. Field report from Medveđa, December 1731. Habsburg military archive, Vienna
• Ranft, Michael. Tractat von dem Kauen und Schmatzen der Todten in Gräbern. Leipzig: Teubners, 1734
• Calmet, Augustin. Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohême, de Moravie et de Silésie. Paris: De Bure, 1746
• Maria Theresa, Imperial decree on the Magia Posthuma, drafted by Gerard van Swieten, 1755. Abhandlung des Daseyns der Gespenster, Augsburg, 1768
• van Swieten, Gerard. Vampyrismus. Latin manuscript report to Maria Theresa, 1755. Modern edition: Piero Violante, ed., Palermo: Flaccovio, 1988
• Hamberger, Klaus, ed. Mortuus non mordet: Dokumente zum Vampirismus 1689-1791. Vienna: Turia + Kant, 1992
• Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988
• Klaniczay, Gábor. The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990
• Bohn, Thomas M. Der Vampir: Ein europäischer Mythos. Cologne: Böhlau, 2016
• Đorđević, Tihomir R. Vampir i druga bića u našem narodnom verovanju i predanju. Srpski etnografski zbornik, vol. 66. Belgrade: Srpska kraljevska akademija, 1953
• Vukanović, T. P. ‘The Vampire.’ Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 3rd series, vols. 36-38 (1957-1959)
• Petrović, Sreten. Srpska mitologija. Niš: Prosveta, 1999