Medveđa: The Vampire Village

Medveđa sits on the West Morava river in central Serbia, a small village that gave the Western world one of its most durable words.

The Arnold Paole Case

In 1725, a soldier named Arnold Paole returned from Ottoman territory and settled in Medveđa. He told neighbors that a vampire had attacked him during his service, and that he had eaten soil from the vampire’s grave and smeared himself with its blood to break the curse. He died after falling from a hay wagon. Within weeks, people in the village began dying. Four bodies were exhumed, and Paole’s was among them. His corpse, according to witnesses, had fresh blood on its lips. They drove a stake through it. The body groaned.

The Visum et Repertum

Seven years later, in January 1732, another wave of deaths struck. The Austrian authorities sent a military commission led by the regimental surgeon Johann Flückinger. They opened seventeen graves. Twelve bodies showed no signs of decay, their chests full of liquid blood. Flückinger wrote a detailed report, the Visum et Repertum, signed by five military officers.

The report reached Vienna, then London and Paris within months. It was translated into every major European language. The Latin word “vampyrus” entered English, French, and German medical and philosophical discourse. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Pope Benedict XIV all commented on the Medveđa case.

The Village Today

Medveđa still exists. The graves have never been precisely relocated. The village does not promote the connection. Unlike Kisiljevo, where the Petar Blagojević case generated the first known use of the word “Vampyri” seven years earlier, Medveđa produced the report that made Europe take notice.