Orko

The name is Latin. Orcus was the Roman god of the underworld, a darker doublet of Pluto whose function was to drag the dead down and to enforce the punishment of oath-breakers. When the western Roman Empire collapsed and Slavic populations moved into the eastern Adriatic during the seventh century, they did not move into empty land. The coastal cities and the southern islands kept their Romance-speaking populations for several more centuries, and on some islands the two groups simply merged. The Slavic peasants of Mljet and the southern islands inherited the Latin word for the underworld god from their Italian-speaking neighbours, slavicized it as Orko, and gave it a job in their own demonology.

Krauss put it plainly in his 1908 chapter on the vampire: “On some Dalmatian islands, where a slavicized Italian population lives, the vampire is also called Orko (from Orcus).” The Düringsfelds had said the same thing thirty years earlier from the other side of the Adriatic.

Appearance

The Orko is a corpse that walks. Once he leaves the grave he looks more or less as he did in life, with the standard signs of recent decomposition slowed or reversed. The skin is stretched and ruddy, the body bloated, the nails and hair appearing to have grown. He may walk on two legs at first and revert to four after he has been out for a few nights. On Mljet the older Orko was said to lose his human shape entirely after a year and become an animal of an indefinite kind, neither dog nor wolf nor goat, that wandered the karst above the village at dusk.

In life he was an ordinary villager. The transformation only happened to certain kinds of dead.

Origins

The Düringsfelds gave the formula for who came back as Orko, and Krauss confirmed it from his own informants. The Orko is the dead body of a person who had broken the holy days during life. People who worked on Sundays. People who worked on the feast days of saints. People who had refused fasts, mocked priests, sworn false oaths, or gone hunting on Easter morning. Misers and blasphemers were also at risk. The categories overlap, and they all share one feature: the Orko was not made by being attacked by another vampire. He was made by his own conduct in life. The community read the death of a known violator of the calendar as an opening for the underworld to claim him.

There was a second route. If an animal of the wrong kind ran or jumped over the open coffin in the room where the corpse was lying out, the corpse could become an Orko or a related creature. Krauss listed the unrein animals from his informants: the magpie, the cat, the female dog, and the hen but not the rooster. The rooster’s voice marked the boundary of the night and was protective. The hen’s silence let the soul slip. The Orko was the result.

Behavior

He left the grave at night, especially in the months between Christmas and the Ascension, when the cold weather and the long darkness gave him cover. He returned to the village he had lived in. His targets were ordered. He went first to his own household, to the wife or children he had left behind, then to the close kin, then outward through the village in concentric rings. He drank blood, but he was as likely to suffocate the sleeper or to crush the chest. The widow of an Orko was almost always the first to fall ill, and on the islands of the southern Adriatic this was the standard early sign that something needed to be done.

The most particular detail Krauss recorded came from Mljet. If a male Orko and a female Orko appeared in the same village at the same time, the village was doomed. The pair would breed at night and the population would die out within a generation. There is no other vampire in the South Slavic system to which this rule attaches. The Mljet villagers organized their entire vampire defense around the impossibility of letting a male and a female cross over in the same season.

Tenac, Denac, and the Greek Root

The Düringsfelds noted that around Ragusa the vampire of the inland villages split into two with two different Slavic names. The bad person who came back was a Tenac or Denac. The blasphemer who came back was an Orko. Krauss preserved the etymology of the first name, which had escaped the Düringsfelds. Tenac is a contraction of tenarac, from the Greek θέναρ (thénar), meaning the hollow of the hand and, by extension, the cavity of a grave. The Slavic peasants of the inland Ragusan villages had inherited a Greek word for the grave from the Byzantine period and used it to name the creature that came out of one. The Tenac is the grave-thing.

So the same coastal region had a vampire with a Latin name and a vampire with a Greek name in two neighbouring valleys. Both were Slavic creatures. Neither name was. The whole eastern Adriatic was a Slavic settlement layered over Latin and Greek substrate, and the demonology preserved the layering more honestly than any other part of the culture.

The Tolkien Trail

The Latin Orcus did not stop at the Dalmatian islands. It went west into Italy as orco, the child-eating giant of the Italian fairy tale, the figure who appears in Basile and in dozens of regional collections. Orco came north into French as ogre, and from French into English. So the English ogre and the Dalmatian Orko are siblings, both descended from the Roman god of the underworld by different routes.

The same root went the other way, into Old English, where it appears in line 112 of the Beowulf manuscript as orcneas, the corpse-things descended from Cain along with the giants and the elves and the eotenas. J. R. R. Tolkien took the word from that line. He wrote in a 1958 letter to the editor Forrest J. Ackerman: “I originally took the word from Old English orc (Beowulf 112 orc-neas and the gloss orc = þyrs (ogre), helh-deofol (hell-devil)).” So the orcs of Middle-earth, the Dalmatian Orko, the Italian orco, and the English ogre share a single root in the Roman god of the dead. The trail is in Tolkien’s Mythology of Middle-earth: The Real Sources Behind the Legendarium.

The Slavic peasants of Mljet were not, of course, reading Beowulf. They had simply borrowed a god’s name from their Italian neighbours and given it work to do at home. But the same name and the same kind of work, the lurking dead thing that comes for the unprotected, runs through the entire western philological tradition from Apulia to Reykjavik to Oxford.

Protection

The Düringsfelds recorded the standard Mljet defense. To prevent a suspect corpse from coming back as Orko, the men of the village cut the tendons of the feet at the moment of death. In the harder cases, where the suspect was still alive but the village had decided he was going to be a problem, the cut was made before death. The Düringsfelds noted, with the dry tone of a couple who had been collecting Dalmatian folklore for years, that the conversations between the cutter and the cut must have been worth hearing.

The whitethorn stake was driven through the chest before burial, sometimes through the heart, sometimes through the navel. A whitethorn needle was placed under the tongue. A clod of consecrated earth was set on the chest. The grave was sometimes left open for a day after burial, with the village watching, to confirm that the corpse was lying still. If it had moved, the standard procedure was exhumation, decapitation, and burning of the body face down on the bonfire so that the ash blew toward the sea.

Krauss preserved the curse formula that any villager could mutter when a known dead troublemaker came up in conversation: “Na putu mu broč i glogovo trnje,” which means “may madder root and whitethorn thorns be on his path.” The same plant pair shows up in the protections against the vampire and against the Vještica. The same plants protect against all the night-walking dead because the same villagers shared the same garden.

The most common euphemism for the Orko in everyday speech was mrtva nesreća, the dead misfortune. The villagers tried not to use his name in case he heard it.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The Orko is part of a coastal vampire system that ran the length of the Adriatic and into the Aegean. To the south, on Mykonos, the Vroucolaca worked by the same rules and was buried with the same precautions. To the north, in inland Croatia and Slavonia, the Vukodlak filled the same niche under a different name. The Kozlak of the same Dalmatian villages a generation later was a hereditary version, passed from father to son, who could read books that no one else could read.

What sets the Orko apart from his cousins is the Latin name and the Italian shadow over it. He is the only South Slavic vampire whose etymology runs back through Italian and into Roman religion rather than into the Slavic root system. He is what happens when a Slavic peasant culture and a Romance peasant culture share the same island for eight hundred years and produce a single monster between them, with one name in two languages and a job description borrowed from the underworld god of the people who left the island first.

Sources

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

• Friedrich S. Krauss, Slavische Volkforschungen (Leipzig, 1908), chapter on Vampire
• Otto Freiherr von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld and Ida von Düringsfeld, Ethnographische Curiositäten (1879), chapter Aberglauben der Küsten- und Inselbewohner Dalmatiens