Vukodlak

The word is a compound. Vuk is wolf. Dlaka is skin, hair, fur. A vukodlak is a wolf-skin, someone who wears the hide of a wolf or carries the wolf inside them. The compound follows the same pattern as the Old Norse úlfheðinn (wolf-coat) and the Greek lykanthropos (wolf-man). What the word means in practice depends on where and when you ask. In Serbia, Vuk Karadžić defined vukodlak as a man who rises from the grave after death, bloated with blood, to strangle livestock and visit the living. In Dalmatia, it meant a living person who turned into a wolf at night. In Montenegro, it could mean either, or both at once.

Appearance

The living vukodlak, in the werewolf traditions of western South Slavic lands, changed shape by rolling three times on the ground, sometimes near a stream or crossroads, sometimes by putting on inverted clothing. Toma Milinković of Trapari, interviewed in autumn 1888, gave Krauss’s mother a longer account from his own village. The household head suspected an old neighbour woman of being a wolf and, on a consultant’s advice, climbed a tree near her field at noon wearing his clothes inside out. She came across the field with a bucket on her head. She set the bucket on the grass and rolled head-over-heels three times beside it. She rose as a wolf. The next thing in the field was a four-year-old fattened lead ram, eaten by the wolf samt der Wolle, den Gedärmen und den Klauen, wool and entrails included. By morning the woman was back in the village, looking ordinary.

The dead vukodlak looked like every other Balkan revenant. Exhumed corpses were found swollen, the skin taut with decomposition gas, fluids seeping from the mouth and nose. In the Serbian tradition, the vukodlak was said to inflate over the forty days following burial, growing larger and redder in the grave until it could rise. Đorđević recorded the folk belief that a vukodlak in its first weeks was boneless and shapeless, like a full wineskin, and that it hardened into its final form only after the forty-day period.

Origins

The paths to becoming a vukodlak were numerous and, in some cases, unavoidable.

Birth circumstances topped the list. A child born with a caul, the membrane of the amniotic sac covering the face, was marked. A child born with visible teeth, or with red or dark hair in a family of lighter coloring, attracted suspicion. In some regions, a child conceived or born on a major feast day fell under the same shadow.

Death could trigger it too. Anyone who died unbaptized, who was killed violently and left unburied, or who had lived a life of particular malice might rise as a vukodlak. If a cat, dog, or chicken jumped over the corpse before burial, the dead person could return. The night vigil held over the body between death and burial existed, in part, to prevent exactly this. Watchers stayed awake through the night, keeping animals away from the body and the candles burning.

In the werewolf variant, the transformation was sometimes voluntary. A person learned the technique from another practitioner, or inherited the ability through family. Krauss recorded cases in Slavonia where the knowledge passed from mother to daughter. Among the South Slavs, unlike other European traditions, it was primarily women who took wolf form. The actual transformation required three somersaults (Purzelbäume), usually performed near a stream or at a crossroads. Reversal followed the same method: three rolls, and the wolf was a woman again.

Croatian folk belief gave the transformation a patron saint. St. George (sveti Juraj), protector of forest animals and commander of wolves, could transform a person into a werewolf by throwing a wolf skin over them. A peasant from the upper Croatian Sava region claimed he had been a werewolf for nine years. He was freed when, at Easter, he attacked his wife as she came home from church with the blessed items and ate the blessed candles from her basket. The wolf skin fell from his body and he returned home human.

A darker element connected the werewolf to the Vučji pastir, the Wolf Shepherd, a figure who commanded all wolves and assigned each its prey for the coming year. The Wolf Shepherd’s office passed like a curse: before dying, the shepherd had to pass his whip to a successor. Anyone who stepped on the shepherd’s right foot could see the invisible wolves surrounding them.

In Istria, the krsnik, a benevolent shapeshifter who fought evil spirits in animal form, sat at the opposite pole from the vukodlak. The same ability, the same mechanics of transformation, could produce a protector or a predator depending on the tradition.

In the Bosnian highlands, families followed daily precautions to keep ordinary people from being drawn into the transformation. Before drinking late-evening water from a fountain, the cup-bearer poured the first drop on the herdfeuer, the kitchen hearth. A man was not to lie flat on his belly to drink from a stream at night, because a tückischer Geist, a malicious spirit, might pull him under by the back of the head. The reason given was that at night Vile, witches, Moras, and werewolves all bathed in free-flowing water. Whoever drank without acknowledging the hearth-spirit risked taking some of that water into his body.

Behavior

In Serbia and eastern Bosnia, the vukodlak behaved like the vampir. It rose at night, visited houses, sat on the chests of sleepers, strangled cattle, and spread death through a community. Karadžić described it draining livestock before turning to humans. The pattern of unexplained deaths in a village, followed by the exhumation of a recently buried body found suspiciously intact, was identical to vampire cases documented by Austrian authorities in the 1720s and 1730s.

In Dalmatia and the Croatian hinterland, the vukodlak was a living shapeshifter. It prowled at night in wolf form, attacked livestock in the fields, and returned to human shape before dawn. This version killed sheep and goats rather than humans, and the community response was social rather than funerary: identification, accusation, and sometimes violence against the suspected person.

In Montenegro and Herzegovina, both meanings coexisted. A vukodlak might be a dead man who rose from his grave, or a living man who turned into a wolf, and sometimes the two identities merged. A werewolf in life became a vampire in death. The transformation was not a contradiction but a progression: the same dark inheritance expressed itself differently on each side of the grave.

The Name That Traveled

The word vukodlak did not stay in South Slavic territory. It crossed into Greek as vrykolakas (βρυκόλακας), losing its werewolf meaning entirely and becoming the standard Greek word for vampire. It likely traveled with Slavic populations who settled in the Balkans between the sixth and eighth centuries. By the time Tournefort encountered the creature on Mykonos in 1701, the word had been Greek for centuries and carried no trace of its wolf-skin origin.

In Romanian, the cognate form vârcolac referred to a demonic creature that devoured the sun and moon during eclipses, a meaning far from either werewolf or vampire. In Albanian, vurvolak filled a similar vampire role to the Greek version. Each borrowing stripped or added meanings, the same word pointing to a wolf in one language, a walking corpse in another, and an eclipse-eating demon in a third.

This scattering of meaning is itself evidence of the word’s age. A term that has taken on completely different definitions in neighboring languages has been in circulation for a long time. The vukodlak predates the neat categories that later folklore studies tried to impose on it.

The Werewolf-Vampire Problem

Modern folklore scholarship treats werewolves and vampires as separate creatures. The South Slavic evidence does not cooperate with this division.

The connection between the two is old and widespread. In Serbian folk belief, a werewolf in life became a vampire in death. In Istrian tradition, the krsnik (a good werewolf) fought the kudlak (an evil werewolf-vampire) in spirit battles while both slept. In Polish and East Slavic tradition, the word upir (vampire) and vilkatas/vovkulaka (werewolf) described creatures linked by the same logic: something human that had crossed into something animal or undead, and could not cross back.

The split between the two traditions happened gradually. As vampire cases gained bureaucratic and literary attention in the eighteenth century, through documents like the Visum et Repertum and books like Calmet’s treatise, the vampire became the dominant figure. The werewolf faded into fairy tale. The vukodlak, which had always been both, was pulled apart. Scholars studied the werewolf in one chapter and the vampire in another, rarely acknowledging that the same word, in the same region, had covered both.

Protection

The defenses against the dead vukodlak matched those used against the vampir. Exhumation was the first step. If the body was found undecayed, the community proceeded with hawthorn staking, decapitation, or burning. Ashes were scattered into running water. Garlic was placed in the mouth of the corpse. The body was sometimes hamstrung, the tendons behind the knees cut, to prevent the dead from walking even if other measures failed.

Prevention focused on the vigil. The body had to be watched from the moment of death until burial. No animal could be allowed near the corpse. Candles had to stay lit. In some regions, a coin was placed in the mouth, or a piece of pottery was broken over the grave after burial, a practice Zečević traced back to pre-Christian ancestor rituals.

Against the living vukodlak, the defenses were social. Identification was the key. Once a person was suspected, the community brought pressure through confrontation, threats, or the intervention of a priest or folk healer. In Istrian tradition, the krsnik could identify and neutralize a vukodlak through spiritual combat. In Serbian villages, the knowledge of who in the community had been born with a caul was kept carefully, an insurance policy against future trouble.

The Trapari case shows what social defense actually meant in practice. The household head saw the wolf and considered shooting from the tree where he had hidden. He chose not to and gathered the woman’s own sons the next day instead. They beat her, in Krauss’s words dass sie sich kaum mehr rühren konnte, until she could hardly move. The treatment worked, and she never transformed again. The community had decided the case in the open of the woman’s own kitchen, with no court and no priest involved.

Modern Survival

The vukodlak has not survived as a coherent figure in popular culture. The word is known in Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro, but it lives in the shadow of vampir, which took the international stage and never left it. Ask a person in Belgrade what a vukodlak is, and they will probably say vampire. Ask someone in rural Dalmatia, and they might still say werewolf. The old ambiguity persists in proportion to distance from cities and television.

What the vukodlak preserves, better than any single creature in the European bestiary, is the memory of a time before the categories hardened. Before “werewolf” and “vampire” became separate entries in separate chapters of separate books, they were the same word, the same fear, the same creature wearing different shapes depending on whether you caught it alive or dead. The vukodlak is the joint in the skeleton where the two traditions connect. Pull it out, and both traditions lose something they cannot explain on their own.

Sources

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

• Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (1818, expanded 1852)
• Friedrich S. Krauss, Slavische Volksforschungen (Wilhelm Heims, Leipzig, 1908)
• Tihomir Đorđević, Vampir i druga bića u našem narodnom verovanju i predanju (1953)
• Slobodan Zečević, Srpska etnomitologija (Službeni glasnik, Belgrade, 2007)
• Špiro Kulišić, Petar Ž. Petrović, Nikola Pantelić, Srpski mitološki rečnik (Nolit, Belgrade, 1970)