What happened
Jure Grando was a stonemason from the Istrian village of Kringa. He died in 1656, and according to the story recorded later he soon began to return at night: he knocked on doors, and in every house he knocked at someone died within a few days. His widow claimed he visited her in her bedroom. The locals called him a štrigon – an Istrian word for both a revenant and a sorcerer. In 1672 nine men, led by the parish priest and the village headman Miho Radetić, went to the cemetery at night with lamps, a crucifix and a hawthorn stake. In the opened coffin they reportedly found an undecayed body with a smile on its face. The stake is said to have bounced off the chest, so after prayers one of the villagers sawed off the head – and blood supposedly flowed from the wound. After that, peace returned to the village. Today Kringa has turned Grando into a tourist attraction.
Witnesses
The parish priest, the village headman and villagers of Kringa; the story was recorded by the Carniolan scholar Johann Weikhard von Valvasor in “The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola” (1689).
Explanations and hypotheses
Grando is often called the first named real person to be described as a vampire, but the case is known from Valvasor's account written some years after the fact, and later versions (such as Görres's) added sensational details. Historians explain the “undecayed” body, the blood and the sound during the cutting by normal decomposition – putrefaction gases, seeping blood-tinged fluid and skin changes that people once read as signs of life. The series of deaths in the village could well have been caused by an ordinary infectious disease.
Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.
Sources
- Istrapedia – Grando, Jure
- Dudley Wright, The Book of Vampires
- Mail & Guardian – Croatian 'Dracula' revived to lure tourists (2006)
More: Wikipedia (en)