Tuesday, December 22, 2015. A group of archaeologists in Poland found vampire coffins in an old cemetery near the village of Drawsko; arranged in the same way they used to bury the “Vampires” in the 17th century.
The finding reveals that this group of people was buried as alleged vampires, four of them with sickles in their throats and huge rocks under their chins; and a fifth deceased with other sickle on the waist, which corresponds to the rituals practiced in the XVII century or XVIII in Europe.
It was determined that four skeletons are women, the youngest was 14 or 19 years old when she died; while the fifth is a man between 35 and 44 years of age. The sickle on the waist appeared in the skeleton of an older woman, who was buried with a medium-sized stone in the neck and with a coin of copper in the mouth; what makes think the archaeologists that the woman could have been considered a witch.
Although many experts have argued that the unfortunate victims were accused of vampirism, there are studies that suggest the reality of the deaths were caused by cholera; reason by which the villagers feared that they resurrected from the dead and the deadly disease could be propagated from the underworld; since in the post-medieval age, the population does not understand how diseases are transmitted.
Such beliefs, made them recourse to the supernatural, instead of searching for a scientific explanation; in this case, the alleged vampires maybe were different people to the majority because they were sick, they were hunchbacks, too high or too low, for example.
These brutal burials reflect an old Slavonic belief according to which the immortals should be bury in such a way that they could not resurrect and return to the world of the living; and so, innocent people served as a scapegoats when threats like the plague came.
In 2013, near the city of Gliwice, in the south of Poland; it was discovered another vampire cemetery, in which were found 44 bodies; 17 of them beheaded and had placed the skulls between the legs, hands or on one of the shoulders buried. Since 2008, there have been excavated over 250 tombs in the territory of the old Drawsko cemetery.
All assumptions vampires are buried according to the Christian ritual, in wooden coffins and with copper coins near the bodies. The belief of the vampires flourished mainly in the countries of Eastern Europe and Greece, and today; it remains a very real threat in the minds of the inhabitants of some of the most remote communities, where garlic and crucifixes are easily manipulated, exhuming corpses to pierce the heart with a stake.
ALFA