WORLD
Medieval 'vampire' skeletons unearthed in Bulgaria
Baku, June 7 (AZERTAC). Archaeologists say they have found two medieval remains of the dead pinned down to their graves through the chests with iron rods, a practice widely used in Europe up until the first decade of the 20th century to stop the dead from becoming vampires.
"If you thought vampires were simply the stuff of myth and legend — and perhaps the odd teen horror film — think again," says Daniel Miller at Britain'sDaily Mail. Last weekend, archaeologists in the Bulgarian Black Sea town of Sozopol unearthed two 800-year-old skeletons with iron rods piercing their chests, an apparent sign that locals believed it might occur to the two men to rise from the dead and terrorize the town. These aren't the first "vampire skeleton" burials discovered in Balkan countries, nor did the practice die out in Medieval times — it was "common in some Bulgarian villages up until the first decade of the 20th century," says Bozhidar Dimitrov, head of Bulgaria's National History Museum. Here, a look at the "vampires" of Central Europe.
Some believe that the legend of blood-sucking vampires spread with the devastating plagues that ravaged Europe between 1300 and 1700. People at the time understood neither decomposition nor how diseases were spread. Sometimes grave-robbers or undertakers adding bodies to existing burial sites would find bloated corpses with blood-like gastrointestinal"purge fluid" seeping from the mouth or nose, making it look as if the corpse had been drinking blood. The modern idea of a vampire was born in Western Europe in the 19th century, immortalized in Irish writer Bram Stoker's 1897 Victorian gothic classic Dracula, based loosely on brutal Romanian prince Vlad III, the Impaler.