ent of
Fallmerayer's doctrines with regard to the Slavonic origin of the
present inhabitants of Greece, allows that the Greeks, as they
borrowed from the Slavonians a name for the Vampire, may have received
from them also certain views and customs with respect to it.[416]
Beyond this he will not go, and he quotes a number of passages from
Hellenic writers to prove that in ancient Greece spectres were
frequently represented as delighting in blood, and sometimes as
exercising a power to destroy. Nor will he admit that any very great
stress ought to be laid upon the fact that the Vampire is generally
called in Greece by a name of Slavonic extraction; for in the islands,
which were, he says, little if at all affected by Slavonic influences,
the Vampire bears a thoroughly Hellenic designation.[417] But the
thirst for blood attributed by Homer to his shadowy ghosts seems to
have been of a different nature from that evinced by the material
Vampire of modern days, nor does that ghastly _revenant_ seem by any
means fully to correspond to such ghostly destroyers as the spirit of
Gello, or the spectres of Medea's slaughtered children. It is not only
in the Vampire, however, that we find a point of close contact between
the popular beliefs of the New-Greeks and the Slavonians. Prof.
Bernhard Schmidt's excellent work is full of examples which prove how
intimately they are connected.

The districts of the Russian Empire in which a belief in vampires
mostly prevails are White Russia and the Ukraine. But the ghastly
blood-sucker, the _Upir_,[418] whose name has become naturalized in so
many alien lands under forms resembling our "Vampire," disturbs the
peasant-mind in many other parts of Russia, though not perhaps with
the same intense fear which it spreads among the inhabitants of the
above-named districts, or of some other Slavonic lands. The numerous
traditions which have gathered around the original idea vary to some
extent according to their locality, but they are never radically
inconsistent.

Some of the details are curious. The Little-Russians hold that if a
vampire's hands have grown numb from remaining long crossed in the
grave, he makes use of his teeth, which are like steel. When he has
gnawed his way with these through all obstacles, he first destroys the
babes he finds in a house, and then the older inmates. If fine salt be
scattered on the floor of a room, the vampire's footsteps may be
traced to his grave, in which h