(BROW-co-look)
Broucolaque, Ancient[]
Variations: Broncolakas, Broucolaca, Broucolacchi, Broucolacco, Broucolokas, Broucoloques, Broukolakes, Brukulaco, Brukolak, Burcolakas, Drakaena, Drakos, Mulo, TIMPANITA, Tumpaniaïoi, VRYKOLAKA
This vampiric revenant is created when a hero or brigand is too intent on staying alive. It is gluttonous in its blood-drinking needs and revels in its atrocities.
Broucolaque, Modern[]
The social evolution of the original Broucolaque. The mode of creation is via evil action or excommunication.
Varieties of Vampires information[]
Described as having a swollen, tense, hard skin, it can scream once per night which deafens all in hearing range for 24 hours. It can also kill, not only by draining life energy, but by naming its victim by name and commanding the victim into a fatal action.
It can imitate any voice it hears, with as much of a chance of being detected as an assassin has of being discovered in disguise. It can control rats, but no wolves. It is defeated by cutting off and burning its head.
Etymology[]
They are different from regular vampires, which appeared in later stories and legends, because vrykolakas do not drain the living of their blood or turn them into ghosts, but the methods of getting rid of them are practically the same as for vampires.
The ethnologists of the Balkans consider the vrykolakas , like the tradition of the Коледа / Colinde or that of the Martenitsa / Mărțișor , also common to several countries, as a Thracian heritage ( substrate common to the various Balkan countries) but the term is derived from Proto-Slavic vьlkolakъ ( vylkolak ), a compound word derived from вълк ( vǎlk ) / вук ( vuk ), which means "wolf", and dlaka, which means "(strand of) hair" (i.e. having the hair or fur of a wolf), and originally meant "werewolf" (it still has this meaning in modern Slavic languages ).
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort describes them as a ghost, as a werewolf, or a bogey. However, the same word (in the form vukodlak ) has come later to be used in the sense of "vampire" in the folklore of Western Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro (while the term "vampir" is more common in eastern Serbia, Macedonia and Bulgaria). Apparently, the two concepts have become mixed. In Bulgaria, the original folklore generally describes the vǎrkolak as a subspecies of werewolf without some or all of the wolf functionality. In sanskrit the wolf is said to be vṛka (pronounced vrîka ): it could therefore be that the vrykolakas come from a mythological substratum prior to the divergence of the Indo-European languages .
- Joseph Pitton de Tournefort , in the account of an exorcism in Myconos in 1723 ( Un Voyage dans le levant )
- Dimitar Marinov, Rites and folklore , tI and II, Sofia 1984 and Kristo Vakarelski, Bulgarian Ethnology , Sofia, 1977.
References[]
- Bane, Theresa (2010) Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology McFarland pg 38
- Joseph Pitton de Tournefort , in the account of an exorcism in Myconos in 1723 ( Un Voyage dans le levant )
- Dimitar Marinov, Rites and folklore , tI and II, Sofia 1984 and Kristo Vakarelski, Bulgarian Ethnology , Sofia, 1977.