map showing the way europe played 5d ping pong with its words for vampires. had to do my own damn map of this so i thought i’d share it cause why not
some words of explanation:
the root of most of these, excluding the blue ones, comes from Turkic languages (most likely Tatar, but we aren’t exactly sure, so for simplicity i just made the slightly redder starting point in eastern Turkey, I am ready to face death at the hands of professional linguists) from words like “ubyr”, “opyr”, “uber”, and other variations of that. the general consensus is that they initially meant “witch”.
“strix” is Latin for owl; “striges” were owl-like female demons from ancient Rome who fed on human organs, mentioned for example in the Satyricon. “strega” is Italian for “witch”.
the Greek “vrykolakas” comes from the Slavic “vukodlak”, technically meaning “werewolf”, but in reality it was used for vampires as well. the vrykolakas were definitely more vampires than werewolves, being dead bodies who rose from the grave.
the Russian “vurdalak” appeared only in the 19th century with Pushkin’s works, because he read Byron’s “The Giaour” in which there is a footnote explaining that the Greek word for vampire is “Vardoulacha” (close enough, I guess) and he made his own version based on that
Everyone now uses “vampire” and variations thereof due to pure chance, because it just so happened that the first reports about the living dead reached western Europe from Serbia thanks to Austrian officials recording the panic surrounding Petar Blagojević. It eventually circled back to Eastern Europe in that form overthrowing most of the regional variants like upyr. This map is focused on Poland in this regard because I am Polish and this map is intended for a presentation for a Polish audience.
“East European Vampires” by Felix Oinas (this one is slightly outdated, but the etymological parts seemed fine when compared to other sources)
it is also still simplified a lot as i omitted other words in other languages about similar phenomena, like the romanian moroi and vârcolac (which is also related to vukodlak, wilkołak etc), the other greek type of “vampire” that was the tympaniaioi and a lot of polish regional variants that i know of like łopi, upierz etc etc
