Pic: deadeyebart a.k.a Brett’s

The Sunday Herald reports that a 4000-year-old “vampire” grave, believed to be the world’s first burial place for one of the presumed “undead”, has been discovered in eastern Europe. It bares spookily similar hallmarks to Celtic tombs in the British Isles designed to prevent bloodsucking “revenants”. These were recently buried people who were believed to rise from the grave, walk the earth and prey on the living. The discovery of the grave during a routine archaeological dig of an early Bronze Age burial site in Mikulovice, eastern Bohemia, in the Czech Republic means that Dracula and the rest of his vampiric brood can now trace their bloodline back at least 4000 years.

Radko Sedlacek, the curator of the East Bohemia, Museum said:

Fearing that he might return from the grave, the dead man was sent on his final journey weighed down with a huge stone on his chest and another one on his head. Only the bodies of people believed to be vampires were given such treatment.

In an ancient ritual which continued in some places until the 17th century, the Irish used to weigh down the bodies of suspected Dearg-dul vampires with stones.

The “Celtic connection” seems to imply that there is a connection between the Bohemian grave and the Irish burials. Migrating Celtic tribes travelling westerly through Europe and heading towards Ireland and Scotland may well have brought their anti-vampire traditions with them to the British isles. The Bohemian vampire grave seems to give this theory weight.

Such strange burial practices were a defence against revenants from the grave. This may indicate ancient cannibal practices with early proto-Celtic tribesmen then living in the region supplementing their meagre crops, or poor hunting hauls, with human blood when times got hard.

Sedlacek believes that the Mikulovice find is the oldest ever grave of a supposed “vampire”. The Celts weren’t the only people, however, to have a culture including those who feast on human blood. In the lore of ancient Greece and Rome, several classical writers, including Euripides, Horace and Ovid, refer to these “pernicious bloodsucking monsters” in their work some two millennia ago.

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