Tournefort watches a vampire slain on Mykonos
The French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort witnessed the exhumation and burning of a peasant believed to be a vrykolakas on Mykonos in early 1701, and wrote a famous sceptical account.
1701 CE · 37.45, 25.33 · status: account
The account
The dead man, a quarrelsome peasant murdered in the fields, was said to walk at night, overturning furniture and beating people. Ten days after burial the islanders dug him up, a butcher cut out his heart amid incense and swords, and finally the body was burned on the shore. Tournefort described the crowd's panic as a collective madness worse than the supposed vampire. His account appeared in his 'Voyage du Levant' (1717).
The sceptical view
Tournefort himself attributed the 'warmth' and 'fresh blood' to ordinary decay and to the suggestibility of a terrified crowd.