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‘Vampire graves’ containing decapitated skeletons with skulls placed between their legs

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Archaeologists have unearthed what they  believe to be a vampire burial ground on a building site in Poland.

The team of historians discovered graves  containing four skeletons with their heads removed and placed between their legs  near the southern town of Gliwice.

Decapitating a suspected vampire was common  practice in medieval times because it was thought to be the only way to ensure  the dead stay dead.

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Eerie: It comes a year after archaeologists in Bulgaria  claimed to have discovered two ‘vampire’ corpses in excavations near a monastery  in the Black Sea town of Sozopol, both more than 800 years old and pierced  through the chest with heavy iron rods

The exact fate of the skeletons is yet  unclear, but the archaeologists noted that, apart from being headless, there was  no trace of any earthly possessions, such as jewellery, belts or buckles.

‘It’s very difficult to tell when these  burials were carried out,’ archaeologist Dr Jacek Pierzak told the Dziennik  Zachodni newspaper.

The remains have been sent for further  testing but initial estimations suggest they died sometime around the 16th  century.

It comes a year after archaeologists in  Bulgaria claimed to have discovered two ‘vampire’ corpses in excavations near a  monastery in the Black Sea town of Sozopol, both more than 800 years old and  pierced through the chest with heavy iron rods.

Bulgaria’s national museum chief Bozidhar  Dimitrov said as many as 100 such ‘vampire corpses’ have been found in the  country in recent years.

‘They illustrate a practice which was common  in some Bulgarian villages up until the first decade of the 20th century,’ he  explained.

Even today, the vampire remains a very real  threat in the minds of villagers in some of the most remote communities of  Eastern Europe, where garlic and crucifixes are readily wielded, and where  bodies are exhumed so that a stake can be driven through their heart.

The notion of blood-sucking vampires preying  on the flesh of the living goes back thousands of years and was common in many  ancient cultures, where tales of these reviled creatures of the dead  abounded.

Archaeologists recently found 3,000 Czech  graves, for example, where bodies had been weighed down with rocks to prevent  the dead emerging from their tombs.

The advent of Christianity only fuelled the  vampire legends, for they were considered the antithesis of Christ — spirits  that rose from the dead bodies of evil people.

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Put a brick in it: In some cases, the dead were buried  with a brick wedged in their mouths to stop them rising up to eat those who had  perished from the plague

Such vampires would stalk the streets in  search of others to join their unholy pastime of sucking the lifeblood from  humans and animals to survive.

In medieval times, when the Church was  all-powerful and the threat of eternal damnation encouraged superstition among a  peasantry already blighted by the Black Death, the fear of vampires was  omnipresent. In some cases, the dead were buried with a brick wedged in their  mouths to stop them rising up to eat those who had perished from the  plague.

Records show that in the 12th Century on the  Scottish Borders, a woman claimed she was being terrorised by a dead priest who  had been buried at Melrose Abbey only days earlier.

When the monks uncovered the tomb, they  claimed to have found the corpse bleeding fresh blood. The corpse of the priest,  well known for having neglected his religious duties, was burned.

But vampiric folklore largely flourished in  Eastern European countries and Greece, where they did not have a tradition of  believing in witches. And just as with witches in England, Germany and America,  the vampire became a scapegoat for a community’s ills.

The ‘civilised’ world came to learn of  vampires in the 18th century as Western empires expanded and their peoples  travelled to remote parts of Central and Eastern Europe.

With the spread of Austria’s empire, for  example, the West became aware of the story of the remote village of Kisilova  (believed to be modern-day Kisiljevo in Hungary) after it had been annexed by  the Austrians.



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