Vampires, Burial, and Death by Paul Barber

The bodies of vrykolakas have the same distinctive characteristics as the bodies of vampires in Balkan folklore. Some believed that a werewolf itself could become a powerful vampire after being killed, and would retain the wolf-like fangs, hairy palms, and glowing eyes it formerly possessed. The Greeks traditionally believed that a person could become a vrykolakas after death due to a sacrilegious way of life, an excommunication, a burial in unconsecrated ground, or eating the meat of a sheep which had been wounded by a wolf or a werewolf.

It may also be noted that the Sanskrit word for wolf is vṛ́ka (commonly pronounced as vrika). Even in Bulgaria, original folklore generally describes the vârkolak as a sub-species of the vampire without any wolf-like features. Apparently, the two concepts have become mixed. However, the same word (in the form vukodlak) has come 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, and in Bulgaria). It is also noteworthy that in the eighteenth century story Vrykolokas by Pitton de Tournefort, he refers to the revenant as a 'werewolf' (loups-garous) which may have also been translated as bug-bears, a strange word that has nothing to do with bugs nor bears, but is related to the word bogey, which means spook, spirit, hobgoblin, etc. having the hair, or fur, of a wolf), and originally meant ' werewolf' (it still has that meaning in the modern Slavic languages, and a similar one in Romanian: see vârcolac).

The term is a compound word derived from вълк ( vâlk)/вук ( vuk), meaning 'wolf' and dlaka, meaning '(strand of) hair' (i.e. The term is attested in other South Slavic languages such as Serbian vukodlak, ultimately derived from Proto-Slavic vьlkolakъ, see Polish wilkołak, and cognates can be found in other languages such as Lithuanian vilkolakis and Romanian vârcolac.

The word vrykolakas is derived from the Bulgarian word vǎrkolak.

Vampires, Burial, and Death by Paul Barber