Twice ToldCommercium litterarium, 12 March 1732: Johann Friedrich Glaser's letter on the vampires of Medveđa
- Language
- Latin
- Reading
- transcribed from the page image
- Translation
- ours
- Retrieved
- 24 September 2026
The Commercium litterarium was a weekly Nuremberg journal of medicine and natural science. Its eleventh issue of 1732, dated 12 March 1732, printed this extract from a letter written in Vienna on 13 February by the physician Johann Friedrich Glaser to a Dr Goetz. Glaser passes on what his son, the imperial physician at Paraćin, had written to him on 18 January. The letter is set in italics; a comment in roman type follows it.
II. Ex Litteris D. D. JOH. FRID. GLASERI ad D. D. GOETZIVM Vienna a. d. 13. Febr. Perscripsit mihi filius meus, Physicus Imperialis Barachini in Seruia, quod in confiniis Turcicis situm a Belgrado 27 milliaribus distat, a. d. 18. Jan. ea in regione, praesertim autem pago Maduega, non procul a Barachino, magicam aliquam ab aliquo tempore grassari luem Mortui nimirum humati illaesis surgentes sepulcris viuos enecant, hique necati et sepulti similiter surgentes alios interficiunt; quod sequenti contingit modo: Mortui nempe dormientes noctu adoriuntur, sanguinemque ex illis exsugunt, vt cuncti tertio exspirent die. Huic autem malo hucusque nulla medela inuenta est. Plurimis itaque breui tempore sic demortuis, iussum ab iis, penes quos summa illinc locorum potestas, vt accuratius hanc in rem inquireretur. Aliis propterea deputatis filius quoque meus, vt Medicus et Physicus, adiunctus est. Hi conuocatos iudices (praetores) et iuratos examinabant, variis, vere rem sic se habere, probantes argumentis, modum autem se nescire confitentes, nisi quod animaduerterent, homines perpauidos, temulentos, meticulosos et anxios e somno erumpere et quiritare, etc. Decreta hinc coemeterii visitatione, singuli atque omnes delegati, sepulcra vt aperirentur iubebant, sicque decem personas in sarcophagis suis, viuorum instar, penitus incorruptas, sandapilas vero, vestimenta et lintea sanguine florido madida, huncque e naribus, ore, oculis et pudendis profluentem, ac denique pristinos manuum et pedum vngues cum recentibus commutatos, reperiebant. Omnibus igitur his Vampyris (sic scilicet in iis oris vocantur) caput amputatum, cadauera postea igne concremata, eorumque cinis fluuio Morauae inspersus fuit. Secuit autem ea antea filius meus, ac cuncta viscera sana et illaesa, ventriculum vero et diaphragma sanguine plena, deprehendit. His festinanter ad me perscriptis, promisit vlteriora imposterum addere, prolixiore relatione ad Regimen nostrum et Collegium sanitatis transmissa.
Nouam hanc antiquae in Hungaria et Polonia crebrius iam actae fabulae esse scenam, illi, qui in historia naturali non penitus hospites sunt, cognoscent. Annon autem hic morbus aliquis epidemicus orgasticus, imaginatio, meticulositas, superstitio, et sim. fermentatio etiam sanguinis in eiusmodi cadaueribus incipiens putredinosa plurimas sibi potissimasque vendicet partes, penitior edocere poterit singularum circumstantiarum peruestigatio.
Translation
From a letter of Dr Johann Friedrich Glaser to Dr Goetz, Vienna, 13 February. My son, imperial physician at Barachin in Serbia, which lies on the Turkish border 27 miles from Belgrade, wrote to me on 18 January that in that region, and above all in the village of Maduega not far from Barachin, a kind of magical plague has been raging for some time. The buried dead rise from their undisturbed graves and kill the living, and those who are killed and buried rise in the same way and kill others. It happens like this: the dead attack people in their sleep at night and suck the blood out of them, so that all of them die on the third day. No remedy for this evil has been found so far.
Since very many had died this way in a short time, those who hold the highest authority there ordered a closer inquiry. Others were deputed for it, and my son was attached to them as doctor and physician. They called together the judges and sworn men and questioned them. These gave various arguments to prove that it really was so, but admitted they did not know how it happened, except that they saw people start up out of their sleep terrified, dazed, fearful and anxious, and cry out, and so on. It was then decided to visit the cemetery, and the deputies together ordered the graves opened. In their coffins they found ten persons lying like the living, entirely uncorrupted; the biers, clothes and linen were soaked with bright blood, which flowed from the nose, mouth, eyes and genitals; and the old nails of the hands and feet had been exchanged for new ones. So all these Vampyri (that is what they are called in those parts) had their heads cut off, the bodies were then burned, and their ashes were scattered on the river Morava. My son had first dissected them, and found all the organs healthy and unharmed, but the stomach and diaphragm full of blood. He wrote this to me in haste and promised to add more later, once a fuller report had been sent to our government and to the health board.
[The comment printed after the letter:] Anyone not wholly a stranger to natural history will recognise a new scene of an old fable, played more than once already in Hungary and Poland. Whether some epidemic disease (orgasticus in the original), imagination, fearfulness, superstition and the like, together with a putrid fermentation of the blood that begins in such corpses, do not account for most of it, and the most important part, only a closer investigation of every circumstance can show.
Notes
- Transcription conventions: the long s is printed as s, the ligatures ct and ae as two letters, and the printed u/v spelling (vt, viuos, conuocatos) is kept. The heading’s “GOETZIVM” is printed across a line break as “GOE-TZIVM”. The letter continues after “peruestigatio” with a list of earlier writings on “chewing” corpses (Garmann, Rohr, Ranft and others), which we have not transcribed.
- Barachin is Paraćin, which the Habsburg documents also spell Baragin; Maduega is the village the 1732 prints call Medvegia or Medwedia, today’s Medveđa.
- “Temulentos” means drunken; we translate it as “dazed”, since the sentence describes people woken by terror, not drinkers.
- Which part is whose: the italic text is the letter; the roman paragraph after it reads as the journal’s own comment, but the page does not say who wrote it.
- The letter puts the son among the deputies who opened the graves, credits him with dissecting the bodies, and counts ten. Ádám Mézes, who read the son’s own report and the commission papers in the Vienna archives, describes two separate visits: Glaser’s, which examined ten bodies and judged only some of them vampires, and a second commission under the surgeon Johann Flückinger about four weeks later, which did the dissections and the executions. The father’s letter, written from his son’s hasty note, appears to fold the two into one; that reading is ours.
- Glaser’s own report to the authorities stayed in manuscript until the twentieth century (Mézes 2021, pp. 151 to 152); whether it is the “fuller report” promised here, the letter does not say.