Scholar Agnes Murgoci states that the Romanians believe “Vârcolaci (svârcolaci) and pricolici are sometimes dead vampires, and sometimes animals which eat the moon.” She goes on to explain that vârcolaci are considered unique – they cause solar and lunar eclipses by eating up the sun and moon. This creature is very clearly related to the 13th century Serbian manuscript which mentioned the vuklodlak.
Variously the vârcolaci are described as small dogs, dragons, or animals that suck octopus-like with many mouths. They are sometimes also called pricolici and under that name considered to be spirit rather than flesh. They are the souls of unbaptised children; they are illegitimate children cursed by God; they arise if, while making maize porridge, someone puts the porridge stick in the fire; they rise when dust is swept out from a house at sunset in the direction of the sun; they rise if women spin at night by moonlight (for vampires and vârcolaci get up to the sky to do their sun- and moon-eating via the thread thus spun).
She adds that “the word vârcolac, or vrykolaka, which is the general name for vampire in Macedonia and Greece, is only exceptionally used to mean a vampire in Roumania, and usually means an animal which eats the moon. Vârcolac means werewolf…”16
From a relatively modern perspective in Greece (1869), persons who come to life again after death, who sleep in their tombs with their eyes open, and wander abroad by night, are called vrykolaka by the Greeks, vurkolak by the Turks. These creatures can be more – or less – malignant, and correspond to the vampire.17
These terms – vlъkodlaci, vъrkolak, vârcolac, vrykolaka, vurkolak, vârcolaci, svârcolaci – clearly spring from the same original concept and word. The previously mentioned Serbian Nomokanon of 1262 is the first extant instance of the word vlъkodlaci being used. The second written appearance we have is from considerably later – the 1500s – in a poem written by Šiško Mencetic: “… like the moon when a vukodlak devours it.” From just a little later, in 1569, comes this phrase in a book published by P. Zoranic in Venice: “And the vukodlaci eat away moon’s rays.”18
There is a persistent meaning evident in the above quotations. In each, the vukodlak is a mythological creature that ascends into the heavens and devours the sun and moon. It is clearly a meteorological monster used to explain eclipses and such phenomena. It is already considered nonsense by St Sava in 1262 (although it ought not to be forgotten that the Slavic concepts of vampires and such daemon creatures is not a function of the educated classes, but of peasant folklore), and it is used metaphorically in the poem.
17 Tozer, Henry. Researches in the Highlands of Turkey. London, 1869, pp. 80-81.
18 Rjecnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika. Zagreb: Jugoslavenska Akademija Znanosti i Umjetnosti, 1973-75m svezak 89, p. 623, and Jirecek, Josef. Geschichte der Serben. Amsterdam: Verlag Adolf M. Hakkert, 1967, p. 164.