No one knows for sure whether vampires really exist, but almost every culture in the world has stories about them. Vampires are ghosts that are believed to have come when dead people rise up from their graves.
Greece is one of the oldest civilizations to have invented the concept of a vampire. It has so many stories about it. Some of these stories have come down to our own days. There are over a dozen words in the Greek language that translate to mean ‘vampire’.
These different names and different spellings for vampire within Greece indicate that Greece has more species of vampires than any other country in the world.
Naturally, there are slight variations from region to region. They explain differently as to who can become a vampire and how it happens.
They have different explanation about its looks. Greek vampires are almost always revenants—a visible ghost or animated corpse that is believed to return from the grave. As the Greek people believe, these vampires come to be so, because in life, a person was particularly evil and was ex-communicated from the church. Having committed suicide was also a ground for returning of the person as “undead”, i.e., coming back to life after dying once. In the Catholic religion, the act of taking one’s own life prohibits a person from having the benefit of a prayer in church for the peace of his soul. Other ways one can become a vampire is by being murdered, having eaten a piece of meat that was killed by a wolf, or allowing an animal to jump over a corpse.
All revenant Greek vampires are described the same way—as a corpse, whose skin has dried so tightly over its body that when slapped, it feels and sounds like a drum. The body shows no sign of decomposition whatsoever.
As a vampire hunts for human prey—something it can do anytime during the day or night—it begins by going from door to door, knocking loudly. If no one answers after the first knock, it will not linger long enough to knock a second time. It moves ahead.
The Greek revenants can rise and return to their graves without disturbing the dirt. They are so terrible in the look that whoever sees them gets his or her blood frozen with fear and falls on the ground, dead. Seeing a Greek vampire is enough to kill a person instantly. It is not always true that the vampires need human blood to continue existing; it is out of their evil nature that they keep hunting for and torturing people.
The vampires of Greece have some weaknesses too. They are so well known and so consistent that the people know what they do and how they behave, and what they are afraid of. This means, they can be avoided and defeated. However, the vampires have no physical disabilities or any other diseases that can be exploited. At times, some easy methods can chase a vampire away. One such way is to neglect its knock on the door.