The Second Life of Upiórs: Where Folklore & the Digital Meet
To celebrate Halloween, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute is making the book ‘With Stake and Spade: Vampiric Diversity in Poland’ by Łukasz Kozak available digitally. It is a compendium of knowledge about upiórs, two-souled beings (strzygi), and other undead creatures from the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The video game ‘Real Vampires’, which is based on the book and was developed by the Danish studio These Eyes, will premiere the same day.
With Stake and Spade: Vampiric Diversity in Poland is an English-language work published in 2020 by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Evviva L’arte Foundation. Its author, Łukasz Kozak, argues that the origins of the vampire myth should not be sought in Transylvania but in Poland. Most ethnographic materials, press reports and court records concerning vampires – or rather, upiórs – originate from the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Beliefs about the dead returning from the grave were common to all ethnic groups inhabiting this pre-partition Commonwealth. And as the author emphasizes, ‘If we were to define the most important contribution of the Slavs to world culture, vampires should certainly be included’.
The anthology is preceded by an introduction in which Łukasz Kozak presents basic information about ghosts, female and male strzygi, and the wieszczy. As he said in an interview with Piotr Policht for Culture.pl:
[…] People were once completely convinced of the existence of upiórs (dead people who could leave their graves) or living upiórs (people with two souls, one of which would remain in the body after death and bear the hallmarks of being bound to return from beyond the grave even while they were still alive). They took the most genuine, realistic measures possible to protect themselves. We find echoes of these in court records and in the press. These are testimonies of real events; exhumations of bodies believed to have returned from the grave were still common into the 20th century.
Make the upiór great again
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Julia Mirny’s illustration from Łukasz Kozak's book ‘With Stake and Spade: Vampiric Diversity in Poland’, 2020, photo: publisher's promotional materials / Adam Mickiewicz Institute
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The anthology includes 78 texts written over five centuries. The oldest source dates back to 1529. It’s an excerpt from court records concerning the case of a parish priest from Grabownica near Sanok. One of his offenses was allowing his parishioners to engage in anti-upiór practices. Church authorities considered this a maleficium, the grave offense of practicing black magic. The most recent press articles cited in the book are from the interwar period. One of them concerns a resident of Wiązowna, near Warsaw, who was arrested in 1933 on charges of desecrating his wife’s body. He explained to the police that his wife had been haunting and terrorizing him from beyond the grave, so he resorted to a method proven by previous generations: at midnight, he dug up her grave and moved her body to another location.
The book also reveals that the temperament of the undead varied regionally. For example, the strzygoń of Lesser Poland could be quite amicable and kind. Although they had a tendency to be rowdy, they sometimes helped their living relatives with household and farmyard chores and were easily dismissed with a sarcastic retort. Meanwhile, the upiórs originating from present-day Ukraine and the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands were particularly terrifying, bringing plagues to humans and cattle, causing droughts and floods.
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The cited sources clash with myths created by pop culture. It turns out that living people drank the blood of suspected upiórs much more often than the other way around. The sources also debunk the myth of the vampire-aristocrat. Slavic upiórs were most often born in peasant huts. Łukasz Kozak’s anthology brings yet more surprising discoveries. What can we learn about upiórs from Benedykt Chmielowski’s Nowe Ateny (New Athens), the first Polish encyclopaedia, and how did Enlightenment writers attempt to combat the belief in the undead? How did a Kashubian wieszczy end up in Ontario, Canada? What should one do to avoid becoming a strzygoń after death? You will be able to find answers to these and other intriguing questions at this link.
Kozak’s publication has already helped to spark interest in local beliefs about the undead in other European countries; it has led to similar research conducted by the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore (Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas). It also inspired Francesco Paolo de Ceglia of Aldo Moro University in Bari, who wrote the book Vampyr: Storia naturale della resurrezione (Vampire: A Natural History of Resurrection, 2023).
Illustrations by Julia Mirny enriched Kozak’s publication. They were created with analogue collage techniques using archival photos from Polish digital repositories available in the public domain.
Upiórs in the digital world
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Poster for the game 'Real Vampires' by Julia Mirny, photo: Adam Mickiewicz Institute
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And that’s not the end of our spooky news. The independent Copenhagen-based video game studio Those Eyes has announced that the release date of its latest project, Real Vampires, a game whose plot is based on Slavic beliefs in upiórs, is set for 31 October 2025. The main inspiration for the developers was Łukasz Kozak’s book With Stake and Spade: Vampiric Diversity in Poland, and the author himself and his talking dog, Oki, guide the player on a journey through a world where the boundaries between the living and the dead get blurry.
The vision of the game’s creators was a blend of horror, humour and cultural history, with each story grounded in historical sources. Julia Mirny is again responsible for the visuals here, and her digital collages add an absurd and grotesque touch to the macabre tales of upiórs.
Besides discovering authentic folklore, players will be able to share their own local stories of the undead from anywhere in the world, which, according to the developers, will contribute to the creation of a growing archive of living traditions. The Danish studio Those Eyes will donate a portion of the game’s sales to aid for Ukraine.
Real Vampires will be available on Steam, the App Store and Google Play on 31 October 2025. More information is available at www.thoseeyes.dk. Real Vampires is supported by the Danish Film Institute, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Creative Europe program.
Łukasz Kozak is a medievalist and an expert in technology, new media and the promotion of cultural heritage. He researches unusual themes in cultural history, is co-creator of the medievalist program Kryzys wieku średniego (Mid[lle Age] Life Crisis) on Polish Radio Channel 2 and is the curator of the early music program at Warsaw’s Festiwal Nowe Epifanie (New Epiphanies Festival). He is the author of scholarly and popularizing works and a lecturer. He has collaborated with numerous cultural institutions and research centres on developing new technological solutions for digital collections.
Written in Polish by Patryk Zakrzewski
Translated by Michał Pelczar