What may have been an exorcism of a vampire in Venice is now drawing
bad blood among scientists arguing over whether gravediggers were
attempting to defeat an undead monster.
The controversy begins with a mass grave of 16th-century plague
victims on the Venetian island of Nuovo Lazzaretto. The remains of a
woman there apparently had a brick shoved in her mouth,
perhaps to exorcise the corpse in what may have been the first vampire
burial known in archaeology, said forensic anthropologist Matteo Borrini
of the University of Florence in Italy.
Vampire
superstitions were common when plague devastated Europe, and much, if
not all, of this folklore could be due to misconceptions about the
natural stages of decomposition, Borrini said. The recently dead can
often appear unnervingly alive. As the corpse’s skin shrinks and pulls
back, for example, hair and nails may appear to grow after death.
The remains of
the woman were apparently wrapped in a shroud, based on the position of
her collarbone, Borrini suggested. A corpse might appear to have chewed
through its shroud because of corrosive fluids it spewed as it decayed,
perhaps frightening gravediggers into thinking it was a vampire.
Vampire myths
link the monsters with contagions, and the plague ran rampant in Venice
in 1576, killing as many as 50,000 people, nearly a third of the city,
including famed Renaissance artist Titian. The gravediggers that ran
across this corpse may have wanted to prevent a vampire
from ravaging the city further with pestilence, Borrini and his
colleague Emilio Nuzzolese suggested in the Journal of Forensic Sciences
in 2010. The “vampire” has since been discussed on Italian national TV
and a National Geographic documentary.
A skeleton buried in the cemetery of Vecchiano in Pisa showing a similar condition to the purported “Venetian vampire.”
However, now
other researchers are openly deriding this claim. Where some might see
an exorcism, these researchers see a brick accidentally falling into a
skull’s mouth.
“I find
surprising that the reviewers of an important journal such as the
Journal of Forensic Sciences had given permission to publish the article
of Nuzzolese and Borrini with inadequate scientific evidence to support
their hypothesis,” physical anthropologist Simona Minozzi at the
University of Pisa in Italy told LiveScience.
To start with, photos of the site where the purported vampire
was found show her remains were surrounded by stones, bricks and tiles,
Minozzi said. They also note the jaws of corpses often gape open,
allowing any number of items to fall in — for instance, they note a
skeleton with a thighbone in its mouth was found in the cemetery of Vecchio Lazzaretto in Venice.
They also note
there is no clear evidence of a shroud, as coffin walls might also
explain the position of the collarbone. They add that the legend of the
so-called nachzehrer, or “shroud-eaters,”
were apparently tightly confined to the East German region and not
Italy. Minozzi and her colleagues detailed their argument in the May
issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences.
Minozzi called
the vampire idea “nonsense.” “Unfortunately, this is a common practice
in the last few years in Italy,” she said. “This is probably due to the
strong cutting of funds for research in Italy, so researchers seek to
attract attention and money through sensational discoveries that often
have little to do with science.”
Borrini and
his colleagues strongly rebut the argument over their analysis. They
discussed how the physical details of the site supported their
interpretation in a response in the May issue of the Journal of Forensic
Sciences, and that while the legend of the nachzehrer was
found in Germanic areas, Venice was a crossroads during the epoch in
which such legends from distant lands might have circulated.
“Regarding the
criticism of my Italian colleagues, I have to admit that it’s a quite
unpleasant situation,” Borrini said. “It seems that the main reasons of
the interest in my research is its mass media success. Well, I want to
be clear regarding this; I never looked for the media.”
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